Briefcase bombs remain

last updated 8 January 2015

Shchuchye, Russia

A U.S. program to dismantle millions of Russian warheads and shells filled with deadly nerve gases screeched to a halt this week after its congressional funding ran out. The U.S. has spent $230 million so far building a facility in Shchuchye to destroy 5,000 tons of chemical weapons left over from the Soviet arsenal. But Congress has frozen the hundreds of millions of dollars it pledged to finish the construction because Russia was not properly accounting for its spending. Sen. Richard Lugar, who co-authored the bill setting up the dismantlement program, said such concerns were trivial. “This is the kind of stuff, at Shchuchye, that terrorists are after,” Lugar said. “We have an opportunity to get rid of it and we’re not moving forward.” Many of the shells are small enough to fit in a briefcase, and a single one could kill more than 100,000 people if detonated in a city.