DAILY BRIEFING ON INDIANA POLITICS
Lugar Heads to Russia for WMD Milestone Next Week
Posted May 23, 2009 @ 11:00 am In HPI Weekly
By BRIAN A. HOWEY
INDIANAPOLIS - There was a long two-hour ride from the airport at Chelyabinsk, a city in Western Siberia where Stalin had moved his tank factories away from the reach of Nazi forces in 1941, to Shchuch’ye. Traveling with Sen. Dick Lugar and Sam Nunn of the Nuclear Threat Inititiate in August 2007, Senate Foreign Relations staffer Kenneth A. Myers III pointed out the window to a nondescript building. It looked like hog barn or a chicken coop. It was surrounded by a weedy berm and dilapidated wooden fences.
Sen. Lugar views racks of 85mm shells filled with nerve agents at Shchuch'ye in
Western Siberia almost a decade ago. Next week, some 2 million shells will begin
to be processed due to Nunn-Lugar funds. (Lugar Senate Photo)
But it was really one of the most dangerous places on the planet.
What Lugar and Nunn discovered there almost a decade ago were 2 million 85mm shells in 14 wooden structures filled with some of the most poisonous material ever made by mankind: nerve agents sarin, GB, somen and VX.[private]
The shells were stacked like wine bottles on wooden racks two or three times the height of our bus. Nunn remembers walking into the building and seeing “light coming through the walls and ceilings.”
The scariest part of it was that there was no inventory. The Soviets simply produced the nerve gases here and vast quantities of microbes like anthrax at sprawling facilities on an Aral Sea island that could have destroyed mankind hundreds of times over. “Taking inventory would have been extremely difficult,” Nunn explained. “It would be very hard for them to know one was missing if there was a clever inside job.”
The true doomsday planner would have been ar Soviet-era munitions expert, Russian Federation soldier or security guard taking some of these shells and making his way either to mob-controlled Yekaterinburg or across the nearby Kazakhstan border to either ancient smuggling routes in the Caspian Sea region and the Southern Caucasus to Turkey or through Dushanbe in Tajkistan to Afghanistan. A shell in the hands of al Qaeda could have been a Western nightmare. “The weapons destroyed here are highly portable and attractive to terrorists the world over,” Lugar explained.
Paul McNelly, the American program manager at Shchuch’ye (pronounced SHOOCH-ya), put the peril in perspective: “All it would take is one of these small shells put in a backsack strapped with C4 plastic explosives going into a stadium. Depending on which way the plume went, you could kill 10,000 to 20,000 people. And there are 2 million of these things out there.”
Sen. Lugar and Nuclear Threat Initiative Chairman Sam Nunn (right) talk with
Russian Federation officers at the Shchuch'ye Chemical Destruction facility in
August 2007. The Siberian plant located in a former birch tree forest, paid for with
Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Funds, will destroy 1,600 metric tons of
nerve agents contained in 2 million shells. (HPI Photo by Brian A. Howey)
There’s a photo of Lugar posing with one of the 85mm shells in a briefcase. McNelly would point out that Lugar was holding a live round, with Foreign Relations Staff Director Kenneth Myers Jr. responding, “Now he tells us.”
Lugar called the progress in 2007 “an important milestone.” Next week he takes the Nunn-Lugar program to a new threshhold, remarkable given that it has occurred over the course of three American and Russian presidencie, through periods of great mutual cooperation between the two rivals as well as the antagonism that marked the end of the George W. Bush and Putin presidencies last year. There were years of hostility toward the program in Congress.
On May 29, Lugar once again travels to Shchuch’ye to observe the dedication and commencement of one of the proudest aspects of the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program. The facility will destroy 1,600 metric tons of these shells between now and 2013. The United States, Russia, Canada, Czech Republic, the European Union, Italy, Norway, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom worked together to build the facility that looked like a modern manufacturing plant under construction when we visited in 2007. Nunn-Lugar and international funding also built the railroad trestle over the Miass River to transport the shells to the facility.
A hole will be drilled through each shell and the nerve agent will be drained. The shell will be decontaminated, deformed and scrapped. The sarin or VX will be drained into a reaction tank, neutralized and mixed with bituminous material.
With Nunn-Lugar funds, the storage of these shells was surrounded by double and triple fences, breach monitors, guard towers and cameras.
Lugar would say, “I am convinced that the weapons destroyed here must be dismantled quickly and safely. I look forward to the day when the last of these horrific weapons are eliminated and a dire threat they pose to all nations is removed.”
Leading up to next week, this has been a nine-year dogged journey for Lugar. Myers counts at least a dozen times that Shchuch’ye was derailed and headed toward the dustbin and Lugar got it back on track, notes Lugar communications director Andy Fisher.
And it was not always the Russians wreaking havoc. In 1999, as the U.S. House tried to cut the program, Lugar wrote conferees imploring them to save the program. Lugar argued in a speech before the Business Executives for National Security that “Nuclear weapons are not the only proliferation threat from Soviet arsenals. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union manufactured enormous stockpiles of chemical weapons. The Russian stockpile is stored in seven sites across that country and the security surrounding it is affected by the Russian economic crisis. We cannot permit these weapons to be stolen or sold to the highest bidders. This material was produced for one purpose, to kill American soldiers. Nunn-Lugar is addressing this threat.”
A year later, the Senate approved funding for Shchuch’ye, but the House rejected. Congress ultimately passed the legislation but tacked on six conditions, which the Clinton administration eventually determined were unmet.
In 2001, President George W. Bush ordered a review of Nunn-Lugar, agreed with its goals and ordered an acceleration of the program. But the Senate cut $46 million. Lugar would write the appropriations chairman, arguing, “It is time to utilize the window of opportunity to destroy these dangerous weapons. It is imperative that Russia’s vast stores of chemical weapons do not end up in the hands of rogue nations or terrorists. We are losing precious time to eliminate these dangerous weapons.”
In 2002, the House Armed Services Committee cut funding for Shchuchye by 50 percent, while the Senate Armed Services Committee provided full funding. Lugar offered an amendment providing the President with a waiver for congressional conditions and it was adopted by unanimous consent. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice wrote to Lugar endorsing his efforts to provide the President with waiver authority. Secretary of State Colin Powell endorsed the program as did Secretary Rice in 2005.
By 2004, Lugar was still working to convince Congress that spending money in Russia was a good idea. Lugar explained, “Some in Congress and in the administration ask why we should spend money to clean up the Russian mess: ‘They made their bed, now they can lie in it.’ The trouble is, in the meantime terrorists could break into the bedroom, steal weapons of mass destruction, and use them against our armed forces, the United States or our allies.”
It wasn’t until 2007 that the last authorization and appropriations authority for Shchuchye were approved by Congress.
Russia ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention only after the U.S. did. The U.S. ratified the treaty over strenuous opposition from Sen. Jesse Helms, the arch conservative from North Carolina. The 1997 debate was managed by Lugar and Sen. Joe Biden, and staffed by Myers III. Hundreds of communiqués were transmitted by Mark Schoeff Jr., then a Lugar staffer and now HPI’s Washington correspondent.
In a remarkable public service career that spans five decades and ranges from Indianapolis school desegregation, to Unigov, the first Chrysler bailout, to fair elections in the Philippines, this chapter for Sen. Lugar will be one of the profoundly sweetest.