Global crisis weighs on chemical arms cuts-watchdog

By Mark Heinrich

VIENNA, Feb 24 (Reuters) - The world financial crisis may make it harder for nations to foot the multibillion-dollar costs of eliminating chemical arms stocks by a 2012 treaty deadline, the director of a watchdog agency said on Tuesday.

Some 186 countries have ratified the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) that bans, with international verification, a whole category of mass-destruction weaponry, leaving only nine outside, mainly in the Middle East and East Asia.

The CWC has made great progress with 43 percent of known chemical weapons stockpiles already verifiably destroyed and 61 of 65 production plants converted irreversibly to peaceful uses, treaty organisation chief Rogelio Pfirter said.

Russia and the United States, the two biggest chemical weapons holders, had scrapped 30 percent and 58 percent of their arsenals respectively and recommitted to finishing the job by 2012, he told reporters during a visit to Vienna.

But the head of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons said chemical disarmament was "an enormously expensive business" for ecological and legal reasons and the worsening financial crunch "certainly does not help us".

"I would say it will cost tens of billions of dollars for the United States, and several billions for Russia", which has also depended on Western financial aid to carry out the task.

Costs were aggravated, Pfirter said, by the need for chemical weapons to be destroyed one by one, not in bulk, for safety reasons, and by litigation, especially in the United States, spurred by environmental fears.

Other countries with declared chemical weapons now close to scrapping them were India, Albania and Libya, said the veteran Argentine diplomat, who is based in The Hague.