test_pdf.pdf

ASSESSING
THE RECORD
OF ARMS
CONTROL
capable of producing biological and chemical weapons, but they’ve decided not to do so. Most of the countries are
abiding by their obligations. The treaties have provided these countries, the vast majority of abiding parties, with a
legally binding way of reassuring others that biological and chemical weapons are not going to be a part of their
military arsenals.
Second, there’s the issue of export controls. Both treaties include legally binding obligations not to assist
others in acquiring the weapons concerned. I think as a consequence, the treaties have helped legitimize the various
export control efforts with respect to chemical and biological materials, equipment, and technology that have
emerged over the last 20 years, both national export controls but also efforts like the Australia Group and the more
recent Proliferation Security Initiative. In the case of the CWC in particular, there are also restrictions on the transfer
of controlled chemicals to non-parties, and this too reinforces nonproliferation export controls.
Finally, there’s the issue of enforcement. I believe that the codification of the norm against possession embodied
in these treaties provides us with a much stronger political as well as legal basis for acting against those
countries that seek to acquire biological or chemical weapons. Of course, that enforcement is only going to be as
good as the states-parties decide it will be.
Let me just conclude with a few quick observations.
Any assessment of the impact of the Geneva Protocol, the Biological Weapons Convention, and the Chemical
Weapons Convention has to take account of the different times in which these particular treaties were concluded as
well as the different nature of their provisions. In many ways the Geneva Protocol was a further step in the codification
of the laws of war we saw reflected in the Hague Gas Declaration and the Hague Convention of 1907.
The BWC was one of the first Cold War arms control treaties. Its limitations and weaknesses—the absence of
a prohibition on research, the reliance on national technical means for verification—were very much a reflection of
what the superpowers would accept in arms control. And the CWC was concluded at the very end of the Cold War
when attitudes toward verification were fundamentally different.
That said, any assessment of the impact of these treaties has to focus not only on their provisions but also on
how those provisions have been implemented by the international community. I think there’s little doubt that these
treaties have helped prevent the use of chemical and biological weapons, that they’ve helped delegitimize the
possession of these weapons, and indeed stemmed proliferation. Where there have been failures, and in particular,
where illicit chemical and biological weapons programs have been maintained, those failures have not been the
result of any treaty but rather of conscious decisions by individual governments. These treaties all have a critical
role to play in helping bolster the norm against chemical and biological warfare, both against use and possession,
but ultimately their success will depend on the actions of national governments.
MR. STEINBRUNER: Okay, thank you. Fortunately we have time for questions and comment. We have an
unusually knowledgeable audience and an interested one too. And let me ask those who do wish to ask questions
or make comment to line up behind one or the other of these microphones. As you’re moving yourself to do that I’m
going to allow myself just one brief comment about all the presentations.
They were describing a history of the business whereby I think it’s fair to say the main concern has been to
impose limitation or prohibition on the capacity for destruction. And the context for that has largely been historically
a concern for large-scale forms of warfare. Obviously, and for obvious reasons, recently we’ve become more
concerned about smaller-scale events. I would argue that as you think about a world in which we do become
concerned about smaller-scale events, one of the big things that happens is we become more interested in imposing
restrictions on behavior and documenting compliance with that rather than on capacity simply because there is a
lot of capacity for destruction out there. So the future of [arms control] might well feature, more than it has in the
past, the organized exchange of information to document compliance with standards of behavior. In fact, if you look
into the history you can see a lot of that has been happening under these previous agreements.
With that said, we now have people ready to make comments.
Please, Jonathan. Please identify yourself too.
Q: Jonathan Tucker, the Monterey Institute. I have a question for Elisa Harris. You did an excellent job of
looking back at what the treaties have accomplished and I wondered if you could look forward. You said, I think,
with reason that the current new process, the intercessional process, has very low expectations, but what are the
prospects for strengthening the BWC, particularly if there is a Democratic administration in 2005. Would it be
possible to revive the BWC protocol, or is that really a dead letter and we have to think about alternative approaches
to strengthening the convention to deal with the problem of compliance? Thank you.
MS. HARRIS: I don’t know whether the sort of comprehensive approach reflected in the BWC protocol, involv-
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