Lugar backs funds to help Russia destroy old arms

[QuietStorm]

Lugar: US Pledges $40M to Kazakhstan

(Almaty, Kazakhstan - AP) -- Indiana Senator Richard Lugar says the United States will give Kazakhstan $40 million in the next two years to fight and prevent dangerous infectious diseases.

Lugar is on a visit to the central asian nation. The money will come under a program Lugar helped design to help former Soviet countries destroy and safeguard weapons of mass destruction. The money will be used to prevent outbreaks of plague, anthrax and other highly infectious diseases and to upgrade anti-epidemiological laboratories.

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http://www.wishtv.com/Global/story.asp?S=1406379&nav=0Ra7HWHd

Lugar backs funds to help Russia destroy old arms
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David Holley
Los Angeles Times
Aug. 16, 2003 12:00 AM

MOSCOW - Despite shortcomings in Russian cooperation on arms control, U.S. funding for the destruction of Soviet-era weaponry should proceed unimpeded, the chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee said Friday.

"Our objective, and the Russian objective at the highest level, is to destroy weapons of mass destruction," Sen. Dick Lugar, R-Ind., said in Moscow. "It is not useful to set up conditions that there must be 100 percent compliance before we do anything."

Out of 44,000 tons of chemical weapons that Moscow has acknowledged producing in the Soviet era, 400 tons have been destroyed, Lugar said.

And despite improved security at Russian weapons depots, the risk of such weapons falling into terrorist hands remains a threat, he said.

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http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0816russia16.html