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WHEN WILL the world agree to ban chemical weapons? ‘I’ve been saying
‘two more years’ for years,’ says Peter Herby, Associate Quaker Representative
of the Quaker United Nations Office, Geneva. He is an unofficial observer
of multilateral disarmament negotiations for the Society of Friends.

Exploratory discussions on banning biological and chemical weapons began
in 1968. The Biological Weapons Convention was signed in 1972, but another
12 years passed before discussions on chemical weapons got onto a formal
footing. Since 1984, the 40 members of the committee on chemical weapons
at the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva have been negotiating a ban,
the Chemical Weapons Convention. ‘The technical work could be concluded
in 1991,’ says Herby. ‘The basic framework, scope and organisation of the
Convention is agreed.’ What remain to be resolved, he says, are some key
political issues that have been deferred to the final phase of negotiations.

‘Of the 40 members, only 20 are submitting new ideas and doing the work,’
says Herby. Another 35 states are ‘nonmembers’ of the committee; they are
allowed to participate in discussions but not to block a consensus. But
very few nonmembers take an active role, says Herby. He believes that many
states are ‘waiting for the endgame’. What they need is for the superpowers
to commit themselves to a deadline.

The Federation of American Å®ÉúСÊÓƵs Fund, the educational arm of the
FAS, highlights four main political problems that are preventing agreement.
The first is that the US and France lead a group of countries that want
the right to retaliate ‘in kind’ to a chemical attack; this reflects the
1925 Geneva Protocol, which effectively outlaws only the first-use of chemical
weapons. If the group were successful, says Herby, it would dilute the prime
purpose of the convention: to eliminate decisively the threat of chemical
warfare. States without weapons would want to make some before signing a
convention so that they had the deterrent too.

The second problem concerns verification. In 1987, in what was seen
as a watershed at the time, says Herby, the US and the Soviet Union agreed
that any state should have the right to challenge and inspect a site inside
another state, within a maximum 48 hours’ notice. Although all negotiating
states accept the need for such ‘challenge inspections’ in principle, differences
remain on how these inspections should be carried out. For instance, for
a traditionally closed society, such as China’s, the proposal is revolutionary.
Some countries fear the system would be too open to abuse through industrial
and political espionage. Others feel that a secretariat, rather than an
individual state, should lead a challenge inspection.

While there is broad agreement on the structure of the organisation
that a convention will create, members are still ‘horse trading’ over the
third major problem, the make up of the Executive Council. Developing nations
fear that the major powers will be over-represented.

The fourth obstacle to an agreement is that developing countries are
concerned that a convention that restricts their access to chemicals will
hinder development of indigenous civilian chemical industries. They also
want a guarantee that they will receive medical and defensive help if threatened
or attacked with chemical weapons. Some developing countries also see chemical
weapons as a cheap deterrent, and they are reluctant to dispose of their
supplies while stockpiles of nuclear weapons exist. Australia has already
produced a ‘blueprint’ of the convention, says Henry Fox, executive officer
of the National Chemical Weapons Convention Secretariat, which was set up
earlier this year to prepare the country to implement an international agreement
rapidly.