The purchase of the chemicals suggests that Hoxha might have believed the invasion threat was real.
"It would be typical of him, given his mind-set at the time," said one U.S. intelligence analyst who spoke on the condition that he not be identified. "It's the same mind-set that produced three-quarters of a million bunkers and such large numbers of conventional weapons. If Russia, the United States and Yugoslavia are all planning to attack you, you do whatever you can to defend the motherland."
Albanian officers guard a depot outside the capital that houses 16 tons of chemical weapons imported in the 1970s, apparently from the Chinese military. The chemicals theoretically contain enough poison for millions of lethal doses.
(Joby Warrick -- The Washington Post)
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Destruction to Begin in 2006
If all goes according to plan, sometime in 2006 a custom-made mobile incinerator will arrive in Albania from the United States to begin the process of physically destroying Hoxha's chemical stockpile. Trucks will haul the machine across the steep mountain roads to the very door of the bunker where the chemicals are now stored.
Albania signed the Chemical Weapons Convention in 1993. The treaty, signed by 167 nations, required disclosure and destruction of chemical weapons by 1997, although many signatories have failed to meet the deadlines. Albania's discovery of the chemicals last year meant that it was out of compliance with the treaty; destruction of them will bring it back into good standing with the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the international chemical arms watchdog agency.
Already, Albania has garnered international praise for immediately disclosing the existence of the stockpile, then moving quickly to secure the chemicals in preparation for their destruction.
"Anytime a country comes clean about a chemical weapons stockpile and then moves to destroy it, it reinforces the norm against these weapons and reduces the potential for a diversion," said Jonathan Tucker, a chemical weapons expert and senior researcher at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies.
For its efforts, Albania is to receive $20 million in U.S. aid to pay for the physical destruction of the stockpile. As a country with ambitions to someday join NATO and the European Union, Albania also gets a chance to strengthen ties with Western nations and to burnish its credentials as a partner in the global effort against terrorism. Majko, the defense minister, said his country's actions reflect a "psychological" break with the past.
"After the Cold War, we have passed from a phase of irresponsibility and entered a phase of responsibility and transparency," Majko said. "Transparency means not only saying, but doing."
With the planned destruction of the chemicals, the United States also is crossing a threshold, though one less heralded. The $20 million set aside for Albania by the Bush administration is the first U.S. money earmarked for eliminating unconventional weapons anywhere outside the former Soviet Union.
While the United States has spent billions helping Russia destroy missile warheads and retrain weapons scientists, government regulations have for years blocked the use of federal funds to eliminate similar threats elsewhere in the world. Two years ago, State Department officials had to turn to a private organization, the Nuclear Threat Initiative, founded by Ted Turner and former senator Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), to fund a plan to remove weapons-grade uranium from a nuclear reactor in the former Yugoslavia.
Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), who has proposed legislation to lift the spending restrictions, argues that destroying weapons stockpiles such as the one in Albania should be near the top of the nation's defense priorities.
"The president has argued, quite correctly, that the most important security problem in the world is the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction," Lugar said. "Yet to this day, there are some people who oppose spending this money -- people who say that the Russians and the Albanians should take care of their own problems.
"But given how these weapons are already dispersed, there's a real possibility that one could be stolen and used to kill a lot of people," Lugar said. "To me, you can't do enough to make sure the American people are spared from that sort of thing."
