But eliminating chemical weapon stockpiles is difficult in good times, arms control experts say, and given the actors involved — Syrian President Bashar Assad and Russian President Vladimir Putin — and the fact that Syria is in the middle of a civil war, it may be impossible.

The challenges to finding, securing and destroying Assad’s chemical weapons amid that brutal conflict could be overcome, but disarmament professionals find it hard to believe that Assad is sincere about surrendering his massive chemical arsenal just weeks after he allegedly attacked his own people — and one day after Syria first admitted it owns chemical weapons.

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“It’s a smoke screen,” said former U.S. ambassador to Bahrain Adam Ereli of the Russian-backed proposal for international monitors to remove Syria’s chemical weapons. “Nobody knows how many weapons they have, nobody knows where they are. It all depends on the Syrians providing full, accountable transparency.”

Former State Department official Robert Joseph, who helped negotiate Libya’s agreement to give up its nuclear and chemical weapons a decade ago, also said he believes the Syrian offer is a ruse.

“I don’t think for one moment that the Syrians will give up their chemical weapons stocks. They will say they will give it up and they will play the game to undercut any support for a military strike. But they will then start to put conditions on verification and on the foreign presence in Syria,” Joseph said. “Soon, they will start in with Israel; demanding that Israel’s nuclear weapons be put on the table. All of this will lead nowhere for the United States — exactly where Damascus and Moscow want it to go.”

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Many analysts warned that the logistics of locating, taking custody of and neutralizing Syria’s chemical weapons stores would be so complex that Assad would have a myriad of ways to stall.

“There’s a potential for foot-dragging,” said John McLaughlin, former deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency. “In that part of the world, you’re entering the bazaar. They’ve got centuries of negotiating skills.”

“I am unaware of anyone successfully gaining control of stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction and monitoring them and ultimately eliminating them in the middle of a war,” said Thomas Graham, a former Arms Control and Disarmament Agency official who helped negotiate the Chemical Weapons Convention. “It’s a difficult task even in peacetime. … I won’t say it’s impossible, but it would appear to be extremely difficult.”

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“I won’t say it should be brushed aside. It’s potentially a very positive development, but on its face it doesn’t look like something Assad would really do,” Graham added. He said Assad has “a track record of never living up to any promise he’s ever made,” including backing out of two U.N.-negotiated cease-fires.

Former weapons inspectors warned that the process could take a long time to complete — perhaps so long it could continue long after Obama leaves office.

“It can be done. You are going to break a lot of crockery in doing it,” former U.N. Iraq weapons inspector David Kay said Tuesday on CNN. “If you try to do it by the book, you won’t get it done in a decade. That’s too long. You need to take this opportunity to test and see if the Syrians and the Russians are real.”

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Kay also described a scope for such a dismantling operation that sounded unwieldy, particularly in the midst of a civil war. “To establish inventory and positive control, using all the technical devices, seals, automatic cameras and all that you would want to, you’re talking well over 1,000 people,” he added.

In Obama’s speech to the American people Tuesday night, he described as “encouraging” the Russian-led initiative to strike a deal to secure Syria’s chemical weapons. However, the president acknowledged the need for some way to make sure that Assad would live up to any such pact.

“It’s too early to tell whether this offer will succeed, and any agreement must verify that the Assad regime keeps its commitments,” Obama said.

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While some experts expressed concern that Syrian chemical weapons stockpiles could be scattered around the country, Secretary of State John Kerry said Tuesday that the U.S. believes Assad actually consolidated his holdings as his regime came under pressure from rebels.

“As the war has progressed and opposition has taken over one particular territory or another, we know [regime officials] have moved these munitions into their more safely controlled area. That’s a virtue of the way they’ve tried to manage their weapons program,” Kerry told the House Armed Services Committee.

Kerry said the U.S. believes Syria has about 1,000 metric tons of chemical agents, including components of the deadly nerve agent Sarin and an even more potent chemical known as VX. Answering questions from House members, he conceded the danger of trying to collect such weapons in an active war zone.

“That’s a huge issue,” Kerry said bluntly.

While Kerry acknowledged major obstacles even if the Syrians are being genuine, he said taking away all of Assad’s chemical weapons through some kind of international process would provide benefit a round of U.S. bombing could not.

”It is clearly preferable to sending a message … by use of force, which, in the end, wouldn’t in fact contain all of the weapons,” Kerry said in a Google hangout Tuesday. “So hopefully, we can make this work, and this is something we’ve been discussing for a little bit of time … but I don’t want to raise expectations because there are some big hurdles in terms of the verifiability and implementation that we have to cross.”

Some former diplomats said the obstacles were so great as to render the idea effectively impossible.

While some are comparing the Syrian case to Libya’s agreement to give up its chemical weapons in 2003, Joseph said the two are quite different. For one thing, Libya’s weapons were dated and not nearly as dangerous.

“Libya’s old mustard agent was more of a toxic hazard than a proliferation risk,” Joseph said. “Mustard gas is nothing like Sarin. Syria’s chemical weapons [are] much more modern and deadly — and there is a whole lot more of it.”

Joseph said the U.S. used bulldozers to quickly crush the empty delivery devices, or munitions, the Libyans had for their chemical weapons. But Libya asked to dismantle the mustard gas itself. That process was never completed and the whereabouts of the stocks are now largely unknown — but also of little concern.

The U.S. has been in the process of destroying its stocks of chemical weapons for more than a decade. The chemicals are generally destroyed by incineration in a furnace — a drawn-out process. In the Syrian case, it would be best to incinerate the weapons in Syria or a nearby country, since transporting the tanks or shells raises the possibility of leaks, experts said.

Despite experts’ profoundly grim assessments about the prospects for a workable deal to eliminate Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal, McLaughlin said it’s possible — though unlikely — that the logistics required to disarm Syria of chemical weapons could actually cause a lull in the conflict that might lead to a political solution to the brutal internal conflict.

“If you were optimistic, you could see it opening up a way to some sort of negotiated settlement,” he said. “If you actually went through all these steps … it might start to open a wedge so there could be some sort of serious discussion among the warring parties.”

Asked how likely that kind of a best-case outcome was, McLaughlin made clear it is remote. “Highly doubtful — maybe five percent,” he said.

Leigh Munsil contributed to this report.