Arms control, treaty regimes

At the conclusion of the negotiation of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) in 1992, this treaty was heralded as a major breakthrough in multilateral arms control. It was the first comprehensively verifiable multilateral treaty that completely banned an entire class of weapons, and went further than any previous treaty in the depth, extent and intrusiveness of its verification. Verification under the CWC includes compulsory national declarations about relevant industrial and military activities, destruction of chemical weapons within a time frame with intrusive verification, and a regime of routine inspections of declared industrial and military facilities. Additional features are the possibility of a challenge inspection, whereby a State Party can request an inspection of any site in another State Party at short notice, and provisions for the investigation of alleged use of chemical weapons. 

In the US, verification has become a key word in the controversy over arms control. It runs wider than straightforward consideration of the mechanisms for ensuring compliance. As Ralph Earle II, a former US negotiator, put it, If there s a desire to have a treaty, verification is adequate or effective. If there is no desire to have a treaty, verification is inadequate or ineffective ,The BW and CW arms control regimes have been caught up in wider US concerns about conventional and nuclear imbalances, about the use of Soviet and client state forces to spread Soviet influence, about the speed of Soviet technological development and about the need for the US and other NATO countries to modernise their forces in order to ensure that deterrence is not weakened. 

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