Proliferating Thoughts

Following on from my last post responding to an AFP report on the outcome of the 2nd CWC Review Conference the OPCW has at last released the final report on the RevCon which includes the final declaration. The specific issue I addressed was that of CW destruction deadlines.

In my previous post I noted that if true, the AFP report had a number of difficult implications. Now, having had the chance to read through the declaration it is clear that the AFP report was not an entirely accurate reflection of the content of the declaration (I am trying not to be unkind). As best as I can determine the source of the AFP claim that the deadline for destruction of all CW stockpiles had been extended to 2012 was a misunderstanding of the following passage.

The Second Review Conference also reaffirmed the importance of the obligation of the possessor States Parties to complete the destruction of their chemical weapons stockpiles within the final extended deadlines as established by the Conference at its Eleventh Session.

This meaning of this statement is quite differed to that which I noted in the AFP report, specifically that the states parties:

“agreed on Saturday a new global deadline of 2012″ for CW destruction. It goes on to note that the United States, Russia, India and Libya “previously had individual deadlines, some of them earlier than 2012, but have signed up to the revised founding treaty.”

Essentially the RevCon simply noted that the various CW possessor states that have not yet completed destruction of their CW stockpiles all have been granted extensions to their deadlines and called on those states to take appropriate measures to ensure hat they meet those deadlines. There is nothing about revisions to the treaty, or a “new global deadline.” As such the thorny question of what to do when the United States and Russia fail to meet their 2012 deadline, as seems almost inevitable at this point, has been put off into the future.

The other CW possessor states remain exactly where they were in March 2008 with the following final destruction deadlines: South Korea (31 December 2008); India (28 April 2009); Libya (31 December 2010).

Equally nothing has been done to make things easier for new possessor states joining the convention. They will continue to be in technical non-compliance with the CWC from the moment they join and until they can secure an extension to their destruction deadlines, a process which can often take several Executive Council sessions. The original destruction deadline was ten years after entry into force (EIF) of the CWC (28 April 2007) with provision for an extension of up to, but no more than, five years (28 April 2012). The truly difficult situation will arise after 2012 as currently there is no way for a state party to legitimately extend its destruction activities beyond 28 April 2012 irrespective of when they join the CWC. There is an argument to be made that tying the CW destruction deadlines to the Convention’s EIF was a mistake in so far as it presumed that all possessor states would sign on either before EIF or shortly thereafter. An alternative approach would have been to tie the deadlines to EIF for the particular state party, although this would have serious drawbacks, not least the potential extension of destruction activities into the 2020s or beyond.

As things stand this AFP report has underlined an important consideration, namely that the reports of wire-services are not reliable and should always be supplemented by primary source material wherever possible.

So it appears that the AFP has gotten enough information together to justify putting out a couple of reports on the results of the 2nd CWC Review Conference. The first addresses the thorny problem of CW demilitarization. Although the report is welcome it raises many more questions than it answers.

The CW demilitarization process has been running very seriously behind schedule. The extent of the problem can be described in several ways some of which make it look worse than others. For instance, with the exception of Albania, which had a trivial CW stockpile, no State Party (SP) has met its CWC deadline (29 April 2007) for completing the process of destroying all CW stockpiles and associated facilities. All of the SPs required extensions to allow them to legitimately extend their destruction efforts beyond 2007.

However, this bald observation overlooks very important details. For instance, although India obtained an extension of its deadline the new date was only 28 April 2009 and in early 2008 India indicated that it had already destroyed 93% of its Cat. 1 CW. By contrast, both Russia and the United States have requested and secured the maximum possible extension of five years allowing them to extend their efforts out to April 2012, not that anyone is particularly confident that they will successfully complete destruction by that date either. Then we have Libya which joined the CWC to great acclaim in early 2004. To date it has not even begun destruction of its admittedly small stockpile. Although there was great optimism at first and the United States was pledged to assist with the destruction process those arrangements broke down in 2007 leading to some uncertainty about exactly how or when Libya will begin to fulfill its obligations.

So anyway, it is with some “curiosity” that I read the AFP report that the CWC SPs have “agreed on Saturday a new global deadline of 2012″ for CW destruction. It goes on to note that the United States, Russia, India and Libya “previously had individual deadlines, some of them earlier than 2012, but have signed up to the revised founding treaty.” In addition to the problem that this report makes no mention of South Korea (sorry, my bad), An Unnamed State Party, it is painfully uninformative about the impact of this decision. For instance,does this mean that India is no longer obliged to destroy its Cat. 1 CW stockpile by April 2009? How will this “global deadline” be implemented Unless the RevCon took additional decisions all that has been adopted is a political declaration which cannot of itself adjust individual SP deadlines. Does this mean that the SPs in question, specifically India, Libya and the ROK will all be coming to the next Executive council session with draft decisions extending their destruction deadlines? If this is the case the decision can only be seen as counter-productive, especially in the Libyan case where the goal should be to accelerate destruction efforts rather than postpone them.

The one positive outcome of this aspect of the final declaration, which is being presented by AFP as modifying the CWC, itself a problematic contention given that the RevCon is not an amendment conference, is that it may make life a little easier for any CW possessor states that join the convention prior to 2012. At present if Syria, to pick an example, were to join the CWC next week it would already be in technical non-compliance for not destroying its CW stockpile by the treaty deadline of April 2007, an awkward position to be in at the start of one’s membership in an organization. Of course any new members would still face a very constrained timeline for destruction and it will be interesting to see how the OPCW proposes to deal with any new CW possessor members that join after 2012, or alternatively that join so close to the April 2012 deadline that they cannot possibly meet it. Still for the moment at least this is a largely hypothetical question. Furthermore the situation of these states may potentially be addressed by the effort to deal with the Russian and US cases in the run-up to 2012. Current US destruction plans have the potential to extend out as far as 2023 and Russia is not expected to meet the 2012 deadline. At some point the question of how to square this timeline with the requirements of the CWC will have to be comprehensively addressed.

So anyway, just an initial thought or two based on what may be an incomplete report. Hopefully things will become much clearer once the final declaration is actually publicly released.

After a fashion at any rate. On March 26th, Arms Control Wonk (ACW) featured my February WMD Insights article on the essentially unnoticed changes that have taken place in the US intelligence community’s assessments since 2003. I really like the ACW blog and I am regularly impressed by the quality of the material posted there. So naturally I was quite pleased to see something that I have written get a positive mention on the site. In the period between the article being finished and ACW drawing attention to it there were a number of developments that had the potential to affect the results of my analysis.

Firstly, on February 27th, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) head, Lt. Gen. Michael Maples testified before the House Armed Services Committee on Current and Projected National Security Threats to the United States. He had testified before the Senate Intelligence subcommittee earlier in the month but all that got released in time for my article was a transcript of his three page oral statement that said nothing about Iran’s suspected WMD programs. However, following the February 27th hearing DIA released the 37 page written version of General Maples statement and that did include language addressing DIA’s assessment of Iranian WMD programs. As things currently stand this is the most up-to-date official statement on the current US assessment of Iran’s CW and BW activities.

The good thing, for me at least, was that this new statement did not undermine my article.

The second thing that happened, which also had the potential to affect my conclusions, was that at the beginning of March, the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) publicly released the long overdue Sec. 721 reports for 2005 and 2006. The 2005 report did not represent a problem in that it continued the low-key assessments that I had noted developing over a period up to and including 2004’s report. The 2006 report however was a little more problematic as it included a passage stating that “We [DNI] judge that Iran maintains a small, covert CW stockpile.” As is the case with these reports there is no way to know why DNI has decided to reintroduce the concept of an Iranian CW stockpile. At the same time there is no way to determine what it is about Iranian activities that leaves DNI convinced that there is a stockpile while DIA appears to feel otherwise. Presumably the issue is a difference over the assessment of available information.

ACW drew particular attention to the conclusion of the 2006 Sec. 721 report “that Iran maintains a small, covert CW stockpile” and wondered exactly how small a CW arsenal has to be to be considered small given that “large” has covered everything from the Russian stockpile of over 40,000 tons to the pre-Gulf War 2 suspected Iraqi stockpile of approximately 100 tons.

This question piqued my interest and I decided to dig a little into the material I had to hand to try and square up the DNI position that Iran maintained “a small, covert CW stockpile” with the DIA position that “Tehran maintains dual-use facilities intended to produce chemical warfare agents in times of need and conducts research that may have offensive applications.” This effort resulted in the following comment that I posted to ACW.

In trying to square this stuff up I noticed that Iran had an OPCW Schedule 1 inspection in 2001 and 2003 and has reported a National Protective Program since 2003. Unfortunately OPCW stopped specifying the breakdown of its inspections by country in 2004. However in October 2007 the OPCW reported (S/657/2007) that Iran was one of 18 countries that had met the deadline for submission of annual declarations regarding projected activities and anticipated production in 2008 at schedule 1 facilities.

On the basis of the admittedly limited information I wonder if perhaps the DNI’s “small, covert CW stockpile” is in any way associated with an Iranian Single Small Scale Facility. At a minimum it seems highly probable that DIA’s “research that may have offensive applications” is associated with the ongoing activities of Iran’s Schedule 1 facility. Based on the available public information DIA’s analysis seems reasonably well-grounded. On the other hand the sudden re-emergence of DNI’s Iranian CW stockpile after several years in which it was absent from public statements and reports is more difficult to account for.

If DNI’s stockpile is tied to Iran’s declared Schedule 1 facility, then assuming that Iran is making a point of not violating CWC thresholds, which may or may not be reasonable, its CW stockpile may be in the range of 10 to 1,000 kilograms of agent. Which barely could be considered small.

Since posting this comment I have a given a little more thought to the question and it has led me back to an issue which I have never gotten around to providing an article type treatment for. Specifically, how US intelligence assesses the work of facilities conducting defensive CW research which are allowed to operate under the terms of the CWC.

Is it really a hiatus if there has only been a single post? I suppose it is if I return to make additional entries.

It has taken a little while to get back to this blog after starting it with such a grandiose statement of purpose (see previous post) but now that I have I am going to try and be a little more regular. If nothing else I am interested in providing some updates on a number of articles and what are, for me at least, exciting developments.