1 2 Prof. Dr. Vladimir Mikhailovitsh Kolodkin, Prof. Dr.-Ing. Wolfgang
Ruck 1 Institute of Natural and Technogenic Disasters, Udmurt State
University, Izhevsk (Russia), 2 Institute of Ecology and Environmental
Chemistry, University Lüneburg (Germany) During the Cold War a whole
arsenal of deadly chemical weapons was allowed to build up on both sides
of the ideological divide. Happily, today the problems are reversed.
Expertise is now required in the field of safe and environment-friendly
disposal of chemical weapons and cleaning up of contaminated sites all
around the world, but not least in the ex-Soviet-led countries. The
participants and speakers to the NATO-Russia advanced research workshop
on the "Ecological Risks Associated with the Destruction of nd th
Chemical Weapons", hosted by the University of Lüneburg on 22 - 26
October, 2003, therefore, came from many different parts of the world.
Of the eight countries represented at the workshop, two were ex-Eastern-
Block, and six were Western countries. Yet the West was by no means
overrepresented. On the contrary, the Russian expert-speaker contingent,
with 33 participants, did justice to the size of their country - and to
their chemical-weapons problem - and provided the majority of active
participants. In all, there were 57 participants, of which 11 dispatched
from the TACIS project "The development of the chemical weapons"
facility at the detached plant No 4 of OAO Khimprom, Novocheboksarsk.