St. Petersburg Sits on a Bomb, Experts Fear

The Russian army cannot afford enough bread to feed its soldiers. The Defense Ministry cannot find the funds to pay its bills. Fighter planes lack gasoline. Troops lack winter coats. There’s no money for shoes, for butter, for housing.

So it is not surprising that the Russian military cannot afford to safely dismantle the uncounted tons of surplus weapons scattered around this stately city.

Huge stacks of sea mines and bullets, hand grenades and bombs, shells and explosives have piled up in three defense depots near St. Petersburg.

Much of the materiel was dragged here when Russian troops pulled out of Eastern Europe. More is due to arrive from Russian bases that have been shut down in the former Soviet republic of Moldova.

From 3-ton bombs to vintage World War II guns, the munitions have been deemed too clunky to use in battle.

But they remain potent killing devices. The impoverished Russian military can do little except stash them in crammed warehouses--where, experts warn, any minor mishap could touch off a catastrophe.

“A shell could suddenly fall and explode,” said Alexei I. Fedotov, president of the St. Petersburg Engineering Academy. “A mouse could run through the shelves and knock something down.”

Twirling his glasses urgently, Fedotov added: “If an accident happened, it could all blow up. Fire could engulf the entire city.”

Scientists who have examined the munitions around St. Petersburg say they have been stored with reasonable care.

Yet they well remember May 14, 1994, when a Pacific Fleet bomb storage depot exploded in a ferocious blaze that shook the earth 60 miles away. Although no one died, shattered glass injured several residents of a nearby town; thousands fled their homes in terror.

Other unexplained arsenal disasters tug at their memories too.

Last spring, dozens of train cars loaded with self-propelled missiles erupted in a town near the Chinese border in eastern Russia.

In May 1993, a storehouse crammed with thousands of howitzer and tank shells ignited in a Siberian town not far from Lake Baikal.

“The designers [of arsenals] put in some security measures, but . . . this is ammunition, and we cannot joke about it,” said Alexander Donets, the city official in charge of dealing with the weapons junkyards.

With St. Petersburg’s nuclear power plant less than nine miles from a large weapons cache, specialists worry that a freak accident or human blunder could endanger the city.

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A slap of lightning slamming into a railroad car full of explosives could touch off an enormous blast. A cigarette butt flicked into a pile of weapons could spark a disastrous fire. Even a car crash on a nearby highway could send flames ripping through trees and into an arms depot.

“We definitely have a problem here,” said Yuri Shevchuck of the Green Cross environmental organization. “The explosives are dangerous just lying there. We need to take care of them. Quickly.”

The military’s first strategy was to get rid of surplus weapons on the cheap--by detonating them.

But planned explosions last summer shot noxious fumes into the air and blew out a window at a nearby crematory. Environmentalists hollered about potential pollution. So the regional government ordered the detonations stopped.

St. Petersburg officials now hope to dismantle the weapons by less violent means, then recycle the scrap metal and explosives.

Theoretically, weapons can be transformed into commercial products--everything from fireworks to dyes to insect repellents. Indeed, the military has converted tons of surplus explosives into harmless civilian goods.

But the work is expensive, requiring special equipment and training.

The military does not have enough money to speedily process the weapons caches. And no one else seems able to help.

There is no money for the project in the draft city budget. And none seems to come from the federal treasury. No money to buy dismantling equipment. No money to keep the arsenals safe until explosives can be disarmed.

Military warehouses are so jammed that many surplus bombs and shells remain piled in the railroad cars that toted them to St. Petersburg.

“They tell me we cannot expand [the arsenal] because we are next to a nuclear power station,” Navy Capt. Vyacheslav V. Khokhlov complained to the Russian daily newspaper Trud. But “we are allowed to stuff the warehouses to the limit and keep the ammunition under open skies. . . . Where on earth is the logic?”

But Khokhlov later brushed off further safety questions.

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Rejecting The Times’ request to visit an arsenal, he wrote: “From our point of view, environmental activists should be more concerned about the nuclear tests France is conducting in the Pacific Ocean.”

Yet in his October interview with Trud, Khokhlov expressed his concerns about the explosives, saying: “The highest officials demand that we increase security and observe all precautions. But none of the inspectors who have come here has offered a single ruble to improve the situation.”

Fedotov, who heads a government committee tackling the problem, estimated that the military needs $3 million to expand safe warehousing of the weapons and bring in dismantling equipment. Cutting through bombs and disabling explosives would cost millions more.

Even as he ran down these figures, Fedotov smiled ruefully. He knows the reality. Top defense officials have described catastrophic shortfalls in the supply of meat, fish, butter and bread for their soldiers. The Russian press has spread humiliating stories of elite troops hungrily foraging for mushrooms, of police forced to beg local leaders for potatoes.

Some months, fully 75% of military paychecks are delayed for lack of funds. Interior Ministry troops have resorted to hunger strikes to demand that their wages be paid promptly.

Meanwhile, officers’ families live in poverty, jammed into barracks, unable to rent the most meager apartments.

In this grim context, Fedotov hardly expects a windfall to help him dismantle outdated weapons.

“It’s a very important problem, and we need to solve it,” he said. “But in Russia, unfortunately, there are very many of these critical problems. And they keep getting pushed to the side.”

Times special correspondent Yevgenia Borisova contributed to this report.