World’s Chemical Arsenal Bulging, Terrifying

They were no-shows in Iraq, but tons of chemical weapons are stoking fears and costing billions to clean up elsewhere in the world -- from concrete “igloos” in Oregon, to the Panama rainforest, to the highlands of China, where Japanese war leftovers reportedly have killed hundreds.

In fact, more chemical munitions have turned up lately in Australia than in Iraq, where the Bush administration claimed up to 500 tons would be found. As Baghdad arms hunters searched in vain, chemical weapons material was even being unearthed four miles from the White House in Washington.

At least 8 million such weapons are stockpiled worldwide, and concern is deepening not only over the health and safety of nearby communities, but also over the threat of theft or attacks on depots brimming with sarin or VX, fearsome nerve agents that can kill by the drop.

“Chemical terrorism is something we should all be very concerned about,” said Rogelio Pfirter, chief international watchdog for the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which oversees destruction of the armaments under a 1997 treaty.

As troubling as the terror potential is, “these weapons are leaking and pose a threat even without terrorist involvement,” said Jonathan Tucker, a Monterey Institute specialist in unconventional arms. “The sooner we get rid of them, the better.”

Inside U.S. chemical depots, shells filled with old sulfur mustard sometimes bubble over like a deadly champagne. Outside, the government is handing out thousands of emergency-warning radios to local residents. At least 12 leaks -- all apparently contained on-site -- occurred last year at the Army depot in Tooele, Utah, researchers at Washington’s Stimson Center think tank reported.

National Guard companies have thrown cordons around these U.S. installations since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. In terrorism-plagued Russia, specialists fret over the security protecting its 36,000 tons of nerve agent.

Chemical warfare reached its depths in World War I, when mustard, phosgene and other gases left more than 1 million wounded and dead on European battlefields. It is World War I leftovers that cleanup crews have been uncovering since 2001 at an old Army test site in residential Spring Valley, up Massachusetts Avenue from central Washington, D.C.

Poisonous clouds were also unleashed in the 1930s by Italian troops in Ethiopia and China’s Japanese invaders, and in the 1980s by Iraq in the Iran-Iraq War. It’s believed that Egyptian gas was used in Yemen’s civil war in the 1960s.

The Chemical Weapons Convention, the 1997 treaty outlawing the weapons, gave governments declaring chemical holdings -- today the United States, Russia, India, South Korea, Albania and Libya -- 10 years to destroy them.

Even if extended to 2012, as the treaty allows, that deadline looks unachievable by either the United States or Russia, a U.S. government study finds. By April, the Americans had barely eliminated 20% of its stockpiles, and the Russians 1%.

“The greatest difficulty is purely one of resources and cost,” said Richard Guthrie of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

The U.S. Army has learned how complex and costly it is to eliminate the dangerous stockpiles -- originally more than 30,000 tons, mostly sarin, a thin liquid; VX, with the consistency of motor oil, and the molasses-like sulfur mustard.

Absorbed through skin or inhaled as gas, the nerve agents can produce convulsions, paralysis and death. Mustard severely blisters skin and internal membranes.

These agents are packed into bombs and aircraft spray tanks, artillery shells, rockets and landmines, mostly stored beneath earth-covered concrete domes at eight depots across the United States.

When it began its planning in 1985, the Army thought that it could destroy the weapons in nine years for $1.7 billion. Two decades later, it still faces years of work and cumulative costs of more than $25 billion.

“There have been a variety of delays,” said Greg Mahall, spokesman for the Army’s Chemical Materials Agency.

Chemicals that gelled, crystallized or otherwise degraded demanded special handling, he said. Testing, permits and oversight requirements, at all levels of government, slowed construction and operation. Environmental and other local groups sought court orders to block incineration. Then the Utah plant shut down for eight months in 2002-03 after workers were accidentally exposed to sarin gas.

The pace picked up in recent months as a second incineration facility opened, at the depot in Anniston, Ala. The Army began chemically neutralizing weapons, a newer method, at its Aberdeen, Md., site, and incinerators at the Umatilla, Ore., depot began -- on Sept. 8 -- burning rockets loaded with nerve gas.

Roadblocks remain. Plans to chemically neutralize weapons at a Newport, Ind., depot are stalled while the Army hunts for a dumping ground for the waste. Local resistance doomed a plan to process it in Dayton, Ohio. Similar opposition is growing to an Army alternative: discharging it from a New Jersey site into the Delaware River.

The Pine Bluff, Ark., arms depot may begin burning sarin by next year. But delays have plagued the two other sites -- in Richmond, Ky., where anti-burning activists forced the Army to convert to chemical neutralization, and in Pueblo, Colo., where neutralization may not begin until 2009.

Kentucky-based activists, the Chemical Weapons Working Group, are demanding more openness about what’s going on at the facilities. Director Craig Williams noted that the Anniston Star newspaper, through a Freedom of Information Act request, found that three sarin spills had occurred inside the Alabama facility this year.

“They were serious incidents, and the only way anybody found out about them was through a Freedom of Information request,” he said.

The information flows less freely from inside Russia, where the “CW” destruction effort, underwritten by U.S. and European aid, bogged down for years. Too little Russian money was available, and U.S. aid was blocked at times as congressmen complained that Moscow wasn’t doing enough. The $2-billion-plus centerpiece -- a giant plant at Shchuch’ye in the Ural Mountains -- may not be ready until 2009.

Meantime, “a large quantity of Russia’s chemical weapons will remain vulnerable to theft or diversion,” the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, warned in March.

Undeclared stockpiles or abandoned weapons add another dimension -- the unknown -- to the CW threat.

China has the biggest such “orphaned” stockpiles, at least 700,000 chemical munitions abandoned by Japanese troops at World War II’s end in 1945, most in the northeast province of Jilin. Last year, mustard gas drums broke at a construction site, killing one and injuring 33.

Chinese plaintiffs suing the Tokyo government contend that the weapons have caused 2,000 deaths since the war. Japanese news reports say Tokyo now has agreed to build a $2.75-billion facility in Jilin to dispose of the weapons, using robots to dig up the unexploded ordnance.

For its part, the U.S. military dropped 31,000 mustard and other chemical munitions on Panama’s San Jose island in 1944-47 tests. The Pentagon long claimed that it left none behind, but in 2001, Panama’s government said seven intact weapons were found. Researchers believe that hundreds more lie unexploded in the uninhabited rainforest.

Washington offered to clean up the seven weapons. Panama rejected that, demanding that the whole island be cleared. “The U.S. government considers the matter closed,” said Gonzalo Gallegos, State Department spokesman.

In Australia last year, 22 mustard shells were found in remote northern Queensland, leftovers from Allied chemical warfare experiments during World War II.

Many more old chemical weapons lie in World War I battlefields in France and Belgium, and elsewhere around the world. But bigger questions hang over secret arsenals -- in China itself, for example, suspected of holding such arms but not declaring them under the 1997 treaty.

The Middle East is a black hole for the treaty. Many of its states -- including Egypt, Syria and Israel, all possible chemical weapons states -- did not ratify the pact.

The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons’ Pfirter said universal ratification is a prime goal this decade. But a more realistic goal might be his hope to better monitor the chemical trade and factories -- 4,000-plus worldwide -- whose products could help terrorists make weapons.

“We should continue to work toward better and greater coverage on the industrial front,” he said. The U.S. GAO concluded in March, however, that the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons “faces resource challenges in addressing the proliferation threat posed by commercial facilities.” Pfirter’s 200 inspectors and $89-million annual budget can’t meet the demand.

Paul Walker, a longtime American campaigner for CW cleanup, said that the job ahead is huge and that resources have been wasted.

“We know where the weapons of mass destruction are, and they’re not in Baghdad,” said Walker, of Global Green USA. “They’re in Shchuch’ye and elsewhere, and the cost of getting rid of them is a small fraction of what we’re spending in Iraq.”