As early as February 2003, according to British prime minister Tony Blair, UN inspectors were out in the Iraqi desert not to find weapons of mass destruction (WMD), but to be shown their location and oversee their demolition. Saddam Hussein agreed to have his Al-Samoud-2 rockets destroyed. Whether Hans Blixs team needed more time to complete this task, however, seems not to have concerned the US: Husseins time was up. To many cynical observers of the gathering Iraq crisis, UN weapons inspections were just another charade played out as a prelude to a war planned long ago.
Saddam Hussein, of course, left it far too late to co-operate proactively with the UN weapons inspectors. Their departure was indeed a failure, not so much of the inspection process (it remains to be seen whether UNMOVICs failure to find WMDs is confirmed by their subsequent discovery or deployment in this war) but of the politics.
Ironically, this has drastic consequences for limiting WMD proliferation in the future. For the foreseeable future, the type of pre-emptive war now entered into by the US and the UK deprives all forms of global arms control of credibility. US reluctance to look for allies in the region, together with the split with old Europe in the UN has cracked the foundations of international cooperation on which effective non-proliferation is built. Verification protocols for weapons proliferation simply cannot work in a climate of confrontation.
There was once a time of high hopes; when multi-lateral negotiations on disarmament and non-proliferation treaties on biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons as well as ballistic missiles, gave weapons inspections a much more dignified and central role in all our futures. As collaborative achievements are reversed (Bob Rigg) and voices begin to call for the legalizing of nuclear weapons (Achilles Skordas), it is time to look back at the role proliferation controls and verification protocols once played.
Deterrence, disarmament and non-proliferation
Once the Cold War nuclear confrontation between the USA and the Soviet Union was over, three major international treaties offered the promise of an end to nuclear arms proliferation and even their eventual abolition. Two bilateral Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties (START) of 1992-93 were followed by the extension of the multi-lateral Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1995 and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) in 1996 (the latter still has to enter into force). Almost overnight, nuclear weapons lost their looming importance in the public eye. Consequently, a public debate on the role of nuclear weapons in foreign and security policy simply failed to occur.
The NPT entered into force in 1970, and remains the cornerstone of global control over the proliferation of nuclear weapons. All but three member countries of the United Nations have now signed it (Israel, India and Pakistan). But many are uncomfortable with the treatys two class character, allowing some countries to keep their nuclear weapons while forbidding others to develop them. Perhaps we were lulled into a false sense of security when the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) was extended in 1995.
Boutros Boutros-Ghali, then UN-General Secretary, spoke of his hopes for a more just and sensible way to control nuclear weapons, not only with regard to the actual warheads but also to their delivery systems, and dual-use technology. To be fully effective such controls, he said, would have to be balanced and fair; should not hinder the peaceful use of science and technology; and should not split the world into haves and have-nots.
The dream of most of the parties concerned (the have-nots) joined by the non-governmental organisations (of the haves) was a world without nuclear weapons. They felt that the NPT should open a window for further negotiations towards a Nuclear Weapons Convention (NWC) which would follow a similar pattern to the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BWC) and Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), banning the entire category of weapons of mass destruction while also providing for the destruction of existing stocks.
First efforts at pest control
You could argue that the use of biological weapons goes back to as early as 1346, when plague-infested bodies were used for ammunition against a besieged city. But in 1899 some European states signed an agreement (The Hague Declaration) that banned the use of weapons using asphyxiating or deleterious gases. Nevertheless, chlorine gas was employed for the first time on the German-French frontline just sixteen years later, on 22 April 1915.
The horrors of the new chemical weapons stuck in the minds of all who lived through the Great War. Politicians tried in numerous negotiations to eliminate the danger of these weapons. The most successful was the Geneva Protocol of 1925 that banned the use of chemical and biological agents in warfare. But it did not forbid their production, as many of the agents used in chemical weapons were also used in pest control and for other peaceful purposes. Only when chemical weapons were dealt with separately from biological ones, was further progress made. The 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BWC) entered into force on 26 March 1975 and banned the development, production and storage of biological weapons.
It took a further twenty years for a similar convention on chemical weapons to be signed. 159 states signed the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) in Paris in 1993 which entered into force on 29 April 1997. It was hard to persuade signatories eager to protect the civilian use of chemical agencies. But a comprehensive and intrusive verification mechanism, the most sophisticated of its type, was established to ensure full treaty compliance.
Despite these safeguards, the danger of WMD proliferation has acquired a new dimension in recent years. During the Cold War it was nuclear proliferation which was of most concern: but it is now obvious that chemical and biological weapons have indeed become the poor mans nuclear bomb; a cheap and portable option for those, like terrorists or rogue states, without access to expensive nuclear technology. This danger was demonstrated by the incidents in the Tokyo subway in March 1995 in which the Aum Shinrikyo sect released the nerve gas, sarin. Obviously, effective counter measures to this kind of attack are needed. And while the CWC established the verification mechanisms for chemical weapons, the 1972 BWC entirely lacked these.
The problem of verification
Subject to the agreement of the majority of signatories, each of these conventions anticipated regular review conferences every five years, to evaluate the treaties ongoing effectiveness. NPT review conferences have been held since 1975, those for the BWC since 1981, while the first CWC review conference has been scheduled for 2003. Initially, verification of the biological weapons controls was based on mutual trust. But the attempt to negotiate a verification regime for the treaty collapsed in 2001 when the United States, fearful of the implications of on-site inspection for its biotechnology industry and biodefence programmes, opposed the adoption of the draft protocol and further negotiations.
Controlling the spread of weapons of mass destruction is clearly dependent on designing and enforcing effective verification procedures for each of these treaties. If disarmament is to be taken seriously, effective monitoring and verification is essential. This is as true for verification of post Cold War arms reductions as for ceasefire agreements.
To date, verification has been undertaken by inspection teams authorized by convention or ceasefire signatories or by the United Nations. The most high profile example of this work is the 1991-1998 period of UNSCOM weapon inspections in Iraq and that of its successor organization, UNMOVIC, from 27 November 2002 to 18 March 2003.
But these are not the only ones. When the Non-Proliferation Treaty was initially signed in 1970, possibilities of international verification were very restricted indeed. More recent weapons control treaties, however, have made verification more comprehensive. The CWC of 1993, for example, has a very sophisticated verification system with routine inspections as well as short notice inspections at undeclared sites.
For historic reasons, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspections have traditionally concentrated on the amount of material available to build nuclear weapons rather than an evaluation of the danger of proliferation from each country. This system used to mean that over the years more than half of the IAEAs annual budget for routine inspections was spent in Germany, Japan and Canada, while countries in the Middle East or South Asia, for example, were less intensively inspected. However, this is changing. Since Iraq was found in violation of its NPT obligations, a strengthened system of safeguards has been progressively instituted, incorporating a new Additional Protocol to safeguard agreements. This will intensify verification. A programme of integrated safeguards will attempt to rationalise them and put resources into the appropriate activities.
But how do you decide which countries pose the greater risk for proliferation?
Before we rush too quickly to accuse so-called rogue states we need to consider that numerous states have been involved in trading material as well as know-how with countries like Iraq, enabling Saddam Hussein to develop his nuclear, chemical and biological capabilities. The main exporters were not North Korea, Iran, Syria, Libya or Cuba but Germany, France, Russia, the UK and the US, Spain, South Africa, Brazil and China. As there was no monitoring of this trade, Iraqs WMD programmes went unnoticed by the international community. True, supplier cartels like the Nuclear Suppliers Group have long attempted to restrict the export of materials and technology to potential proliferators. But companies often circumvent these attempts. Equipment is often genuinely dual use.
However, if the IAEA and the conventions, or any other organization on their behalf, were to register the trade in arms and weapon-related materials (UNMOVIC could surely supply a list of what should be categorized as such), similar programmes elsewhere in the world could be detected much earlier.
A case for two-dimensional weapons inspection
It is often argued that the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction is essentially a political problem. It is true that the struggle for power often drives proliferation, and that there is no reliable technical solution which ensures the total detection of weapon usable materials. It is also true that only measures in the political arena can end proliferation. But the scientific-technological nature of the root of the problem should not be overlooked. Only too often, scientific-technological developments influence the possibilities of political power, mostly irreversibly. In the long term, deciding what to do about WMD proliferation will also necessitate decisions about the path of scientific-technological advance.
Proliferation has two dimensions: the horizontal one is the proliferation of weapons across the world; while vertical proliferation describes the progressive development of WMDs. Only through a two-dimensional approach can true non-proliferation be achieved. There is no end to horizontal proliferation without a stop to the vertical one. Some of the developing countries have repeatedly asked for an end to vertical proliferation in the nuclear weapon states in order to encourage horizontal non-proliferation. The argument from the nuclear powers, of course, is that vertical proliferation is needed to counter the effects of unwanted horizontal proliferation. Once this is effectively stopped, vertical proliferation would follow, they suggest.
But it is not only in the political field where horizontal and vertical proliferations form an interdependent spiral. Hitherto, advanced technological developments have been quickly translated into industrial use in the countries of the western hemisphere, without considering their military relevance. Other countries may follow on anything between ten to twenty years later. Only then is the danger of proliferation put on the agenda. Brazil, for example, managed to develop the technology of ultracentrifuges for enriching uranium independently. Iraq was similarly successful with both deliberate and inadvertent help from western companies. Without an effective control mechanism, this technology can also be utilized for the production of nuclear weapons. Verification of vertical proliferation has to start in the originating countries to prevent the transfer of technology that offers a second use in WMD development.
The dangers of horizontal proliferation are obvious these days. There are at least two dozen countries that have access to one of the technologies for enriching uranium, but apart from the nuclear weapon states all but three are under safeguards and two are violating them (Iraq and North Korea). But technical limitation will not safeguard us against the proliferation of biological and chemical weapons. Any country with a chemical or biotech industry can develop these. Here, the issue of which of the countries have pledged no-use and how this commitment is verified is of much greater concern.
The dangers of vertical proliferation are equally stark. Nuclear disarmament has progressed slowly. The reduction to less than 6,000 nuclear warheads in the US and the states of the former Soviet Union respectively, as prescribed by the START treaties, has been verified bi-laterally. Nonetheless, it still allows both the US and Russia an overkill capacity many times over. Meanwhile, the concept of nuclear deterrence is not yet dead. Research and development programmes for nuclear technologies progress unsupervised in the US, France, UK, Israel, India, Pakistan as well as China: either acknowledged nuclear weapon states or those not party to the NPT.
When it comes to the exporting countries for WMD usable technology, control mechanisms, as for the importing countries, are ineffective. Export restrictions and effective monitoring of compliance, demanded again and again by NGOs, have been reported in the media, most noticeably after the first Gulf war in 1991 when western governments had to face the fact that the main export culprits were based in their countries. Methods to contain vertical proliferation simply lag far behind what is needed.
Deterrence and cooperation after the Iraq war
While verification bodies such as the IAEA have a pretty good idea of who holds which kind of nuclear weapons, a register for the holdings of plutonium and highly enriched uranium is badly needed. There seems to be a consensus that new safeguards for the NPT are necessary, but that they will not find majority support amongst signatories. Safeguards are perceived by the have-nots in particular as an attempt to prevent them from acquiring a security based on deterrence that is second nature to the haves.
The CWC has the most advanced verification protocol to date, but needs to change its focus from verification of destruction to verification of industrial facilities worldwide, including the registration of chemical agents. The BWC still has to adopt a verification protocol. But a draft which provided for the registry of high containment laboratories rather than agents might be a step in the right direction for dealing with the challenge of dual-use.
Ideally, export control mechanisms for all WMD-relevant technologies could be cross-checked by accounting for the imports of receiving countries. But this needs the political will of all: any agreement has to be based on consensus. While most developed countries have voluntary regimes (which the EU is making efforts to extend to eastern European countries), most of the developing world, India, Pakistan, and especially China, remain opposed. Dual-use goods are therefore excluded from these regimes to date. There is a further dilemma inherent in export controls; the ideology of the free market, the dominant model in western and western-dominated markets, is antithetical to such controls.
The WMD proliferation problem will not be solved by short-term solutions. What is obvious is the need for a re-orientation of the scientific and technological determinants of our industrialized global culture. The civil-military ambivalence of many advanced research and development programmes needs to be addressed, and proposals for radically new research policies outlined which will safeguard against the commercial exploitation of weapon relevant technologies.
It seems this would only be workable if the current security paradigm of the western hemisphere was changed and deterrence replaced by cooperation. Only then is a long-term solution imaginable. Bearing in mind the political arena, with its many different players, their various ambitions, and the ongoing struggle for western domination can this be done? What do you think?