Russia, U.S. Discuss New Path for CW Disposal Plant

By Jon Fox, Global Security Newswire

MOSCOW — U.S. Cooperative Threat Reduction officials met with their Russian counterparts yesterday to discuss a new strategy to enable work to resume on the unfinished chemical weapon destruction plant at Shchuchye (see GSN, June 30).

A U.S. participant at the meeting described the outcome as positive and said U.S. officials and Russian representatives from the Federal Industry Agency are scheduled to meet here again today regarding the plan.  The U.S. source spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not expressly authorized to discuss the talks.

The United States has committed more than $1 billion for the project.  However, work at the sprawling facility east of the Ural Mountains in Siberia has been stalled for more than a year, due to the failure to award a crucial contract to build the disassembly line that would drain 5,400 tons of nerve agent from stockpiled munitions.  The chemicals are then to be neutralized and encased in an asphalt-like substance.

Washington has refused to award the contract to Russian subcontractors, who returned bids on the project that were initially more than six times the cost estimated by U.S. officials.

U.S. officials estimate the cost of the work to be roughly $60 million, but the lowest initial bid from Russian construction firms was $389 million, the U.S. participant said.  After seven months, the United States was able to elicit a $100 million bid, but that was still seen as a prohibitive figure.

“We’ve had some problems, some big problems, and the problems resolve on not getting a fair and reasonable price,” the U.S. observer said.  “We’ve had almost 18 months now where we’ve tried to award this contract.”

The new plan would enable Russian officials to deal directly with Russian firms, removing U.S. middlemen.  The hope is that the Russian government would be better able to negotiate a fair price with Russian companies, he said.

The Shchuchye project is one of seven chemical weapon destruction facilities planned in Russia as Moscow struggles to eliminate the chemical weapon arsenal built up under the Soviet regime.  The remote facility was originally scheduled for a 2005 completion date, but the timeframe was pushed back to 2008.  Now, some arms control experts have begun to doubt whether that schedule remains feasible.

“There is a question whether that is possible or realistic at this point,” said James Harrison, the deputy counterproliferation and arms control director with the British Defense Ministry.  Harrison was in Moscow attending a public forum on Russian chemical weapons destruction.

The United States and Russia are pushing to deal with their chemical weapons legacies while meeting a series of benchmarks set under the Chemical Weapons Convention.  Both nations hope to have 20 percent of their stockpiles eliminated by April 2007, 45 percent dealt with by the end of 2009 and the entire store of chemical weapons eradicated by April 2012.

Earlier this year, however, the United States indicated that it would miss the final 2012 deadline under the treaty by at least five years (see GSN, April 18).  Russian officials say Moscow is still committed to meeting the final cutoff date, though experts believe that is unlikely.

The U.S. participant at yesterday’s meeting expressed a continued commitment to the Shchuchye project tempered with an increasing frustration.  “We don’t want to go home not having finished, and right now we’re just very tired,” he said.

After more than a year of being unable to award a contract, U.S. Cooperative Threat Reduction officials in Moscow began to brainstorm, searching for a way forward, the source said.

In late June, shortly after the Government Accountability Office released a report documenting lagging progress on the project, a Defense Department official said he expected to receive an acceptable bid within weeks.  That turned out to be the $100 million bid.

A number of European nations, along with Canada, have contributed money to the project, but U.S. cash makes up the lion’s share of funding.  Total foreign contributions provide 58 percent of funding, according a representative of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The U.S. participant made it clear that the proposal would not involve simply handing the project over to Russian officials to be funded by the remaining U.S. money.  Rather, Washington hopes to structure the emerging deal in such a way that the United States retains oversight and releases funds only as work is completed to its satisfaction.

 “Now it’s a question of how do we get there,” the U.S. observer said.

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