Pace Urges Disclosing Info on Chemical Arms Buried in Baltic
Posted on: Thursday, 29 May 2008, 21:00 CDT
MOSCOW/STOCKHOLM. May 29 (Interfax) - The Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly (PACE) appealed to the United States, the United Kingdom and NATO on Thursday to immediately declassify information on chemical weapons which were apparently buried in the Baltic Sea after World War II.
The appeal followed a report to a meeting of the PACE Standing Committee in Stockholm on Thursday, on chemical munitions that belonged to Nazi Germany but were taken over by the United States, United Kingdom and Soviet Union after the war and were dumped in the Baltic in the late 1940's, the chief Russian delegate to PACE, Konstantin Kosachyov, told Interfax by telephone from the Swedish capital.
The report is a response to an initiative put forward three years ago and the reason for the document is the planned Nord Stream pipeline, which will carry natural gas from Russia to Germany.
"The report that has been presented today is absolutely balanced, and it contains an appeal to the participant countries to ensure a careful environmental analysis of all aspects of the pipeline, taking account of the well-known factor of chemical weapons on the Baltic Sea floor," Kosachyov said.
It is an important part of the report that it contains "an appeal on the part of the Assembly to the U.S. and British governments and to NATO to immediately declassify all information on the burial sites of chemical munitions in the Baltic Sea," he said.
Such information was classified for 50 years in 1947 by decision of the 1945 Potsdam Conference, but, when that period ended, the United States and United Kingdom, unlike Russia as legal successor to the Soviet Union, decided to keep this information secret until 2017.
Citing the report, Kosachyov said that, by decision of the Potsdam Conference, the United States took hold of 200,000 tonnes of chemical munitions, the United Kingdom of 65,000 and the Soviet Union of 35,000 tonnes.
All the weapons were initially planned to buried in one of the deeper areas of the Atlantic but, to cut expenditures, some of them ended up being dumped in the Baltic, Kosachyov said.
(c) 2008 Daily News Bulletin; Moscow - English. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.
Source: Daily News Bulletin; Moscow - English
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