ENVIRONMENT-RUSSIA: Chemical Weapon Stocks Pose Threat

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Sergei Blagov

MOSCOW, Jun 22 2001 (IPS) - Environmentalists warn that Russia faces potentially huge health and ecological hazards from its chemical weapons dumps, many dating to World War II. Moscow had pledged to destroy the munitions but has moved slowly, citing insufficient funds.

The trouble is, many of the dumps have simply been “lost and forgotten,” said Lev Fyodorov, head of the non-governmental Union for Chemical Safety.

Officially, Russia has stockpiled 44,000 tonnes of poisonous military gases at seven storage facilities. Moscow has promised to destroy its chemical weapons by 2008 under the international Chemical Weapons Convention, which it ratified in November 1997.

The programme has fallen behind schedule and Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov has invoked a provision in the convention that would allow Russia an additional five years, extending the deadline to 2012.

Additionally, Moscow has repeatedly asked for more international aid to defray the costs of safely destroying the deadly chemicals, most of which are nerve agents. The government previously announced that it would need 5.5 billion dollars to liquidate its chemical arsenal but this month re-estimated the cost at 7 billion dollars, said Zinoviy Pak, head of Russia’s Munitions Agency.

Fyodorov, however, insisted the situation is far worse than the government realises. In addition to the seven official storage facilities in Russia itself, hundreds of caches remain buried throughout the former Soviet Union, including several sites in Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan. Complicating matters further, some of the sites are former testing grounds where unexploded ordnance was left behind.

Although the Chemical Weapons Convention deals with post-World War II chemical stocks, he added, weapons produced between 1915 and 1946 remain unaccounted for. Many were buried under military installations that have since been converted into residential areas and national parks.

Fyodorov said that under the Chemical Weapons Convention, the government must identify all the sites and begin destroying the old weapons. “Yet nothing has been done so far,” he told IPS.

Russian officials denied Fyodorov’s claims, saying that the problem was not that big. They conceded, however, that there could be some contamination resulting from old storage sites or unexploded chemical ordnance.

Fyodorov insisted he had checked some 300 files from military archives and found concrete evidence of the dumps. He said some chemical barrels and bombs had already been excavated in the Moscow districts of Kuzminki and Ochakovo – former chemical dumps that now are densely populated areas.

Before and during World War II, expired chemical weapons and waste from chemical weapons plants were buried without any system and rarely with records, Fyodorov said. Moreover, in the wake of chemical weapons tests, nobody bothered to collect unexploded bombs and shells.

Munitions experts calculated the barrels’ and bombs ten-millimetre walls have rusted at a rate of one millimetre every six years – meaning they likely have rusted through. Fyodorov and others warned that even tiny amounts of substances such as mustard gas could cause cancer, physical mutations, and other health problems in humans.

At the same time, Russia and other nations face the problem of more than 300,000 tonnes of chemical weaponry dumped at sea. Most of this was confiscated from Nazi Germany at the end of World War II but some 45,000 tonnes came from stocks maintained by Allied armed forces.

The bulk was sunk to the seabed between Norway, Sweden and Denmark, where the Baltic Sea meets the North Sea. The Soviet fleet sunk a smaller quantity in the Baltic Sea off Kaliningrad.

Half of the barrels, which have been under water for more than half a century, contain mustard gas. The rest contain a dozen other deadly poisons.

The locations of the underwater dumps are well known, Fyodorov said. By contrast, many underground dumps were simply “lost and forgotten” and could contain a total of up to 120,000 tonnes of chemical weapons.

If his estimates are correct, those stocks are greater than the current arsenals of Russia and the United States combined.

Moscow has been keen to demonstrate its commitment to the international Chemical Weapons Convention. Earlier this month, Russian officials and foreign diplomats visited Shchuchye, in the Ural Mountains, to launch construction of the country’s biggest weapons-destruction facility. About 14 percent of Russia’s 44,000- tonne chemical arsenal is stored at Shchuchye.

The ceremony was designed to thank international donors for committing one billion dollars to help build Shchuchye and six other plants. Washington has pledged 888 million dollars to the effort. Shchuchye is due to open in 2004.

Moscow expects to spend some 400 million dollars to build the destruction facilities. The government pledged 120 million dollars for the programme in this year’s budget, six times more than in 2000.

Fyodorov, however, said the facilities under construction would use untested destruction technologies. “These projects could become yet another experiment involving people employed at these facilities,” he said.