RUSSIA TAKES MAJOR STEP FORWARD IN WMD THREAT REDUCTION

Global Green USA Welcomes Start-up of New Russian Chemical Weapons Destruction Facility, Urges Safety and Transparency 

February 28, Washington, DC – Global Green USA, the U.S. affiliate of Mikhail Gorbachev’s Green Cross International, welcomes the official opening of the Russian Federal Agency for Industry’s second major facility for the destruction of its chemical weapons arsenal and urges safety and transparency as destruction gets underway.  The facility, located in Kambarka, Udmurt Republic, was built with assistance from several countries, including Germany.  The official opening of the facility is scheduled for March 1, 2006.

“The start-up of Kambarka’s neutralization facility is a giant step forward in cooperative threat reduction and in keeping deadly chemical agent out of the hands of terrorists,” said Dr. Paul Walker, director of Global Green USA’s Legacy of the Cold War Program. “Only with continued strong international cooperation, as we’re witnessing in Kambarka today, will we be successful in securing and eliminating the remaining 60,000 tons of dangerous chemical weapons in Russia, the United States, and elsewhere.”

Vladimir Konyashin, former head of the Kambarka Rayon administration and current chairman of the Commission of the Kambarka District Council of Deputies, underlined the importance of safety and transparency in the chemical weapons destruction project.  “It is very crucial that this chemical demilitarization project be absolutely safe and transparent to the local community,” he said. “We’ve lived with these weapons for decades, and are glad to see them destroyed.  But protection of our environment and public health is the first goal.”

On a recent trip to Kambarka, Global Green USA encountered a community anxious about, though not against, chemical weapons destruction.  Residents have ongoing concerns about safety, health, and the poor state of the local infrastructure – including dilapidated roads that would negatively impact evacuation in case of a chemical incident – as well as unanswered questions about the technology that will be used to neutralize lewisite and treat toxic byproducts.  Meanwhile, several social and infrastructure projects key to a safe demilitarization process remain understaffed, including a new medical-diagnostic center.  And there is disappointment that this federal project has not brought more employment opportunities to the local population; many of the more lucrative jobs have gone to outside experts and contractors. 

Green Cross Russia maintains a public outreach office in Kambarka, which provides information related to chemical weapons, facilitates communication with authorities, and offers emergency-preparedness training to the local community. The Kambarka office is one of eleven Green Cross outreach offices serving communities in Russia’s chemical weapons stockpile regions.  

Russia, which signed the international Chemical Weapons Convention in 1993 and ratified it in 1997, is legally obliged to destroy its 40,000 tons of declared chemical weapons by 2012.  It opened its first chemical weapons destruction facility in Gorny in the Saratov Oblast in December 2002 and completed the neutralization of 1,143 tons of lewisite and mustard agents there in December 2005.  Kambarka, about 850 miles east of Moscow, is the site of 6,349 tons of lewisite stored in railway tank cars.  Russia began testing its new facility, constructed over the past year, on 20 December 2005 and has destroyed 1.7 tons of lewisite to date in trial runs.  

The U.S. agreed a decade ago to help Russia with its CW destruction efforts and has appropriated almost $1 billion to date under the Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) Program to help construct a nerve agent neutralization facility at Shchuch’ye, a stockpile site in the Kurgan Oblast.  The G8 industrial nations agreed in 2002 in Kananaskis, Canada, to establish a “Global Partnership” to provide Russia with $20 billion of support over a decade for securing and dismantling weapons and of mass destruction – nuclear, chemical, and biological – and related systems.  The Global Partnership (including the U.S.) has committed about $1.8 billion to Russian CW destruction to date.