WASHINGTON -- A leading international nonproliferation official is urging the United States not to retreat from providing sufficient funds to accelerate the complete elimination of the U.S. stockpile of chemical weapons (see GSN, May 6).
(Jul. 22) -
A truck transports a final bulk container of VX nerve agent for disposal last year at the Newport Chemical Depot in Indiana. An international nonproliferation official urged Washington to maintain a high funding level for its chemical-weapon destruction efforts (U.S. Army photo).
“We hope that … every [funding commitment] will be completed in good time for the facilities to be completed in good time and be able to destroy the remaining chemical weapons in good time,” said Rogelio Pfirter, director general of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.
The Defense Department’s Assembled Chemical Weapons Alternatives program stands to receive about $550 million in fiscal 2010 as it continues construction of demilitarization plants at the Blue Grass Army Depot in Kentucky and the Pueblo Chemical Depot in Colorado. That would be a nearly 30 percent hike in resources from this year, and news reports indicate that the organization could collect $1.2 billion in extra funding over several upcoming budgets.
The Pentagon today has destroyed more than 60 percent of its chemical arsenal, which was stored for decades at nine locations. The Colorado and Kentucky sites will be the last two installations to begin -- and presumably complete -- destruction of their stockpiles. As it stands, the end is more than a decade away.
Proposed ACWA funding in the next budget is “substantially sufficient for a one-year effort,” Pfirter said in a June telephone interview with Global Security Newswire.
There should be no letdown in spending, he said: “It will take much more than that just to complete the facilities.”
Pfirter was in Washington last month for his first meetings with Obama administration officials at the White House and the State and Defense departments, along with lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
During the subsequent interview, he avoided discussing details of the visit. However, the former Argentine diplomat said he left convinced that the new U.S. leadership is engaged on meeting its commitments under the international Chemical Weapons Convention.
The United States is one of 188 member nations to the 1997 pact that prohibits the development, production, stockpiling, use or proliferation of chemical warfare materials such as mustard blister agent and the lethal nerve agents VX and sarin.
Any nation that joins the pact while in possession of banned armaments -- the list to date encompasses Albania, India, Iraq, Libya, Russia, the United States and a publicly unidentified nation widely understood to be South Korea -- is required to destroy those weapons and any production capabilities.
“The administration fully recognizes the convention and is totally aware. It doesn’t need anyone else to remind them,” Pfirter said. “The commitment is very, very strong toward the convention. I’m sure the United States will continue to look for ways of bringing their own destruction program in line with the convention.”
Officials in Washington also said little about Pfirter’s day and a half of talks. One congressional source said Pfirter met for a short time with then-Representative Ellen Tauscher (D-Calif.), who has since become undersecretary of state for arms control and international security. The two discussed the challenges facing the U.S. disarmament program, the source said.
“There was no big strategy discussion. I think it was a courtesy call on his part,” according to the Capitol Hill official.
The administration’s public face on arms control has to date been squarely aimed at nuclear weapons, with President Barack Obama in April giving a highly publicized speech in Prague on disarmament (see GSN, April 6). More recently, the U.S. president signed a pledge with his Russian counterpart to draw down their nations’ strategic nuclear arsenals (see GSN, July 6).
“The State Department and Defense Department have taken President Obama’s Prague speech as their marching orders. So they view the president’s top arms control priorities as entirely nuclear, with much less of a focus on the other categories of WMD,” said chemical-weapon expert Jonathan Tucker, a senior fellow at the Washington office of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies.
Concerns in the intelligence community regarding the threat of terrorists developing and using chemical weapons have not resulted in new international policy initiatives, Tucker said. The White House has also not scheduled any sort of meeting on chemical-weapon issues similar to a planned August session on biological threats, he added.
Meanwhile, the State Department has yet to appoint a high-level diplomat to replace the Bush administration’s envoy to Pfirter’s organization, which monitors compliance with the convention, Tucker said. That position will be crucial for preparing Washington to deal with the diplomatic fallout expected when it inevitably misses the chemical-weapon disarmament deadline set by the document.
A Pressing Schedule
The convention originally set a deadline of April 29, 2007 -- one decade after its entry into force -- for its member nations to do away with their chemical stockpiles. In 2006, all declared arsenal holders but Albania received schedule extensions, with the United States and Russia being given a full five extra years (see GSN, Dec. 11, 2006).
In the intervening years, Albania, India and South Korea have all completed their chemical demilitarization work (see GSN, April 29).
The Defense Department, though, has acknowledged its inability to eliminate its weapons on time.
“The DOD review has concluded that there are no realistic options available to destroy the complete U.S. stockpile by the CWC deadline of April 2012,” the Pentagon said last May in a report to Congress.
The latest plan calls for the Army Chemical Materials Agency around that time to complete destruction operations at storage sites that held 90 percent of the U.S. chemical warfare holdings. The organization by June 30 had eliminated more than 63 percent of the original U.S. arsenal of 31,500 tons of warfare materials.
The remaining 10 percent would be eliminated by 2021 by the Assembled Chemical Weapons Alternatives program, according to the report.
Washington now has less than three years to persuade other CWC member states that delays in the destruction of its chemical stockpile are the result of factors beyond its control and that it is doing everything it can to meet its treaty obligations. Failure to do so could result in international criticism or more concrete penalties.
The best outcome for the administration would be that, rather than blaming or punishing the United States, the organization’s members simply require the Pentagon to eliminate whatever remains of its stockpile within a specified period of time, Tucker said. If U.S. officials fail to prepare the ground diplomatically, however, they should expect to face a blast of rhetoric when the deadline passes, he added.
Also possible, though less likely, is that OPCW member nations collectively or individually could impose sanctions against the United States, such as stripping it of its voting rights within the organization or cutting off trade in dual-use industrial chemicals listed in the pact.
“It’s hard to predict what the political dynamic in the OPCW will be in April 2012. Obviously it’s essential for the United States to begin preparing now to make a convincing case,” Tucker said. “The total quantity of CW agent that still remains to be destroyed … will also be significant.”
“Already countries like Iran have been highly critical of the United States and I anticipate that that criticism will only increase, so it’s important that other CWC member states be seen as sympathetic to the U.S. position. That will take a fair amount of persuasion, I think,” he added.
U.S. diplomats are likely to argue that the treaty drafters set unrealistic deadlines that failed to account for the technical and political challenges involved in destroying chemical-weapon stockpiles in a safe and environmentally responsible manner, Tucker said. The United States could also to point to recent increases in Pentagon funding as an illustration of its commitment to the spirit -- if not the letter -- of the treaty, he said.
Should diplomatic efforts prove persuasive, the United States might receive a pass similar to the one granted Albania, Tucker said. The Adriatic nation had to overcome technical difficulties in destruction of its 16.7-metric-ton arsenal of warfare materials but finished operations several months after the treaty-set deadline without sustaining any repercussions, he said.
In deciding against penalizing Albania, the OPCW Executive Council invoked a paragraph in Article 8 of the convention, which states: “In its consideration of doubts or concerns regarding compliance and causes of noncompliance … the Executive Council shall consult with the states parties involved and, as appropriate, request the state party to take measures to redress the situation within a specified time.”
Officials at the State Department told GSN they could not discuss a situation that is several years from being realized.
“Of course people are aware of the present [schedule] estimates,” Pfirter said. It is a political and diplomatic issue that will be “attended to,” he said.
The Deadline at Home
Beyond the convention deadline is the Dec. 31, 2017, end-date demanded by Congress for complete elimination of the U.S. stockpile. That is also almost certain to be missed; as recently as last September, the military estimated that disposal operations at Blue Grass and Pueblo would have barely begun by then, much less finished.
The two installations have been beset by a variety of problems over the years. Federal legislation forced the Defense Department to find alternatives to destruction of weapons using incineration, the process used at most other sites. Military planners ultimately chose to employ chemical neutralization, but progress on the plants themselves has been slowed by major funding fluctuations -- as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq drew away money -- and a mandate for redesigns to restrict costs.
The projects, though, have been on an upswing in recent years. The ACWA program received $427 million in this budget year, and lawmakers have already added $5 million to the Pentagon’s $545 million request for fiscal 2010 as it makes its way through Congress. The next fiscal year begins Oct. 1.
Construction of the primary demilitarization facilities is now under way at both sites, with crucial equipment being installed at Pueblo, according to a June update from the program.
The United States can use the extra money to draw closer to the congressional deadline, but it will not meet it.
“To achieve the congressional destruction mandate of 2017, only transporting portions of the stockpile to currently operating destruction facilities showed any reasonable probability of success, and this option is precluded by law,” according to the Pentagon report.
The document recommends an expedited disposal program in which the program receives additional resources through several budgets -- annual funding that one expert said would be roughly equivalent to the amount requested this year, which would constitute a $250 million yearly increase over previous estimates -- and all warfare agents, munitions and waste are treated on-site at the Colorado and Kentucky installations. Carrying out the effort would involve increasing personnel to allow for faster construction, an early beginning to testing of the plants and expanding disposal operations from four to seven days a week, 24 hours per day.
Neutralization of more than 2,600 tons of mustard agent in Colorado would begin in May 2014 and end in September 2017 -- three years ahead of existing schedule estimates. The Kentucky plant would begin operations in October 2018 and finish elimination of 523 tons of mustard, VX and sarin in May 2021 -- two years earlier than anticipated.
Speeding the pace of work would actually save about $235 million, bringing lifetime costs for the ACWA program to $8.2 billion, the Defense Department found.
Spending on the entire chemical demilitarization effort would exceed $35 billion, according to the DOD estimate.
The strategy outlined in the document appears to reflect the administration's plan for the program.
"The current path forward is to use the fiscal resources in the FY 2010 president’s budget request to accelerate the ACWA program to achieve destruction of the Colorado stockpile by 2017 and the Kentucky stockpile by 2021," a Pentagon spokesman stated today by e-mail.
Assuming the funding comes through, the Defense Department is likely to meet its present goal of finishing off its prohibited arsenal 12 years from now, said Paul Walker, security and sustainability director for the environmental organization Global Green USA.
"It's a little too late to play complete catch-up. But the catch-up they're playing is a good sign," he said.
Walker argued, though, that the schedule could be cut by another one or two years through certain measures, such as use of explosive detonation chambers to destroy mustard-filled munitions at Blue Grass before the demilitarization plant itself is operating.
Pfirter, who has a year left in his eight-year stint as OPCW chief, acknowledged the challenges ahead. However, he also asserted that even the most recent target dates are not set in stone.
The Defense Department in 2006 estimated that operations at all existing disposal plants would be less than 70 percent complete by 2012, Pfirter noted. The latest assessment has all but two facilities wrapping up operations by then and just 10 percent of the stockpile remaining.
“We look forward to further estimates that will show further substantive progress in the pace of destruction, so as to ensure elimination is achieved,” he said.