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Delhi Declaration, 1985

Here is the Delhi Declaration from the January 1985 Six-Nation Summit on Nuclear Disarmament. The six countries were Argentina, Greece, India, Mexico, Sweden, and Tanzania.

The full text is too long to paste, but here’s a sample:

We reiterate our appeal for an all-embracing halt to the testing,
production and deployment of nuclear weapons and their delivery
systems. Such a halt would greatly facilitate negotiations. Two
specific steps today require special attention: the prevention of
an arms race in outer space, and a comprehensive test ban treaty.

Plus ca change, etc.

D Feith on CWC

I did not know that Doug Feith worked on the CWC, but he recounted that experience in this 2012 interview:

I knew President George H. W. Bush a little bit, having worked with him in the Reagan administration. I was responsible for the chemical weapons negotiations and he was very interested in that.

Riley
He cast the tie-breaking vote.

Feith
He had to vote in the Senate as Vice President on the modernization of the U.S. chemical arsenal. He rather remarkably gave some kind of press interview where he said that his mother called him and berated him for that vote and that, in part to satisfy her, he was committing himself to chemical weapons arms control.

We wound up having a debate within the administration on chemical weapons arms control. The State Department generally argued that the way to make progress in an arms control negotiation in the view of some people is to find out what the other guy wants and give it to him. That was not the way we analyzed these things at the Pentagon. Yet we knew that, as the saying goes, “You can’t beat something with nothing.” So when the State Department came in with what they called an initiative, which was basically a retreat on the issue of verification, we needed to say more than “no.” We came up with an alternate initiative.

It was a bold, “anywhere, anytime” inspection regime. One of the biggest problems with the chemical weapon ban is that it is not verifiable in any meaningful sense. So we tried to at least tackle this by saying we would do inspection anywhere, anytime. This was controversial within the U.S. government because some of our own military and intelligence people were unwilling to accept anywhere, anytime inspections of U.S. facilities. We said to the President, “If we’re not willing to tolerate it, then don’t ask for it. But if you’re not going to ask for it, then don’t fool yourself into thinking that you can have a verifiable chemical weapons ban. Then you have to ask yourself, do you want a chemical weapons ban that the United States will adhere to, and the Soviets can cheat without detection? Mr. President, over to you.”

When we were dealing with Ronald Reagan, we found that time after time he came to what we considered to be the right answer on questions of that kind. He did so after debates that lasted months. Anyway, in the course of the chemical weapons arms control debate, I got to know President Bush.

When the Defense Department prevailed in this debate, I was the one who accompanied Vice President Bush to Geneva to present this. I got to know him somewhat. I later decided I wasn’t interested in working for him. I had also just started my law firm, so I was perfectly happy to stay out of the Bush-Senior administration.

Üzümcü on Syria and CWC

Former OPCW DG Ahmet Üzümcü wrote this piece a couple of months ago about the Syria CW saga. Here’s his take on Syria’s 2013 accession to the CWC:

In retrospect, I think that my initial reservations were correct and it was too much of a leap of faith to jump from the “red line” trigger (U.S. President Obama’s warning that Syrian CW use would be met with consequences) to membership of the OPCW. Let me explain. I believe a progressive approach should have been adopted under which Syria should have been asked to wait until it had gotten rid of all its CW stockpiles and production capacity in a verifiable manner, and then a reasonable and quiet period allowed to elapse without any reported use of CWs. Although the CWC does not provide a basis for such a transitional arrangement, it could have been executed through a UN Security Council (UNSC) resolution. But the Director General had little influence in decision-making, for that remains the prerogative of Member States.

The piece also provides some other interesting details concerning the OPCW and Syria’s chemical weapons.

U.S. Declaratory Policy RE: Iraq WMD

A while ago, Doug Feith published, at the same time as his book War and Decision, this document titled, Non-WMD Declaratory Policy for Iraq. It’s worth examining an instance In which the Bush administration’s consideration of preventing WMD use in a concrete case.The problem was that Saddam Hussein would have an incentive to use WMD if he believed that the United States were about to overthrow his regime (which, of course, the Bush II administration was planning to do). For example, take a look at these: For example, take a look at these:

THere’s more, so take a look at the whole thing.