A Former Superpower's Hazardous Legacy

Experts Cite Risks of Aging and Unsecured Arms Caches in Ex-Soviet Republics

KUTAISI, Georgia -- Just beyond the rusted wire fence with gaping holes and the teenage guards wearing slippers, dozens of napalm bombs lay in the tall grass.

Nearby were canisters of land mines stacked in the open air, rotting crates of ammunition for antiaircraft batteries, ancient guided missiles and piles upon piles of various types of bombs. Stacked in a nearby warehouse were thousands of launchers for shoulder-fired rockets.

Once a bristling outpost of a global superpower, the former Red Army base near here has deteriorated into a weedy munitions junkyard, one of hundreds of aging, relatively unprotected stockpiles scattered throughout the former Soviet Union. While the United States has focused on securing potential weapons of mass destruction in this part of the world, some security experts increasingly say conventional arsenals may be dangerously vulnerable to theft as well.

Millions of tons of armaments were left behind in depots like the one in Kutaisi when the Russian military largely withdrew from the 14 former Soviet republics that became independent from Moscow more than a decade ago. Some of these bases have since served as one-stop shopping centers for black-market arms traders who have little trouble sneaking in or bribing guards to let them pass.

"The situation in my opinion is extremely bad," said Yura Krikheli, deputy director of the Gamma Center, a Georgian government institute charged with securing arms caches. "Georgia lies in a very dangerous location. If we consider what countries we border, then anything can happen. There's a danger of terrorists coming and people stealing things and taking them to conflict zones."

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), a regional grouping of 55 countries, has cited "huge risks" associated with the weapons stockpiles. Foreign ministers from the member countries last December approved a plan to secure and destroy many of those weapons to stop "illicit diversion and uncontrolled spread especially to terrorist and criminal groups."

The corroding bombs and ammunition also pose a growing risk to the environment and to the communities near the stockpiles. An explosion at an old Soviet arms depot in Ukraine this month, possibly caused by a cigarette, touched off about two weeks of secondary blasts and fires that were extinguished only last week. Five people were killed and 10,000 were evacuated; more than 2,000 buildings were damaged or destroyed.

In 2001, a series of depots containing artillery shells left over from the Soviet war in Afghanistan exploded in Kazakhstan, prompting the evacuation of 1,000 soldiers and residents from a six-mile danger zone.

The problem exists in Russia as well. In the eastern port city of Vladivostok, two officers were killed and five soldiers were injured last August when a munitions facility exploded. It was the fourth major fire at Pacific Fleet arsenals since the demise of the Soviet Union, despite politicians' demands that ammunition warehouses be moved away from residential areas. Similar explosions have occurred in the Samara, Sverdlovsk and Buryatia regions in the last six years.

Here in Georgia, a warehouse at a military base exploded in 1996 and forced the evacuation of tens of thousands of people for a week, according to military experts, who fear that it could happen again. "If there's an explosion, there'll be a chain reaction of explosions," said Imanual Yakov an Israeli consultant hired by the Georgians. "There'll be unbelievable damage."

It is the fear of terrorists and guerrillas, though, that has generated a new drive by officials in this mountainous country to address the long-neglected danger.

The Russians still maintain two bases in Georgian-administered territory, but in the 1990s, as part of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the newly constituted Georgian army was given control of more than 30 Soviet bases, spread across a country smaller than South Carolina. Many contain thousands of tons of unneeded arms, which are guarded by little more than fragile fences.

"It's a legitimate issue because we inherited from the Soviets a huge infrastructure," Defense Minister Gela Bezhuashvili said in an interview. "Posts are spread all over Georgia. They need to be cleared of mines." Georgian officials said they had received virtually no help from the Russians with these or other crucial tasks.

A recent tour of four bases in different parts of the country provided a glimpse of the exposure. An arsenal in the capital, Tbilisi, was surrounded by barbed wire that had been pulled apart at points so intruders could easily come and go. At a base outside Tbilisi, the fencing was so ineffective that cows, pigs, horses and mangy dogs wandered in and out unimpeded.