The Politics of Weapons Inspections: Assessing Wmd Monitoring and Verification Regimes - Hardcover

Busch, Nathan E.; Pilat, Joseph F.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804797439 ISBN 13: 9780804797436

Verlag: STANFORD SECURITY STUDIES, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

The need for effective monitoring and verification of regimes is increasingly urgent in our landscape of "nuclear context" governments, yet the path ahead remains unclear for international non-governmental organizations and monitoring authorities. How should these regimes look? What pitfalls might they encounter? What technologies would prove most reliable for them? How should recent policy developments, such as the 2015 Iran nuclear deal or Syria's renunciation of its chemical weapons, influence their architecture?

The Politics of Weapons Inspections presents an evidence-based approach to these questions, systematically studying today's monitoring and verification efforts and offering guidance on how to strengthen them. In addition to examining these regimes' technological, political, and legal contexts, Nathan E. Busch and Joseph F. Pilat reevaluate three recent cases in South Africa, Libya, and Iraq—each representative of a "core type" of verification situation—and apply the lessons learned from them to ongoing debates about North Korea, Iran, and Syria. Finally, based on the evidence presented thus far, they provide a forward-looking set of policy recommendations for the future.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Nathan E. Busch is Professor and Co-Director of the Center for American Studies at Christopher Newport University. Joseph F. Pilat is Program Manager in the National Security and International Studies Office of Los Alamos National Laboratory and a Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Nathan E. Busch is Professor and Co-Director of the Center for American Studies at Christopher Newport University. Joseph F. Pilat is Senior Advisor in National Security at Los Alamos National Laboratory, as well as Visiting Professor of Government and Guest Scholar in the Reves Center for International Studies at the College of William & Mary.

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The Politics of Weapons Inspections

Assessing WMD Monitoring and Verification Regimes

By Nathan E. Busch, Joseph F. Pilat

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2017 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8047-9743-6

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Abbreviations, 
Introduction, 
1. What Are Monitoring and Verification Regimes?, 
2. South Africa, 
3. Iraq, 
4. Libya, 
5. Verifying Global Disarmament, 
6. Applying Lessons to the "Difficult Cases": North Korea, Iran, Syria, 
Conclusion: Strengthening Monitoring and Verification Regimes, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

What Are Monitoring and Verification Regimes?

In 1992, after nearly ten years of negotiation, North Korea finally agreed to allow the nuclear watchdog group, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), to conduct inspections at Yongbyon, the reclusive country's most sensitive nuclear facility. This facility had long been suspected of being the centerpiece of a dedicated nuclear-weapon program. As part of the verification process, DPRK officials declared all their activities at Yongbyon — including, they said, a onetime removal of less than 100 grams of plutonium from "damaged" fuel rods at an operational 25MW heavy-water reactor located at the site. However, after IAEA officials conducted a series of tests on equipment and nuclear waste at the site, they discovered that North Korea had separated significantly more plutonium than it had declared — possibly enough for a bomb or two.

In 1997, vehicles operated by the United Nations Special Commission on Iraq (UNSCOM) rolled up to Baghdad University. This was no sight-seeing mission. UNSCOM inspectors were in search of Dr. al Keedi, an Iraqi biologist of national repute whom UNSCOM also suspected of being part of a secret Iraqi program on the biological agent ricin — a program that Iraqi officials had long denied ever existed. In the confusion of the search, UNSCOM inspector Terry Taylor spotted a man attempting to slip out of the building with a folder concealed under his arm. After stopping him, Taylor discovered that the fleeing man was indeed Dr. al Keedi and that the file he carried contained a progress report on research into ricin as a potential biological-weapon agent, including the results of experiments on a range of animals — a clear indication that the program not only existed but also had made some progress in weaponizing the agent.

On November 8, 2011, the IAEA published its quarterly report on Iran's nuclear activities. Among other troubling activities related to uranium enrichment, the IAEA report stated that the agency had received information relating to "undisclosed nuclear related activities involving military related organizations, including activities related to the development of a nuclear payload for a missile." The information, which the agency assessed to be "credible," came from "a wide variety of independent sources, including from a number of Member States, from the Agency's own efforts and from information provided by Iran itself." According to some reports, some of the most critical information was provided by a Western intelligence agency and was reportedly acquired "from the wife of an Iranian involved in Iran's nuclear program."

All three of these cases are dramatic examples of monitoring and verification activities of international organizations tasked with deterring or detecting covert weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs in various countries throughout the world. In all these instances, the monitoring process revealed important information about clandestine WMD programs among suspected proliferators — and apparent discrepancies in countries' statements about their programs. These cases, among many others, demonstrate the central importance of monitoring and verification mechanisms for the international community's WMD nonproliferation efforts and for international security generally.

And yet, despite the apparent "smoking guns" that were discovered in each of these cases, the monitoring process did not necessarily produce the political breakthroughs that might have been expected. In the case of North Korea, the crisis of over Pyongyang's nuclear-weapon program is still simmering more than twenty years after this discovery. In the case of Iraq, Iraqi intransigence and opposition by members of the UN Security Council forced UNSCOM to withdraw from the country in 1998, and ongoing questions over the status of Iraq's WMD programs lasted until after a bloody war in 2003 (and some questions have never been answered). And Iran's suspected nuclear-weapon program continued to be one of the most divisive issues facing the international community until the negotiation of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

As we will see from these and other cases examined in this book, monitoring and verification is, and will remain, an essential component of the international community's nonproliferation efforts. But these mechanisms also contain significant technical and political limitations that need to be examined carefully, not only to obtain a clear idea of what they can and cannot accomplish, but also to identify potential ways to make them more effective.

This chapter provides an introduction to monitoring and verification. It begins by defining monitoring and verification and by explaining some of the basic challenges associated with these mechanisms. It then describes the specific monitoring and verification regimes, such as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), and various ad hoc arrangements that are designed to carry out monitoring and verification activities. The discussion in this chapter therefore sets the stage for the analysis in the substantive case studies in the rest of the book.

The Challenges of Monitoring and Verification

Defining Monitoring and Verification

How are monitoring and verification defined? Most simply, "monitoring" is the technical process of gathering data allowed under any agreement or regime, or of data available through national technical means. That process can include everything from inspectors physically onsite at a declared facility, to actual readings from sensors placed to observe activity, to the analysis of material samples, to the collection and use of satellite imagery.

"Verification" is a political process that involves authoritative judgments about the data and interpretations provided by the monitoring community collected from monitoring and other sources. With this data, the policy community within the verifying country or the authorities in an international organization must assess whether the treaty-obligated state is or is not in compliance. In principle and practice, then, verification involves monitoring treaty-limited items and activities and assessing compliance on the basis of that monitoring and other relevant information. Aside from this declared purpose of verification, a common goal of verification provisions is to deter the parties from violations. This objective already presumes a reasonable level of effectiveness for the measures. But it is a difficult standard for verification, because like broader deterrence policies, it is difficult to know what deters and under what conditions deterrence operates. What risks is a party to a treaty willing to take? What is their sense of the benefits of cheating? What is their expectation of...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: STANFORD SECURITY STUDIES
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804797439
• ISBN 13: 9780804797436
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 400
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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