Chemical weapons: Slow progress to disarmament

Chemical Disarmament: Current Problems in Implementing the Chemical Weapons Convention

The Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) is briefly characterised by stressing its main pillars, such as verified destruction of CW stockpiles and destruction/conversion of CW production facilities (CWPFs), verified non-production of CW by the chemical industries, assistance and protection), and international cooperation. The CWC ́s leading principle in defining the CW (protecting it generally agai...

The Chemical Weapons Convention--disarmament, science and technology.

2014 marks the centennial of the outbreak of World War I—the first war that saw the large-scale use of chemical weapons. Although poisons have been used in warfare for centuries, it was rapid advances in science and engineering and the rise of the modern chemical industry that made the mass production of toxic chemicals possible. The horrors of gas warfare led to the signing of the Geneva Proto...

The Danger of Chemical Weapons in Syria. Unfinished Disarmament and International Control Efforts

On 4 January 2016, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in The Hague announced that the process of destroying Syrian chemical weapons had been completed. Despite that declaration of success, problems obviously persist. Since April 2014, the civil war parties have accused each other in more than one hundred cases of having used chemical weapons. In more than twenty inc...

Biological and Chemical Weapons and the Prospective Disarmament Process in the Middle East

Chemical Weapons Convention Bulletin

The Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC) was opened for signature on 10 April 1972 and entered into force on 26 March 1975 with the United Kingdom, the United States and the former Soviet Union as the depositary governments. The Convention is to eliminate biological weapons and prohibit their development, production, stockpiling, acquisition and retention. It has 15 articles. The init...