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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.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Ltd.
All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
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