CHAPTER 1: Introduction: Preventing the Re-emergence of Chemical Weapons

Since its entry into force in 1997, the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) and its associated implementing body, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW),¹  have become the most important mechanism for global action in combating the use of chemical weapons, whether employed against armed forces or civilian populations, under any circumstances.

On 10th December 2013, the OPCW received the Nobel Peace Prize for its ongoing activities overseeing the destruction of declared chemical weapons stockpiles in Syria, and for its continuing efforts supporting CWC implementation throughout the world. In his Nobel Lecture, the OPCW Director General, Ambassador Ahmet Üzümcü, described the incredible achievements and continuing ambition of the Chemical Weapons Convention and the attendant control regime: “The OPCW has been overseeing the elimination of an entire category of weapons of mass destruction. Our task is to consign chemical weapons to history, forever. A task we have been carrying out with quiet determination, and no small measure of success … we are hastening the vision of a world free of chemical weapons to reality.”² 

To date, 192 States, covering 98% of the world's population, have joined the CWC, and only four countries have yet to take affirmative action on the treaty (Israel which has signed but not ratified the Convention; and Egypt, North Korea and South Sudan which are all non-signatories). Since coming into force, over 6700 inspections have taken place at over 3100 chemical weapons related sites and at over 3600 industrial sites throughout the world.³ 

The primary focus of the OPCW, to date, has been the identification and destruction of all existing chemical weapons arsenals and production facilities around the world. By January 2018, following the complete verified destruction of all declared Libyan and Russian chemical weapons stocks,⁴  approximately 96% of the world's declared stockpiles of over 72000 metric tonnes of chemical agents have been eliminated, and almost all former chemical weapons production facilities have been verified as destroyed or converted for peaceful purposes. These hard-won accomplishments—which clearly demonstrate what can be achieved by multi-lateral disarmament—have proven critically important for safeguarding international peace and security. Consequently, all outstanding destruction activities must be completed with the full support and encouragement of the international community, in word and by deed. In particular, full attention must now be given to ensuring that the delayed and subsequently re-scheduled verified US destruction of its remaining chemical weapons stockpiles is completed safely as planned by 2023. In addition, the OPCW must investigate and address all concerns regarding potential undeclared chemical weapons related activities, such as the recent allegations of development, stockpiling and use of Novichok chemical weapons.

The most serious and challenging situation currently facing the Organisation concerns the ongoing chemical attacks in Syria. Although the OPCW–UN (Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons–United Nations) Joint Mission successfully removed and destroyed all declared chemical weapons stockpiles, there are continuing concerns that the Syrian Government did not provide the UN and OPCW with full and accurate details of its chemical weapons programme and stockpiles. In addition, reports of the use in Syria of sarin and improvised chemical weapons employing chlorine and other toxic chemicals have continued. Where evidence of the development, possession and use of such chemical weapons is discovered, the OPCW must act swiftly to halt all such activities. Full cooperation in these processes must be given by the Syrian Government and all parties to the conflict in Syria.

Along with its ongoing activities in supporting the full current implementation of the CWC, the OPCW is now engaged in a difficult and potentially turbulent process of review, planning, and structuring of the Organisation to prevent any future re-emergence of chemical weapons. Although the future priorities of the OPCW have yet to be collectively agreed by its Member States, an initial “vision paper” circulated by the OPCW Director-General in 2015 stated that: “The operating environment of the … OPCW will change significantly over the coming decade. To stay relevant, the focus of the Organisation's activities will progressively have to be shifted from disarmament of chemical weapons to preventing their re-emergence.”⁵ 

An essential element in the OPCW’s effort to prevent the re-emergence of chemical weapons will be its responses to complex and evolving challenges concerning the appropriate regulation of toxic chemicals. One critical set of challenges arises from the continuing rapid developments in, and convergence of, chemistry, biology, and other relevant scientific disciplines and associated technologies; and the potential danger that certain developments may be employed for the production of existing and new types of chemical weapons.⁶  The potential effects of such scientific and technological developments are amplified and influenced by the continuing growth and patterns of globalisation of commercial chemical and biotechnology industries, the increased availability of materials, and the ‘democratisation’ of expertise arising from trade and communications.⁷ 

Another set of challenges relates to the changing nature of the external environment, within which the OPCW operates, and in particular, the evolving security environment where “conflict is no longer framed in the context of opposing military alliances in a bipolar world”, but instead the “borderlines between war, civil war, large-scale violations of human rights, revolutions and uprisings, insurgencies and terrorism as well as organized crime are blurred.”⁸  In this unstable environment, the number and range of actors who may be interested in acquiring and using chemical weapons is hard to determine, though a particular concern has been the employment of chemical weapons by State and Non-State actors, including terrorist organisations, against civilian populations, most recently in Iraq and Syria. Another concern is the apparent desire from certain military, security and police forces for delivery systems employing toxic chemicals for use in a variety of law enforcement operations. This has included a growing range of systems capable of delivering significant amounts of riot control agents over wide areas and/or extended ranges. In addition, certain States have explored the utility of so-called incapacitating chemical agent weapons. Unease about such developments is exacerbated by concerns that in certain situations, the lines separating law enforcement, counterinsurgency, and low-level conflict may become blurred.⁹ 

It is currently unclear in what ways the OPCW will seek to transform itself into an organisation able to respond effectively to these multi-faceted challenges, and how this transformation will be achieved. However, it is clear that the 4th Review Conference of the CWC to be held in November 2018 will be a very important forum where these issues will be discussed, if not finally resolved. Consequently, the 4th Review Conference, the long term processes initiated there, and subsequent follow up activities, are key foci of this book.

The 4th Review Conference of the CWC will have to address many issues and determine how best to respond to, and balance, the competing demands upon the OPCW's limited resources. Of critical importance will be how the Organisation and its Member States address the very rapid advances in relevant science and technology (S&T), and the potential threats of their employment in new and existing forms of weapons employing chemical agents. Indeed, the Review Conference is specifically tasked under the CWC to examine such long-term issues of concern and to “take into account any relevant scientific and technological developments.”¹⁰ 

Given the wide range and diverse nature of S&T developments, spanning the chemical and life sciences, and increasingly encompassing many other disciplines notably nanotechnology, engineering and informatics, the Review Conference is likely to require a broad input of objective technical information in order for it to properly assess the scope of the advances, their potential impact for the regime, and to determine how the Organisation should respond to them. Thus, in addition to the official technical papers that will be produced by the Technical Secretariat, the Scientific Advisory Board, and individual State Parties, for consideration by the OPCW in preparation for and during the Review Conference, it seemed useful to bring together a group of scientists—chemical, biological and social—to produce a wide-ranging set of contributions focussing on different aspects of relevant S&T advances and exploring how the OPCW and broader international community should attempt to respond to them. In addition to informing and stimulating State and civil society thinking on these issues, it is hoped that this publication will inform the relevant OPCW structures and mechanisms tasked with addressing these issues in the longer term.

For many years, the governmental and non-governmental arms-control communities have sought to construct strategies to combat the development, proliferation and subsequent use of chemical and biological weapons by State and non-State actors. Recognising that reliance upon a single disarmament or arms-control agreement alone would not guarantee success, scholars have explored a number of concepts seeking to broaden the range of possible regulatory mechanisms. Utilising and building upon such work, particularly the concepts of “preventative arms control”¹¹  and “webs of prevention (or protection)”,¹²  a “holistic arms control” (HAC) framework for regulation, has been developed¹³  and in this book is adapted and applied to frame an exploration of effective strategies to address the threats arising from the misapplication of the rapid advances in the chemical and life sciences and, more broadly, to prevent the re-emergence of chemical weapons.

Whilst the proposed HAC analytical framework concentrates upon existing arms-control and disarmament measures (in this case primarily the Chemical Weapons Convention, but also the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, the BTWC), it attempts to widen the range of applicable mechanisms for regulation, and also the nature of the actors involved in such regulatory measures.

As originally envisaged, HAC consists of the following three stage process:

• Stage one: constitutes an examination of the nature of the weapons and technology that are to be controlled and explores the current and potential future scenarios of application, together with the attendant national and human security concerns of inappropriate use. During this stage the potential relevance of advances in science and technology is assessed.

• Stage two: constitutes an analysis of the full range of potentially applicable international law, (arms control, disarmament and other) instruments and attendant control regimes; highlighting strengths, weaknesses and ambiguities in these mechanisms. The potential roles of relevant civil society actors are also explored.

• Stage three: following an analysis of information derived from stages one and two, a comprehensive strategy is developed to strengthen existing mechanisms and/or introduce new mechanisms to facilitate effective regulation or prohibition of the weapon or weapons-related technology of concern.

The conception, development and organisation of this book have been informed by the HAC analytical framework. The book consists of 21 chapters divided into six sections. In Section I, following this introductory first chapter is Chapter 2 by Paul Rogers which provides an overview of the very different international security system that has evolved since the end of the East–West Cold War and how asymmetric warfare within this novel system may well encourage the use of forms of chemical warfare by parties involved.

Section II then gives an overview of the nature and health of the contemporary chemical weapons prevention and disarmament regime today, with contributions by Ralf Trapp on the Chemical Weapons Convention (Chapter 3), Jeremy Littlewood on the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (Chapter 4) and Michael Crowley on United Nations mechanisms designed to combat the development, acquisition and use of chemical weapons (Chapter 5), and wider international legal constraints on the weaponisation of toxic chemicals (Chapter 6).

Section III forms the major part of the book with a series of chapters on the advances in relevant science and technology. Chapter 7 by Trapp considers the continuing convergence of the sciences of chemistry, biology and nanotechnology and the implications of these advances. In Chapter 8, Malcolm Dando describes some of the developments in our understanding of the operation of the central nervous system and how this may open up the possibility of the design and weaponisation of novel chemical agents. Kathryn Nixdorff, in Chapter 9 then discusses the advances being made in our capabilities in targeting chemical agents to designated sites in living systems. Advances in anti-plant and anti-animal biological and chemical agents are dealt with respectively by Simon Whitby in Chapter 10 and Piers Millet in Chapter 11; contemporary trends in toxic chemical dispersal and delivery mechanisms by Crowley in Chapter 12. The section ends with a technical review of advances in our capabilities for prevention and treatment of traditional chemical agents by Xinbo Zhou, Wu Zhong, Pengbin Bu and Lijun Shang in Chapter 13, and of the challenges to the current export control system particularly produced by the changing nature of the marketing of relevant goods through the internet, authored by Philippe Mauger and Ray Zilinskas in Chapter 14.

The implications of these advances for the chemical weapons prevention and disarmament regime and options for how they should be addressed are then the subject of the chapters in Section IV. Chapter 15 by Trapp deals with the implications for the CWC, and Chapter 16 by Littlewood with the implications for the BTWC.

Given the importance of a wide range of expertise, experiences and viewpoints being available to the 4th CWC Review Conference and the OPCW more broadly, Section V is devoted to an investigation of the ways in which civil society has attempted to assist in combating the development and use of chemical weapons, and of how it might continue such efforts in the future, particularly in the context of rapid scientific and technological developments. In Chapter 17 Katie Bowman, Alistair Hay and Jo Husbands detail the initiatives of the non-governmental chemical community, Tatyana Novossiolova examines the non-governmental life science community’s efforts in Chapter 18, and Crowley and Vivienne Nathanson explore the importance of medical ethics and the role of the non-governmental medical community in Chapter 19. In Chapter 20 Crowley, Catriona Mcleish and James Revill then consider the work of informed activist civil society as a whole.

The final Section VI of the book comprises the concluding Chapter 21 by the editors and Trapp. This seeks to employ the HAC framework as a means of analysing the contributions of the preceding chapters and synthesising them into a proposed integrated approach which would prioritise the most appropriate and effective mechanisms to address potential threats arising from the rapid advances in the chemical and life sciences, and more generally, the dangers of the (re-)emergence of existing or new forms of weapons employing toxic chemicals. Given the central importance of the CWC, the chapter incorporates recommendations for both States and civil society to strengthen OPCW action in these areas, at the 4th Review Conference and beyond.

On behalf of all of the authors we would like to thank the external reviewers – Stefan Mogl, Julian Perry Robinson and John Walker – who kindly read through the final drafts of the chapters and offered us such helpful comments. The authors and editors are, of course, responsible for any remaining errors.