Establishing the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW)

Abstract

This thesis shows that at the core of all recent disarmament negotiation, the question of verification has been an overriding concern for most delegations. In 1948, the United Nations Commission for Conventional Armaments made a value judgement concerning Chemical Weapons by placing them in the same category as Nuclear and Biological Weapons, thereafter known collective as Weapons of Mass Destruction. This classification was certainly present in the minds of most delegations attending the virtually permanent conferences on disarmament matters that took place in Geneva from the late 1960s onward. It is apparent that despite evidence of mutual regard and respect, their deliberations were constantly hampered by the mistrusts engendered through the bipolar confrontation that occurred during the most of the post World War II period.

The construction of an organisation designed to provide reasonable assurance that known Chemical Weapons holdings would be destroyed and that no covert chemical arsenals were being developed is shown to have been critically influenced, not by the almost universal desire to achieve a reasonable compromise solution, but rather by the political changes within the USSR that brought about an easing of international tensions. It will be seen that the prolonged gestation period during which, the concept of an organisation for this purpose came to be developed was stimulated by a series of unexpected interventions designed to overcome seemingly intractable problems. It may be anticipated that some of these procedural techniques will feature in future negotiations.

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