Russian officials today denied a report of an accident at a chemical weapons reprocessing site.

Radio Liberty had quoted Tatyana Korolyovaya, an environmental activist in a town close to the Maradykovsky complex, as saying that several aviation bomb casings had ruptured during reprocessing and that toxic liquid had spilled onto the ground.

Lt Gen Valery Kapashin, a top chemical weapons destruction official who was at the plant this week, also said that “there have not been any accidents at the chemical weapons storage facility,” Interfax reported.

Interfax news agency said Kapashin had travelled to Maradykovsky to discuss the next phase of construction at the plant, 450 miles north-east of Moscow, but RIA-Novosti quoted Manin as saying Kapashin had observed the extraction of toxic materials from eight weapons.”

Lev Fyodorov, the head of the Union for Chemical Safety in Moscow, said that the perception of what occurred a week ago all comes down to definitions.

“I think it’s an accident. They don’t think so,” he said.

The Maradykovsky reprocessing plant, which holds 6,900 tons of nerve agents stored in aerial bombs and missile warheads or more than 17% of Russia’s chemical weapons stockpile – opened to great fanfare in September.

The destruction facility, on the site of one of Russia’s seven former chemical weapons production plants, is a focal point of the push to meet an April 2007 target set by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons for Russia to destroy 20 percent of its stockpile.

To date, Russia has eliminated just 3%, as opposed to 39% destroyed by the United States, home to the second-largest stockpile.

The alleged accident “is a sign that the method they chose is convenient only for making a quick accounting” before other signatories to the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention,” Fyodorov said.

The bombs stored at Maradykovsky hold VX, soman and sarin, as well as a less deadly mixture of lewisite and mustard gas. Technicians are to open each bomb, drain out some agent if necessary, insert a neutralising reagent, close up the bomb and let it sit for 80-110 days to let the chemical processes take place, chemical weapons destruction program official Gennady Bezrukov, said at the plant opening in September. When it is running at full strength, the plant will be able to neutralise 96 weapons a day, he said.

Fyodorov said officials had chosen an unreliable technique for reprocessing the chemical weapons, since it involves filling the bombs and warheads with water to start the reprocessing but that does not leave adequate room for the liquids inside to expand if the temperature rises.

“When you have 22,000 weapons filled with water lying around, there is the probability that one or the other will explode, and it’s a high probability,” he said.

But he said that the chances of environmental damage from the alleged accident were slim, since it occurred inside the reprocessing facility.

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