An Easier, but Less Deadly, Recipe for Terror

During a visit to a Russian military base, Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.) shows how easy it is to fit a small chemical weapon into a briefcase. (Courtesy Of Sen. Richard G. Lugar)

"There are few groups that have both the motivation and the capability to acquire and effectively use chemical weapons," said Jonathan B. Tucker, a senior researcher with the Center for Nonproliferation Studies and author of a forthcoming history of chemical weapons. "Al Qaeda appears to have the motivation but not the capability -- not yet."

U.S. and European intelligence agencies have amply documented the group's failed attempts to master the art of chemical weaponry. Captured training videos from Afghanistan suggest that al Qaeda's amateur chemists succeeded in making cyanide that was potent enough to kill a few dogs. But no traces of the more lethal mustard agent, sarin and VX were discovered in al Qaeda camps.

Last year, British and French police uncovered a series of "poison plots" by al Qaeda-trained groups in Europe, only to find that the would-be attackers were lacking in poison.

In France, a terrorist cell had struggled to manufacture small quantities of a toxin called ricin using kitchen appliances and castor beans.

In Britain, Islamic radicals hatched a scheme to steal osmium tetroxide, an industrial compound that, while hazardous, has never been used as a weapon. The plan was foiled, and weapons experts are not convinced that the chemical would have killed anyone.

Still, groups such as al Qaeda could conceivably obtain powerful chemical weapons -- ones with proven ability to inflict truly large numbers of casualties -- by buying or stealing them from military stockpiles. Thousands of tons of nearly pure mustard agent, sarin and VX exist in military depots in such countries as the United States, Russia and Libya. The use of such weapons has been banned since 1925, and the existence of chemical stockpiles was outlawed in 1997. Yet they have never gone away.

Dangerous Stockpiles

For Westerners who have been allowed to see them, Shchuchye's vast rows of wooden shelves lined with VX shells are an unforgettable sight. But the vast arsenal represents less than 10 percent of Russia's 44,000-ton chemical stockpile, and an even smaller fraction of the total quantity of military-grade chemical weapons believed to exist in at least 12 countries.

Defense officials and weapon experts disagree sharply over whether the stockpiles at Shchuchye (pronounced SHOO-shya) and elsewhere are adequately protected. But as recently as the mid-1990s, Shchuchye's commanders could not produce an inventory for the weapons stored there. That frightens arms-control advocates such as Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), who has visited Shchuchye.

"The Russians claim that just one of the shells is potent enough to kill 85,000 people at a football game -- every single person," said Lugar, who for years has pressed Congress for funding to help the Russians destroy the weapons. "There are more than 1.9 million weapons at Shchuchye alone. Anyone who thinks this is not a problem needs to work through that arithmetic."

As recently as this fall, Shchuchye commanders have welcomed delegations of Western visitors to the arsenal to show off the high-tech security system built in recent years with aid from the United States, Canada and Europe. Layers of fences, motion detectors and heavily armed guards control access to the storage barns, located east of the Siberian city of Chelyabinsk, 100 miles from Russia's border with Kazakhstan.

The conditions are dramatically different from those encountered in the mid-1990s by Paul Walker, a chemical-weapons expert with the advocacy group Global Green. In 1994, security consisted of a six-foot barbed-wire fence, bicycle padlocks and an 18-year-old Russian guard who said he had not been paid in months.

"The windows of the storage buildings were broken, and there were holes in the roof," Walker recalled in an interview. "There was obviously no reliable inventory system, because the weapons were spaced haphazardly, with many of the racks only partially filled. When I asked the commander how he kept inventory, he said: 'We keep the doors locked.' "

Even today, Western-style security upgrades are in place in only two of the seven arsenals in Russia where weapons or bulk chemicals are kept. Meanwhile, beyond Russia, far less is known about the security of weapons stocks in countries such as Iran, which used chemical weapons in its war with Iraq in the 1980s and is alleged by U.S. intelligence officials to still possess them.

Nonproliferation experts draw some encouragement from the fact that no stolen chemical weapons are known to have been used in a terrorist attack. Within a few years, the threat will diminish dramatically as Russia and the United States destroy their stockpiles, as required under the international Chemical Weapons Convention. But deadlines for destruction have been pushed back seven years, to 2012, because of financing problems and environmental concerns.