Nations to Consider Future of Chemical Weapons Pact

By Chris Schneidmiller
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — The upcoming review conference for the Chemical Weapons Convention is likely to feature some diplomatic dust-ups, but they should not overwhelm efforts to set the course of the international treaty for coming years, insiders and analysts said (see GSN, April 27, 2007).

Treaty members are required to meet every five years to consider the operations of the pact over the preceding half-decade and to prepare for developing challenges.  The second review conference begins Monday and continues through April 18 in The Hague.

The event provides member nations with a dual opportunity to promote chemical weapon nonproliferation and to sound off on perceived noncompliance by other states.  Particularly vulnerable to criticism could be the former Cold War rivals that possess the world’s largest stockpiles of banned chemical materials.

“I think both the United States and Russia are going to get whacked around a little bit,” said Paul Walker, head of the Legacy Program at the environmental organization Global Green USA.

Washington has acknowledged that it could miss by more than a decade the April 2012 deadline to eliminate nearly 28,000 metric tons of chemical warfare agents, while there is significant skepticism about Moscow’s claims that its 40,000-metric-ton arsenal will be gone by then (see GSN, March 11 and Jan. 11).

“I don’t think we’ll get off easy, nor should we,” said one official in Washington.  He could not say whether the U.S. delegation would, as it did at the 2003 session, name Iran and other nations it believes to be operating or seeking chemical weapons programs (see GSN, April 28, 2003).

Following what could be several days of public statements from member nations, participants are set to meet in closed sessions to prepare a report that would be issued at the end of the conference.

Among the matters expected to be considered are destruction of chemical weapons by those nations still holding them, bringing additional nations into the convention, promoting implementation of national measures required by the pact, chemical terrorism, and monitoring of chemical industry facilities by the convention’s verification body.

If the 2003 report is any indication, the final conference document would identify areas of concern and progress relative to treaty implementation and include calls for action on certain matters by the 41-nation Executive Council to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and the agency’s Technical Secretariat.

Experts said they did not anticipate major developments or initiatives leading from the conference.  They said, though, that despite the potential for conflict between antagonists, the event is likely to end with consensus on a report that furthers the goals of the convention.

“I trust that will be the case,” OPCW Director General Rogelio Pfirter told Global Security Newswire.  “Ultimately it will depend on member states and I am not privy to what their own individual goals are.  But I imagine that since everybody has everything to win from the benefits of the success [of the meeting] and no one has anything to benefit from should this not go in the right direction, I would imagine we would have a good” conference.

“I don’t see at this point any obstacles that can’t be overcome,” the U.S. official said.

The Chemical Weapons Convention entered into force in 1997 and now has 183 member nations.  It prohibits its members from developing, producing, stockpiling, transferring or using materials such as mustard blister agent and the nerve agents VX and sarin.  Weapons carrying banned substances must be destroyed, ensuring they are put permanently out of reach of nations and terrorists.

Hanging over any treaty meeting is the continued existence of declared chemical stockpiles in India, Libya, Russia, South Korea and the United States, along with Japanese weapons abandoned in China (see GSN, April 1).  More than 44,000 metric tons of stockpiled weapons agents remain to be destroyed, following elimination of more than 27,000 tons by the possessor states and Albania, which last year became the first country to dispose of its full stockpile under treaty terms (see GSN, July 12, 2007).

All known chemical weapons holders have received destruction schedule extensions beyond the original April 2007 end point set by the treaty, with the deadlines for Russia and the United States being pushed as far back as allowed to 2012 (see GSN, Dec. 11, 2006).

The next review conference is scheduled for 2013, one year past the cutoff date, but there appears to be little chance at this meeting of any serious talk over how to handle the expected deadline violations of Moscow and Washington.

“There will be some strong words, that this is a solemn obligation, but nothing more specific,” one expert in the field, who asked to remain anonymous, said by e-mail.

Iran might not agree.  An Iranian official in February told Arms Control Today that his government wants treaty parties at the review conference to acknowledge that missing the 2012 deadline would be a “clear case of serious noncompliance” requiring action under the treaty.

Pfirter said it is too early to emphasize violations of the destruction deadlines, particularly given Russian and U.S. progress in eliminating their stockpiles.  The United States has destroyed more than 50 percent of its chemical weapons; Russia has eliminated around 25 percent, though there is debate on the latter figure as Moscow has not eliminated caustic waste produced through the chemical neutralization process.

“I believe that we should give every credit to the strong political commitment shown by all possessor states to the fulfillment of the obligations to the convention,” Pfirter said.  “Certainly the main two possessor states have clearly stated their commitment to the convention.  At the same time we should not ignore the practical difficulties that lie ahead for them.”

Treaty states should monitor the situation in coming years and could conduct a special meeting sometime before the final deadlines pass, Pfirter said.

Jonathan Tucker, a chemical weapons expert at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, said the two nations might ultimately be given a pass under a precedent set for Albania’s destruction program.  Due to unforeseen technical problems at its incinerator, the European nation could not complete weapons disposal by the April 2007 deadline.  The OPCW Executive Council, rather than finding Tirana in noncompliance with its obligations, used a provision from Article 8 of the treaty to call on the nation to “take measures to redress the situation within a specified time.”  Albania eliminated its 16-ton mustard stockpile in July 2007.

The same treaty provision could be used four years from now if Russia and the United States can prove they are closing in on full stockpile destruction and intend to finish the project in a quick, safe and environmentally responsible manner, Tucker said.

The two nations, though, might have to offers additional concessions such as increased inspections of stockpile sites by representatives from other treaty nations, Walker said.

As weapons stocks continue to shrink, OPCW verification duties would lean increasingly toward ensuring that chemical industry facilities are not used to produce banned materials.  Agency inspectors have inspected more than 1,300 plants to date.

The major question today surrounds the sites known as “other chemical production facilities” which do not produce materials listed under three chemical categories in the treaty but could be altered for that purpose.  Only 519 of the 4,680 facilities in this category declared by 79 nations have been inspected, and up to 15 percent of the total number use manufacturing technology that would allow them to quickly convert for production of chemical warfare agents, Tucker said.

Prior to this year, the algorithm used to select other chemical production facilities gave all treaty states an equal chance of having sites checked even though some had far more declared facilities than others, Pfirter said.  A revised selection system instituted in January at the agency more proportionately distributes inspections among member states.

However, other chemical production facilities covered by the treaty now are only required to declare their name, location and end product.  The chemical processes used at each site — and the rapidity with which they could be converted to weapons purposes — remains privileged information.

“The problem now is that a lot of OCPF inspections are wasted because the inspectors go to a plant and discover that it’s producing methanol or some other innocuous chemical and lacks the flexible production capacity that poses a potential risk to the treaty,” Tucker said.

It would be up to treaty members to require these facilities to provide additional information that could help identify sites of greatest concern and to distribute the limited number of inspections most effectively, he said.  While the United States and other Western nations have backed that move, they could face opposition at this month’s meeting from developing nations where new chemical plants today are more often being built.  “Even though developing countries have a growing number of OCPFs, they don’t want to bear their fair share of the inspection burden,” Tucker said.

Some of these nations do not have adequate measures in place to police chemical industries and ensure they do not violate the terms of the convention, according to a commentary published by the Royal United Services Institute for Defense and Security Studies.

Eric Javits, U.S. ambassador to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, last month said that the review conference should call for a study that could lead to exempting some classes of facilities in the category from inspections because they pose no threat to the treaty.  That would allow for more attention to those plants that are relevant to the pact, he said.

Development of new and increasingly sophisticated technology in the chemical and biological sectors poses additional challenges to the convention that could be addressed at this meeting, experts said.

These advancements can provide benefits in protection against chemical weapons and in other sectors such as public health and food production, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry said in a report this year.  However, there are also dangers.

Among them:

—The convergence of biological and chemical sciences, which makes it increasingly possible to use living microorganisms and plants to produce drugs or other nonliving molecules.  While some materials are covered by both the biological and chemical weapons treaties, only the latter has a verification capability to detect prohibited development and production capabilities.

—Smaller, continuous-flow chemical reactors are likely to be increasingly used at industrial levels, Tucker said.  These “microreactors” could give aspiring proliferators a capability to quickly produce chemical warfare agents while presenting a smaller detection footprint than normally found in such manufacturing programs.

—Advances in nanotechnology and drug delivery through aerosols that “may be exploited for more effective and targeted delivery methods for toxic chemicals,” according to the IUPAC report.

“Everyone understands, I think, that verification of the CWC will have to keep up with rapid changes in science and technology, but thus far there has not been the political will to draw the necessary conclusions,” Tucker said.  “Countries have generally tried to minimize the burdens associated with implementation rather than to increase them.  That makes me somewhat concerned … about the future viability of the CWC and its ability to keep up with rapid technological change.”

The time for studying these issues is now, as some of the emerging verification challenges already exist and others are only a few years away, he said.  The next step would be to develop practical proposals to strengthen the verification regime to address developing risks.  Finally, states parties to the treaty would have to adopt the proposals.

Another expert argued that, in addressing the technology issues, delegates now are not likely to go far beyond offering strong support for the treaty’s general purpose criterion.  The rule states that the wide assortment of toxic materials not listed in the treaty’s three schedules of chemicals still fall under the prohibitions against development, production, stockpiling, transfer or use.

“I don’t think they will want to get into exactly how new science and technology in detail should be treated, especially when it comes to new science and technology creating the prospects for new agents and that kind of thing.  But they will strongly reassert that the treaty does ban such new agents,” said Michael Moodie, a former U.S. official who helped negotiate the convention.

One technology issue not expected to gain much traction at the conference is concern over violations of the convention through potential development and use of new nonlethal incapacitants (see GSN, June 11, 2007). 

The Chemical Weapons Convention allows only for law-enforcement uses of tear gas and other riot control agents which “produce rapidly in humans sensory irritation or disabling physical effects which disappear within a short time following termination of exposure.”  It expressly bans using such materials in warfare, but critics are concerned by what they believe is increasing interest by some nations in developing incapacitants and their potential military applications.

More technical study is needed on the issue, Pfirter said.  Without that information, discussions of nonlethal agents relative to the treaty would be political rather than scientific, he said.

“I certainly don’t see that as taking center stage in the final document,” Pfirter said.  “I don’t detect in member states any particular urgency at this juncture.  Maybe in the future.”

With two years left in his second and presumably last term as OPCW chief, Pfirter is more focused on two programs initiated at the last review conference — bringing additional nations into the convention and ensuring they meet their obligations once inside.

Only 12 U.N. nations have not joined the pact, but more than half of the treaty parties have yet to enact comprehensive legislation that make the convention’s rules the law of the land.

Particularly troublesome in the membership drive is the Middle East, where Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Lebanon and Syria remain beyond the bounds of the convention.  While Pfirter argues that joining the treaty could be a component of the peace process in the region, to his frustration it is more widely felt that first there must be some sort of resolution to the issues of peace and Israel’s widely assumed possession of nuclear weapons (see GSN, Dec. 8, 2006).

“It is not an issue that can be resolved solely on its own merits in isolation, and I think people recognize that,” Moodie said. 

Pfirter said the parliaments of Iraq and Lebanon have approved legislation on treaty membership and the troubled countries should soon be brought into the fold.  He said “good dialogue” is continuing with Angola, the Bahamas and Guinea Bissau.

There are no major changes on the horizon for the work plans on membership and national implementation, Pfirter and others said.

The use of chlorine by insurgents in Iraq illustrates the threat of chemical terrorism, Pfirter said yesterday during an appearance on Capitol Hill (see GSN, July 2, 2007).

While the convention was not created as an antiterrorism tool, the issue is likely to be raised at the review conference, he and other officials said. 

The discussion could focus on states’ obligations under Article 10 of the treaty to provide assistance and protection to other member nations against chemical weapons, in the form of detection systems, protective and decontamination gear, countermeasures and other means.  “Many states parties have yet to pledge the financial or other assistance they would provide through the OPCW to states party attacked with chemical weapons, as required” under the article, according to the RUSI commentary.

“This is an issue that I think is inescapable and I trust that it will be addressed by the review conference,” Pfirter told GSN.

Pfirter said he hoped that member states would also affirm that fulfilling the terms of the convention — for example, by enacting the required laws against chemical weapons activities — serves to reduce the potential for acts of terrorism involving banned materials.

In his speech last month to the OPCW Executive Council, Javits indicated that Washington might be looking for a more assertive approach.

“It is time to make better, more concerted use of the tools of the convention, and of the OPCW as a forum, to address the threat of terrorist use of toxic chemicals,” he said.

Back to top
About Newswire  |  Contact National Journal  |  Re-Use Guidelines © Copyright 2008 by National Journal Group, Inc. The material in this section is produced independently for NTI by National Journal Group, Inc. Any reproduction or retransmission, in whole or in part, is a violation of federal law and is strictly prohibited without the consent of the National Journal Group, Inc. All rights reserved.