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Sep. 28, 2003. 01:00 AM

U.S. lags in destroying chemical weapons
Likely won't meet deadline to be rid of chemical stores

Efforts to raze arsenal hindered by cost overruns

KATHLEEN KENNA
STAFF REPORTER

While the United States continues its search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, it is struggling to dismantle its own.

With the world's second largest stockpile of chemical weapons, the American
government has admitted that cost overruns and delays will force it to miss deadlines for destruction set by an international treaty.

The U.S. asked the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons
(OPCW) this month for an extension of its long-standing pledge to destroy 45 per cent of its chemical weapons by 2004.

There is a "great risk" that the U.S., one of the original forces behind the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention, will miss the final, 2007 deadline for getting rid of all chemical munitions, says a new report from the U.S. government's General Accounting Office.

Experts predict that Russia, with the world's largest chemical weapons stockpile, also will miss the 2012 deadline recently set after an OPCW extension.

Russia has failed to meet almost every deadline under the 1993 convention,
which holds the promise of seeing a single class of weapons destroyed for the first time in history. Russia has about 40,000 tonnes of chemical weapons; the United States, about 31,000 tonnes.

"The amounts stockpiled could kill all human life several times over," says
Peter Kaiser of the OPCW at The Hague in the Netherlands. It takes only a pinprick drop of the nerve agent VX to kill almost instantly.

Even with heightened security at sites around the world after 9/11, the most
lethal chemical weapons ever produced are stored in decaying rockets, mortars, artillery shells, land mines and tanks in the U.S. and Russia.

Both of the former Cold War enemies have been burning their chemical weapons in incinerators at temperatures of about 1,500 C.

Yet the pace is slow and the work is dangerous and costly.

"It's like building a nuclear power plant in your backyard but the risks are far greater," says Paul Walker, one of the world's top experts on weapons of mass destruction. The director of Global Green U.S.A., he has visited every known chemical weapons site in the American and Russian arsenals.
"Destroying chemical weapons is much more difficult than people imagine,"
Walker adds. "Everyone is very committed, from the Russians and Americans to
the other G-8 countries (including Canada) to getting the job done. The Russians are absolutely committed to getting rid of theirs. They don't really have the money."

The U.S. has spent $25 billion (U.S.) so far on getting rid of its chemical weapons. The original army estimate, in 1985, was $1.8 billion to destroy the entire stockpile in four years.