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Republican Senators Criticize Planned Budget Cuts to U.S. Chemical Weapons Disposal Program By David Ruppe WASHINGTON — Two Republican senators yesterday criticized the Bush administration’s plan to cancel funding for chemical weapons destruction work at two U.S. Army depots through 2011 (see GSN, Feb. 15). The Defense Department in its 2006 budget eliminated hundreds of millions of dollars planned for the construction next year of chemical weapons destruction facilities at the Bluegrass Army Depot in Kentucky the Pueblo Chemical Depot in Colorado, while adding $31 million for additional research of destruction technologies at the sites. The move, part of a five-year budget plan presented to Congress, initiates a freeze on construction at the sites through 2011 and suggests that the administration is not aiming for the United States to meet its Chemical Weapons Convention commitment of destroying its arsenal by 2012. “Do you know how long we’ve been researching the destruction of those weapons?” Senator Jim Bunning (R-Ky.) asked Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz at a Senate Budget Committee hearing on the Defense Department’s budget for fiscal 2006. “We have a treaty to get rid of them by 2012. And even the money we appropriated in the last DOD budgets, over the last one, two, three years, you want to use it for other purposes now.” Factoring time for facility construction and weapons destruction, Paul Walker, director of Global Green USA’s Legacy Program, said the sites may not finish eliminating their stores until as late as 2018 or 2019. The Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader reported yesterday that a Defense Department document states that the two sites are set to go on “caretaker status” for five years, followed by two years of “redesign.” Construction would begin in 2012, and the Kentucky facility would not finish weapons disposal until 2018, it said. “How can we argue that [the other declared chemical weapons states] should meet their deadlines?” Walker said in an interview today. “For us to plan to miss our deadlines by a half a decade or so, that tends to have serious diplomatic implications, as well as for homeland security.” Program Costs Cited Wolfowitz cited growing costs for chemical weapons demilitarization as causing the delay in disposal. “We understand the priority that has to be put into getting rid of this stuff. But we also have a problem with costs that are just going through the roof,” he said (see GSN, Feb. 24). He said that despite the cuts the budget does contain $1.4 billion for chemical demilitarization at other sites in fiscal 2006 and $6.3 billion over the course of the program. Senator Wayne Allard (R-Colo.) said the administration’s cuts add delays, confusion, and costs to the program and questioned whether they would prompt international doubts about the U.S. commitment to meeting the treaty’s deadline. “I would hope that you would sit down [with] Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice,” Allard said. Rice has said “such a failure would damage our credibility overseas and hinder our efforts to hold other nations accountable when we don’t meet our deadlines,” Allard said. The United States now stores about 22,000 tons of chemical weapons at eight sites in the continental United States. Destruction facilities have been operating at, or as with the case of the Blue Grass and Pueblo facilities, are planned for each site to meet the U.S. commitment to the Chemical Weapons Convention. Construction of a chemical weapons neutralization facility was initially to begin in late 2003 at Pueblo, with work on a neutralization site at Blue Grass to follow in 2004. The facilities also each lost $100 million in anticipated funding for the current fiscal year. The Defense Department previously had planned to spend up to $388 million for construction at both sites in fiscal 2006. All of that money has been eliminated. Walker of Global Green USA suspects the cuts for Blue Grass and Pueblo are the product of efforts by the administration to reduce the overall federal budget, “given the president’s decision to cut the deficit in half and not raise taxes.” “I would think there has been a top-line given to the [Army] Chemical Materials Agency … [forcing] really difficult choices,” he said. The Army has said it is assessing options to meet the 2012 treaty deadline, including possibly shipping weapons from Pueblo and Blue Grass for disposal at operating incinerators (see GSN, Jan. 20). An interim progress report on the study is scheduled to be given Friday to the Defense Department, according to a Chemical Materials Agency press release. U.S. law, however, bans shipping the weapons, short of a presidential order and approval by the affected governors. The fact that the chemical weapons destruction program is a target of such budgetary pressure suggests a “curious disconnect” between the administration’s stated prioritization of nonproliferation and threat reduction and its actions, Walker said. The cuts may have been made “with the full knowledge that it would create a political firestorm on Capitol Hill and the funding would be restored,” he said.
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