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The chances of an ecological disaster affecting the Pacific Rim grow every year that Russia fails to dismantle its nuclear submarine fleet, a former representative to President Boris Yeltsin in Primorye said.

Valery Butov, who is now the president of the Green Cross, was trained as a military lawyer and spent three decades working with the Soviet Union’s nuclear submarine program, serving as presidential representative 1991-94.

In a recent interview, he said that due to a lack of funding and continual neglect, the condition of the 60 retired nuclear-powered subs floating in harbors around the Russian Far East is deteriorating rapidly.

The ships must remain afloat all the time, which means the reactors must constantly operate. But the old hulls could spring a leak, causing the ship to sink, thereby setting off the reactor inside each sub.

If the reactor is activated, said Butov, there may not be an explosion, but the sub’s damaged body could release atomic materials into the water.

A ship sank just this March off Kamchatka. Crews managed to lift the sub before much ecological damage occurred, but some radioactive material leaked into the water.

An explosion in Bolshoi Kamen in 1985 resulted in the deaths of 11 sailors and officers. At that time, a sailor was using a crane to lift the ship out of the water for repairs and then hesitated. Due to a design fault, when the ship stopped moving it set off a chain reaction in the sub’s inner core and "sent everything flying everywhere," said Butov. Objects flew more than 200 meters from the site, he said.

That incident was an exception to the mainly uneventful history of the Pacific Fleet’s sub program. Although accidents did occur on a regular basis, they were no more frequent than on the U.S. program, Butov said.

Even if there is little chance of another Bolshoi Kamen-scale catastrophe, the overall infrastructure is in a precarious position now, Butov said. Besides the rusting ships themselves, there are problems now with the storage of their waste.

For example, water that has been used to cool the cores of the reactors is stored at the Zvezda factory in Bolshoi Kamen. Not only is the radiated water near the ocean, but it’s piped above ground to underground concrete tanks. Neither the pipes nor the concrete is earthquake-proof, Butov said, and the tanks are already old.

"They were built to be temporary, but they’ve been used for 40 years," he said. The tanks can only be used safely for 50-80 years. And it’s time to find another place to store the water, Butov said. He added that scientists have found radiation in the bay water next to the hills housing the tanks, proving that the concrete has already begun to crack.

Butov is president of the Far Eastern chapter of the Green Cross and the Morskoy Ecological Fund, which are both looking for funding for the sub dismantling program. In 1994, the United States donated $25 million in equipment to the Zvezda submarine factory in Bolshoi Kamen.

That was a good start, says Butov, but there are other problems now. The factory doesn’t have enough electricity to power the equipment, which slices the 47 centimeter-thick titanium hulls for recycling. And the specialists who know how to isolate the nuclear reactor and remove it during dismantling are all leaving the industry, fed up with late, insufficient salaries.

Waiting for the Russian government to deal with the situation is foolish, Butov said. Primorye has a bad relationship with Moscow, he said.

"It will all go sooner or later into the sea -- because Russia doesn’t care," Butov said.

Butov indicts not only Russia, but the international community, for the condition of the Pacific Fleet nuclear submarines.

"It’s not just our problem," he said. "It’s the fault of all nations who participated in the Cold War arms race. America let the nuclear genie out of the bottle in 1945, and we’re all paying for it."

To ensure a safer world for the next generation and to lay to rest the dirty past of nuclear warfare, Butov said, all nations should help dismantle Russia’s decaying submarine fleet.