How and Where Chemical Weapons Proliferated

Recent events in Syria have once again spotlighted the dangers of chemical weapons and international efforts to catalog and destroy them. The Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on their Destruction (otherwise known as the Chemical Weapons Convention or CWC) was opened for signature with a ceremony in Paris in January 1993 â?? 130 States signed the Convention within the first two days. Four years later, in April 1997, the Convention entered into force with 87 States Parties. Currently, the CWC comprises 184 States Parties, as well as an implementing body, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), located in Brussels.

The Convention had been the subject of nearly 20 years of negotiations within the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva. The States involved in these negotiations were seeking to finalize an international treaty banning chemical weapons, and designed to ensure their worldwide elimination. The Convention is the first multilateral treaty to ban an entire category of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and to provide for the international verification of the destruction of these weapons. Altogether, the international community succeeded in producing a treaty that would verify the destruction of chemical weapons worldwide as well as ensure the non-proliferation of these weapons and the toxic chemicals used in their manufacture.

In these excerpts, Ambassador Henry Allen Holmes, who served as Assistant Secretary of State for Politico-Military Affairs and served as the lead negotiator for the United States, discusses the tough negotiations that led to the CWC and the surprising cooperation of his Soviet colleagues. He discusses the French proposal to hold the international conference on chemical weapons, made after the massacre at Halabja against Iraqi Kurds, the efforts to get China and other countries on board, and Israelâ??s deep concern with Syriaâ??s stockpile of binary chemical weapons, and the occasional difficulties the U.S. had with Israel itself. He was interviewed by Charles Stuart Kennedy beginning in March 1999.