Russia and US open facility to destroy nerve gas shells

Moscow: Russia and the United States formally opened a plant in Siberia on Friday to destroy a huge stockpile of artillery shells filled with deadly nerve agents.

The move came more than a decade after US officials pledged to help secure and dispose of the weapons.

The $1 billion (Dh3.67 billion), 250-acre facility is said to be the largest in the world dedicated to destroying chemical munitions.

Its debut represents a milestone in Russia's long, rocky partnership with the United States to safeguard and eliminate the arsenal of chemical, biological and nuclear arms the former Soviet Union produced.

Located near the border with Kazakhstan, the plant is supposed to neutralise about two million shells and warheads stored nearby that are loaded with VX, sarin and soman.

The stockpile has worried US officials since 1994, when an American inspection team found it in a loosely guarded complex of run-down warehouses. Just one of the shells could kill tens of thousands of people.

Senator Richard G. Lugar dramatised the potential for terrorism posed by the weapons during a visit to the complex in 1999, when he was photographed holding a briefcase with a VX-filled shell inside.