Biological and Chemical Weapons
Moscow Releases More Detail on Poison Gas Capabilities
CBW Chronicle, Volume III, Issue 1 (February 2000)
Partly to encourage additional international contributions to its stagnant chemical weapons destruction program, Moscow recently made more information publicly available about twenty-four former Soviet chemical weapons production facilities. The newsletter of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, Synthesis, ran an article by staffers from three Russian bureaucracies in its November-December 1999 issue. After detailing previous activities at Russia’s poison gas factories, the trio of authors contends that Russia will be able to finance just 10 percent of the estimated $110 million needed to demilitarize these former production facilities.
According to Jane’s Intelligence Review, State Department officials characterized the information in the article as consistent with Russia’s January 1998 declaration to the Hague-based international chemical weapons inspection agency. As shown in Figure 1, two dozen chemical agent production and munition filling facilities were identified at five separate sites in Russia: five at Novocheboksarsk, eight at Volgograd, three at Chapaevsk, seven at Dzerzhinsk, and one at Berezniki. International inspectors have already certified three facilities as destroyed, as noted in Table 1; two other destruction certificates are expected soon, while a third additional facility will probably not be destroyed until 2004.
Russia plans to convert ten production facilities at Novocheboksarsk and Volgograd to peaceful uses, a lengthy process that the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) allows in exceptional cases of compelling need. Thus far, the United States and Great Britain have gained approval for conversion of former production sites into peaceful applications. Demilitarization of these two large sites in Russia involves tasks ranging from the destruction of specialized equipment (e.g., pipelines, ventilation systems, and concrete bunkers) to the demolition of buildings. The tab for cleaning up Novocheboksarsk alone will run $99 million, due largely to the challenge of dealing with a severely contaminated VX production and filling facility. Volgograd’s demolition and clean-up will cost another $4 million. Aiming for international assistance, the authors highlighted recent Russian laws that offer tax and customs benefits to aid donors.
For the time being, US financial assistance has been suspended, pending Moscow’s ability to provide the socio-economic improvements that it promised to the seven communities in Russia where chemical weapons are stored. Figure 1 also shows these storage sites. In the fall of 1999, Congress axed $130 million in Cooperative Threat Reduction funds slated for a pilot chemical weapons destruction facility at Shchuchye, which houses artillery munitions filled with the nerve agents sarin, VX, and soman. The 2000 Defense Authorization Act instead directed a maximum of $20 million to security improvements at Russia’s chemical weapons storage facilities. Italy’s recent decision to contribute $7.6 million to socio-economic improvements at Russia’s poison gas storage sites may pave the way for the resumption of US aid to construct the pilot facility at Shchuch’ye.
With Russia’s economy in shambles, Moscow has made virtually no progress on the destruction front. Barring a miracle, observers believe that Russia will not meet the 2007 CWC deadline for destroying its chemical arsenal. Even though other countries are beginning to increase contributions to the destruction effort, including the Netherlands and the European Union, some experts wonder whether even a five-year deadline extension will prove sufficient for Russia to eliminate its 40,000 ton chemical arsenal.
CWC observers welcomed the release of more details about Russia’s chemical weapons capabilities, but Moscow has remained silent about charges first raised in 1991 that the USSR and Russia developed an entirely new generation of nerve agents in the late 1980s and early 1990s. A 26-year veteran of the Soviet chemical weapons complex, Dr. Vil Mirzayanov, blew the whistle on the program code-named novichok, wherein experimental quantities of several novel, highly lethal, binary nerve agents were developed, tested, and produced in experimental quantities. The novichok agents, which are based on agro-chemicals, are not yet on the CWC’s list of banned warfare agents since their formulas are not known.