#20 - RW 271
Asia Times
August 28, 2003
War chemicals, from Russia with love
By Stephen Blank

It has long been known that during the Soviet era the USSR established and maintained a large-scale and robust program of both biological and chemical warfare. It is equally well known that at the same time as immense exertions were being made to sustain these programs, the Soviet government was a signatory of treaties banning these forms of warfare.

Yet nothing happened, and these programs remained opaque to foreign inspectors throughout the Soviet period. Worse yet, throughout the 1990s, the Russian military successfully stonewalled both the government and the international community with regard to full disclosure of the size, location and scope of these programs, and constantly complained that it could not undertake chemical demilitarization because it had no money for this, even though Moscow fought two wars during that time. And the state also successfully stonewalled foreign governments using the same excuses, as well as others.

Recently, Moscow claims to have undertaken chemical demilitarization, but that program will take years to complete, if it is ever completed, and will last at least through 2012, provided that foreign funding is made available. In effect, the cry for more foreign money to come in and destroy those weapons amounts to blackmail that if this money is not forthcoming, the weapons will not be destroyed. While substantial sums have been remitted to Russia under the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, otherwise known as the Nunn-Lugar Act, to date only about 1 percent of an estimated 43,000 tons of nerve gas and blister agents have been destroyed in the past decade.

Meanwhile, Russia is still refusing to admit foreign inspectors into the country to verify its biological and chemical warfare holdings and the ongoing destruction of these programs according to international agreements and treaties. Naturally this failure has led Senator Richard Lugar, one of America's most thoughtful foreign policy experts and an author of the program for reducing these arsenals, to warn that Russia is endangering continued funding of the program by the US Congress, which will not appropriate funds for continuing obstruction.

This obstruction may be what the Russian military - the last great unreformed Soviet bastion inside Russia - wants. During the 1990s there were numerous reports of officers and officials in the chemical warfare program attempting to sell their knowledge or holdings to foreign governments like Syria. At the same time, virtually every Middle Eastern state has an ongoing chemical and/or biological warfare program that could only benefit from more holdings and technical knowhow. Since virtually anything in the way of weapons can be bought from Russia, Belarus or Ukraine, which often function as surrogates for Russian arms deals that Moscow does not wish to see advertised, the danger of proliferation of these stocks is immense.

Nor is it a danger of proliferation only to states. We know that al-Qaeda and groups affiliated with it or various Palestinian outfits have expressed interest in acquiring such weapons, and through their connections to Iran or other governments those states could easily serve as middlemen or brokers for such transactions. This would not be so shocking a transaction as one might think. Proliferation from Russia, its surrogates, and China continues, often through covert channels and it would not be hard for them to do this. After all, before September 11, 2001, there were reports in the American press that Russian intelligence had sold to al-Qaeda a US encryption machine sold to it by the convicted spy Robert Hanssen and the efforts by al-Qaeda, and presumably other such terrorist groups, to penetrate or make deals with the Russian mafia are well known.

We need only remember the story of a Russian Kilo-Class submarine that turned up in Colombia to see the dimensions of such covert weapons sales. Similarly, in January 2000, Great Britain confiscated Scud missile components with chemical and biological weapons warheads that were destined for Libya and which had originated supposedly with a Taiwanese company. Thus the danger of such proliferation is constant and ubiquitous. And it would be relatively simple to arrange the sale of Russian chemical or biological weapons. The US General Accounting Office reported in March this year that 65 percent of Russia's nerve gas stockpile is "unsecured" and that it will take 40 years to destroy Russia's chemical stockpile at current rates.

Russia's behavior to date regarding these chemical and biological weapons also casts into great doubt the utility of such arms control treaties. If inspections are not to take place and verification is rendered impossible without any penalty, then other states can happily sign treaties and violate them with impunity. That would make a mockery of any arms control treaties and undermines all the arguments made in favor of signing such treaties. Treaties with defects this large are clearly not worth the paper on which they are written.

Certainly one motive for Russia's armed forces and bureaucratic obstruction is anti-Americanism and resentment of the idea of letting in foreign inspectors. But another motive is pure greed. Thus Eric Margolis of the Toronto Sun reported in February, 2000 that Russian defectors had reported that Russian intelligence had used what professionals call the "false flag" ploy to obtain millions in aid from America that Israel had persuaded Washington to offer for jobs to keep scientists from going to Arab states or Iran and diverted that funding back into top secret biological weapons programs.

Stephen Blank is an analyst of international security affairs residing in Harrisburg, PA.

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