On 14 September 2013, Syria acceded to the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) with the United Nations. From next month, Syria will join 188 other countries bound by the treaty. The CWC sets a strict schedule for the dismantlement of chemical weapons, and Syria must complete declarations of its chemical weapons and chemical weapons production facilities by 14 November.
Syria’s accession came on the same day that the United States and Russia set out an even more ambitious timeline in their Framework for Elimination of Syrian Chemical Weapons, giving Syria just a week to complete declarations. Consistent with the deadline, it was reported on Saturday that Syria handed over an initial declaration. But it is uncertain whether this includes the types, quantities and locations of agents and munitions.
The next step is for the CWC’s verification organisation, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, to conduct initial inspections of chemical weapons and facilities. The treaty requires that initial inspections be completed for all of the weapons and production facilities by April 2014. Syria and the Organisation must also agree on arrangements for overseeing their destruction. The CWC facilitates phased elimination of chemical weapons and facilities, usually over a period of years. Peaceful industries that use potentially dangerous chemicals (or their precursors) must also be inspected periodically.
The framework for Syria calls for all of this to be completed by the first half of 2014. Even assuming good faith on the part of the Syrian government, it is not clear that Syria can meet these deadlines.
Physical security may not have been established at the presumed 40 or 50 Syrian sites responsible for producing and storing chemical weapons, even though President Bashar al-Assad recently announced that sites remain under the control of the army.
The volume of chemical agent is generally quoted as about 1,000 tonnes, but it is not clear how much of this is in live weapons with explosive charges. Some of the agent may be poorly stored, presenting safety hazards during destruction. The work may be conducted by contractors building incinerators on the site of each former weapon facility (as occurred in Libya) or the weapons may be shipped out of the country to undergo this process. Ironically, the United States itself is not scheduled to complete disposal of its own chemical arsenal until the early 2020s, even though it started decades ago.
THE POSSIBILITY OF SYRIAN VIOLATIONS
Syrian violations of the CWC could take many different forms. Inspectors are likely to experience delays in accessing some locations for a variety of reasons. Declarations could be rushed and incomplete, and may or may not be deceptive.
In coming months, we can expect the United States and Russia to argue about the evidence, whether violations are significant and premeditated and whether enforcement action is necessary. Here it is important to recall that, despite Libya’s accession to the CWC in 2004 and apparent compliance, Gaddafi managed to keep a bunker of blister agent secret until 2011.
In terms of verifying Syria’s adherence to the CWC, the biggest problem will be attributing responsibility to the government, or the rebels, for any further use of chemical weapons. Even if the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons can examine the use of chemical weapons, the Organisation’s technical instruments are not particularly well suited to determining the culprit, unless combined with other detailed information sources like intelligence reports provided by other states. Terrorist groups could also acquire control of these chemical agents and the systems to deliver them.
A WORLD FREE OF CHEMICAL WEAPONS?
Despite all of these challenges, Syria’s accession to the CWC may become an important milestone in international disarmament. There are now only seven countries not party to the CWC: Angola, Egypt, Israel, Myanmar, North Korea, Somalia and South Sudan. (Israel and Myanmar signed but have not ratified the convention). It is also worth noting that the United States suspects a couple of other countries of maintaining a chemical warfare capability contrary to the treaty.
It is the combination of the indiscriminate suffering that chemical weapons cause, particularly in densely populated areas, and the limitations to their strategic utility that explain the willingness of the vast majority of states to abide by the CWC.
The case of Syria provides a timely reminder of both of these considerations. NATO’s proposed military strikes are expressly linked to Syria’s chemical weapons. On Saturday, a senior Kremlin official also suggested that Russia could drop support for Assad if convinced that he was cheating on the CWC. This could be a major blow to the regime.
If any of the handful of states that may still possess chemical weapons actually contemplate using them in similar circumstances in the future, they will be forced to recall that NATO is prepared to use military force in a war in which it was otherwise unwilling to intervene. For states with even modest conventional capabilities, it is difficult to see how adding chemical weapons to an attack during a regional war (or a civil war) could possibly give a strategic benefit that would not be completely outweighed by the risk of drawing in the great powers.
To date, modern history of chemical warfare has been dominated by the Iran-Iraq War, in which the United States not only failed to condemn the use of chemical weapons by Iraq, but in fact provided intelligence reports that Iraq went on to use to identify targets for its chemical munitions. It is particularly important for the United States to send a message about the consequences of using chemical weapons in the twenty-first century. In the last month, diplomacy and the threat of military action have produced progress with respect to the chemical weapons issue, even though there is still no end in sight for the war.
Due to the relative ease of synthesising poisonous gases, even sarin and other nerve agents, it is likely that the world will continue to face threats from relatively small-scale chemical terrorism in the future. For the Middle East, a lot will turn on whether or not terrorist groups acquire some of Syria’s missiles. However, we may now be approaching a time when use of tonnes and tonnes of chemical agents in large-scale war-fighting can finally be confined to the history books.
Kalman A Robertson is a PhD candidate and research assistant specialising in nuclear safeguards and non-proliferation in the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University’s College of Asia and the Pacific.
