A group of US Congressmen led by Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana visited the chemical weapons disposal site Wednesday in the Ural Mountains, 1,560 kilometres southeast of Moscow, US Embassy officials said Thursday.

"We have three to five accidents a year" caused by leaks from corrosion, Yuri Mamontov, a Shchuchye administration official in charge of chemical disarmament told Bellona Web in a telephone interview Thursday. "Many munitions have been stored here for more than 50 years. We would be better not to tempt fate."

Mamontov added that these accidents are quickly contained without harm to personnel and cause no serious harm to the surrounding environment. He also asserted that such accidents were not uncommon in similar sites in the United States.

But the dilapidated state of the weapons dump holding corroding chemicals from the world’s largest known chemical weapons programme points to disturbing bureaucratic snags in US and Russian efforts to contain the threat to world security.

"In the Senate, I am promoting legislation to permit the President to use Nunn-Lugar expertise and resources to address proliferation threats around the world," Lugar told a gathering of international non-proliferation experts in Washington, DC on Friday.

Photo: Thomas Nilsen

This spring the Pentagon told Russia not to expect certification because it was refusing to share information about a bio-engineered strain of anthrax it had long promised the United States, refusing to provide access to biological institutes run by the Russian Defence Ministry, and failing to own up to decades of secret work on biological and chemical weapons.

In part, this lack of certification means — rather embarrassingly for the Pentagon — that the weapons cuts Presidents George Bush and Vladimir Putin agreed on at last weeks summit cannot begin in Russia until US Congress approves a waiver to that certification procedure.

This certification problem has also caused the Pentagon to block construction of a plant in Shchuchye to destroy the nearly 2 million shells, missile warheads and other munitions carrying nerve agents like Russian VX gas and sarin, the gas released in 1995 into the Tokyo subway. All told, the Shchuchye stockpiles constitute about 14 percent of Russia's 40,000 to 44,000 tonnes of chemical weapons — the world’s largest arsenal.

Zinovy Pak, head of Russia's Federal Munitions Agency that oversees chemical and biological weapons destruction, told the Associated Press Wednesday that the US accusations were groundless and said he hoped that US assistance for Shchuchye would resume soon.

But Washington sources say that — beyond certification and alleged information sharing problems — the Pentagon is holding up the construction of the Shchuchye CWD plant for two other reasons. First, the Pentagon has asked for rights to inspect any facility anywhere in Russia for chemical weapons on 24-hour notice. Second, the Russian side has promised to build so called “outside-the-fence” infrastructure for the plant — such as housing for plant workers and kindergartens for their children — and the Americans have committed to building the plant itself. Neither side, these sources say, wants to start before the other.

Indeed, by some reports, the Russian side has started construction on its side of the agreement, the Global Security Newswire (GSN) quoted Russia’s Federal Munitions Agency as saying Wednesday. After Wednesday’s official visit, the Agency told GSN it hopes the United States will resume its financing.

Several European nations — including Britain, Italy and Norway — have also pledged to help build the Shchuchye site but are holding off until US financing resumes.

Lugar, who co-authored with former Sen. Sam Nunn the decade-old CTR effort — also known as the Nunn-Lugar Act — to help contain the threat of weapons of mass destruction in the former Soviet Union, pledged to continue championing weapons dismantling efforts, AP reported.

The visit to Shchuchye followed a Moscow conference where Nunn, Lugar and other US and Russian officials and experts discussed new safeguards that should prevent terrorists obtaining nuclear, biological and chemical weapons and ways to speed up dismantling projects.

Lugar and his delegation also visited the Mayak facility near Chelyabinsk to inspect the progress of a plutonium storage facility that CTR has been financing for the last 10 years, US Embassy officials said Thursday. According to Mayak officials, the storage facility should open this August.

Earlier this week, the delegation witnessed the destruction of a strategic missile silo in the nearby Chelyabinsk region, the Embassy officials said.

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