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China Apparent Source of Albanian Chemical Weapons
China was apparently the source of a small stockpile of chemical weapons agent now set to be destroyed in Albania, the Washington Post reported today (see GSN, Dec. 3, 2004). The discovery helps to confirm suspicions by U.S. intelligence that China previously supplied chemical weapons technology abroad, the Post reported. Beijing is known to have provided military assistance to Romania, the former Yugoslavia and several Middle Eastern nations in the 1970s and 1980s, U.S. officials said. If China did transfer chemical weapons to such countries, it is unknown if they have been destroyed or forgotten, as was the case for years in Albania, U.S. intelligence analysts said. “The threats turn up in the darndest places,” said Joseph Cirincione, director of the Nonproliferation Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “It illustrates the problem we face with Cold War arsenals, which are still deadly and still large. Just as you have to worry about what a crazy man is thinking in a cave in Afghanistan, you also have to worry about what happens to these weapons in places like Albania and North Korea. It’s not that the Albanians would use them, but a terrorist group could learn of them and then try to pick the low-hanging fruit,” he said. There are also concerns that additional quantities of chemical weapons could be discovered in Albania beyond the 16 tons slated to be destroyed beginning in 2006, according to intelligence analysts. While Albanian defense officials have said they are confident all of the country’s Cold War-era weapons are secure, the government has been unable to find any documentation on the purchase of the known weapons, the Post reported. “It was the height of the Cold War,” said Lt. Col. Muharrim Alba, a senior arms-control specialist with the Albanian Defense Ministry. “Communist countries helped each other. And they didn’t always leave documents to show what they did” (Joby Warrick, Washington Post, Jan. 10).
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