Libya agreed in 2003, under sustained U.S. and British pressure, to give up all of its work on weapons of mass destruction and to permit U.S. and international inspection of its declared stocks of mustard and of nerve-agent ingredients. Libya has “provided full and transparent cooperation,” then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair said during a meeting with Gaddafi outside Tripoli, the Libyan capital, in March 2004.
But Libya admitted only to producing aerial bombs, not artillery shells, and U.S. officials watched as Libyans flattened some bomb casings with bulldozers and detonated their burster charges in the desert. In total, the Libyans destroyed more than 3,500 aerial bombs, according to the OPCW.
“We looked pretty carefully in 2004, and we found no evidence they had the capability to produce a chemical artillery round,” said Donald A. Mahley, a retired Army colonel and deputy assistant secretary of state for threat reduction who headed the U.S. effort to close Libya’s weapons-of-mass-destruction programs. Perfecting the design of accurate, liquid-filled artillery shells is considered much more difficult than the manufacture of sulfur mustard itself.
The discovery shows, he said, that “we will have to think very seriously about finding inspectors with a different skill set, and about more intelligence-sharing, and about looking widely, not just at declared sites.” Under the CWC treaty, regular inspections are limited to verifying what each nation admits; a provision allowing for short-notice “challenge inspections” of undeclared sites, at the demand of any treaty member, has never been invoked.
Libya claimed in 2004 that it moved all of its mustard agent — so named because of impurities that make it smell like the mustard plant — from storage sites in suburbs of the capital to Rughawa, a remote desert village 250 miles south of Tripoli. About 10 tons of mustard is stored in a half-dozen or so large canisters there, amounting to roughly half of the arsenal that Gaddafi declared.
Although an Italian-made neutralization plant there was inactive during the armed clashes this year, a German military plane flew international inspectors to the site late last month. They verified that nothing was missing, according to diplomatic sources.
The OPCW declined to comment directly on its inability to find the hidden sites.
Inspectors will soon “establish whether these sites contain materials that should have been declared previously,” said Michael Luhan, a spokesman for the OPCW. “Libyan authorities have advised us they are preparing to declare a detailed description of their contents, and when we receive that our inspectors will promptly visit the country to verify the inventories. Until then we cannot comment or speculate on the outcome.”
Lynch reported from the United Nations. Staff writer Alice Fordham in Tripoli contributed to this report. R. Jeffrey Smith is managing editor for national security at the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization dedicated to producing original investigative journalism on issues of public concern.
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