Russians Wary of Chemical Arms Plan

Method for Dismantling Stockpile Is Debated as Deadline Looms

Russian soldiers during a routine check in 2000 of toxic agent containers at a chemical weapons storage site in the town of Gorny. (Associated Press)

MIRNY, Russia -- On a closed military base, just outside this small town cut from a forest along the Trans-Siberian railroad, sits one of Russia's deadliest stockpiles of chemical weapons. Nearly 7,000 tons of chemical agents are packed inside 40,000 aerial bombs that are secured in containers made of concrete and steel.

Broken down into individual doses, that's enough agent to kill everyone on the planet.

Sometime this year, Russian authorities are to begin to neutralize most of the 4,000 tons of VX nerve agent in the stockpile to meet a deadline under the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1992, which calls for 20 percent of the country's chemical arsenal to be destroyed by April 2007.

As the moment of destruction nears, some residents of Mirny and the surrounding farmlands are living in dread. But the willingness of residents to struggle against the plant defies notions about the political passivity of Russians, particularly those living in the countryside. And it illustrates how the Russian government now has to contend with civic activism in even the most remote areas if an issue is sufficiently galvanizing.

The authorities have been forced to engage their adversaries in debate even though some officials, particularly in Moscow, have treated the objections of residents with contempt. A government newspaper even mused about how such public resistance would never have been tolerated in Soviet times. Local residents learned of what was on their doorstep only after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Echoing the criticism of some Russian and international specialists, many citizens here fear that the military is rushing forward with an untested method of destruction. The authorities are not prepared, they contend, for a serious accident, which could have untold consequences for the 4,000 people of Mirny and tens of thousands more living in two surrounding districts.

Officials are "in a hurry and they're using a technology that has never been tried before," said Tatyana Koroleva, a schoolteacher in Mirny, which means peaceful. "Life is cheap in Russia. People are very afraid that we will be betrayed."

This is a critical year for Russia under the Chemical Weapons Convention, which aims to achieve the complete destruction of the weapons worldwide by 2012. Russia and the United States have the largest arsenals. So far, Russia has destroyed just 1 percent of its stockpile, at seven sites -- as compared to 35 percent in the United States at nine sites, including Aberdeen, Md.

Plans call for the bombs stored at the Maradykovsky facility outside this town to be moved by hand from their storage places to an adjacent destruction building, which is under construction. There, workers will cut off the tops of the bombs, pour water containing neutralizing additives on the VX, then reseal the bombs.

In three months, Russian officials say, the mixture inside the bombs prompts a slow reaction and leaves a residue that has low toxicity. "In reality, it will be fast," said Mikhail Manin, a former military officer and the senior official overseeing the destruction process in the regional capital of Kirov in central Russia. "We believe it's more reliable than other methods."

Two destruction plants, Kambarka in the Ural Mountains region and Maradykovsky here, 550 miles east of Moscow, are meant to begin operation in 2006. The Kambarka facility, which holds lewisite, a blistering agent that contains arsenic, is scheduled to start March 1, after several delays.

Most of the U.S. plants underwent an 18-month testing period of an automated method of destruction, according to Paul Walker, legacy program director at Global Green USA. It is the American affiliate of Green Cross International, a organization founded by former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev to address the environmental consequences of war and conflict.