Chemical weapons

last updated 8 January 2015

Tirana, Albania

Albanian officials last year stumbled upon 16 tons of mustard and arsenic gases stored in a bunker, The Washington Post reported this week. Paranoid communist dictator Enver Hoxha—who believed the U.S., the Soviets, and the Yugoslavs were all going to declare war on his country—bought the lethal chemicals from China in the 1970s. After his death in 1985, the location of the stockpile was forgotten. The Albanian government secured the site as soon as it was rediscovered, and alerted U.S. and U.N. officials. But the discovery raised fears that other stockpiles might be lying unguarded somewhere. “It’s not that the Albanians would use them,” said Joseph Cirincione of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “but a terrorist group could learn of them and then try to pick the low-hanging fruit.”