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

Publisher: Stanford Security Studies, 2017

Synopsis

Given recent controversies over suspected WMD programs in proliferating countries, there is an increasingly urgent need for effective monitoring and verification regimes―the international mechanisms, including on-site inspections, intended in part to clarify the status of WMD programs in suspected proliferators. Yet the strengths and limitations of these nonproliferation and arms control mechanisms remain unclear. How should these regimes best be implemented? What are the technological, political, and other limitations to these tools? What technologies and other innovations should be utilized to make these regimes most effective? How should recent developments, such as the 2015 Iran nuclear deal or Syria's declared renunciation and actual use of its chemical weapons, influence their architecture?

The Politics of Weapons Inspections examines the successes, failures, and lessons that can be learned from WMD monitoring and verification regimes in order to help determine how best to maintain and strengthen these regimes in the future. In addition to examining these regimes' technological, political, and legal contexts, Nathan E. Busch and Joseph F. Pilat reevaluate the track record of monitoring and verification in the historical cases of South Africa, Libya, and Iraq; assess the prospects of using these mechanisms in verifying arms control and disarmament; and apply the lessons learned from these cases to contemporary controversies over suspected or confirmed programs in North Korea, Iran, and Syria. Finally, they provide a forward-looking set of policy recommendations for the future.

About this title

About the Author

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.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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 a significant response?

Whatever the specific verification provisions of treaties and agreements, all of the knowledge a party has about the other party or parties comes into play in the verification process. Intelligence is thus closely related to verification, and intelligence can guide verification by providing an alarm or triggering mechanism for, say, challenge inspections (prompt adversarial inspections called for by a party or parties to an agreement to prove or disprove a suspected treaty violation by another party or parties).

One must not forget that in the long term, greater transparency is critical to increasing the difficulty for those countries that may decide to cheat on an agreement or regime and may provide additional information to assist a verifying country in making compliance judgments. Verification is facilitated by open societies. The activities of closed systems are more difficult to verify. To some extent, on the basis of political and technical factors, we are entering an era of greater transparency, even to some degree in closed regimes. These global trends can be enhanced through specific transparency measures and technological advances (for example, with the use of Google Earth and various forms of social media). Ultimately, they involve obtaining information related to items or activities of interest or concern, in the scope of this analysis from a nuclear nonproliferation or arms control perspective. They may be formal — that is, they could be directly negotiated in the context of a treaty and subject to some means of evaluating the quality of the information provided. Or they may be informal.

Assessing Compliance

A key question confronting the verification process is how to determine compliance and noncompliance. Ultimately this must be a matter of judgment. Because verification often involves sensitive intelligence, charges of noncompliance are difficult to address and assess publicly. Indeed, the consequences of revealing intelligence sources may inhibit the use of available intelligence. This difficulty is compounded by the fact that in some instances, judgments may not be based on clear information, but may themselves be ambiguous.

One of the problems when encountering noncompliance is how to respond, because international organizations, including the United Nations, have not been able to act effectively, especially if permanent members of the Security Council (with a veto) are involved. UN or other collective action, as provided for by treaties and agreements, can be more effective if the violator is a pariah state, a small power, or has been defeated in war. However, even in these cases the results of collective action are by no means certain.

If a violation is clear or probable, diplomacy will certainly be attempted to rectify the problem, but its effects are uncertain. Embargoes, sanctions, and the threat or use of military force in response to violations could be significant in themselves if diplomatic solutions fail, and may even have a deterrent effect. The problem is getting a consensus on action, which is very difficult. Responses are in the hands of the party or parties that are affected by the cheating, a situation that may not provide the aggrieved party many good options, especially if it is a small or weak state. Of course, violations may be ignored by the parties, depending on how they assess their response options, and on the political and security context. A response may be equivalent to abrogating the agreement. Even publicly airing violations has dangers, as it may undermine the agreement, particularly if no action is taken against the violator or violators.

Violations cannot and should not be ignored, but dealing with them is by no means easy. Even if a violation is not significant, it may indicate a pattern of behavior or be a test of a party's resolve. If it is not responded to, the violating party might feel it has carte blanche to violate the agreement further, thereby undermining the legal regime established by the agreement. And it may even lead to repudiation of the treaty or agreement. Violations brought before the public can bring the domestic political forces and the international community into the picture, and indicate to a violator the costs of its actions. Or such publicity, as suggested above, could undermine the agreement.

The Problem of Ambiguity

Ambiguity is almost certain to be a factor in the determination of compliance or noncompliance, and it can derive from:

• uncertainties produced by poor, lost, distorted, or otherwise incomplete information resulting from the passage of time, partial or unreconstructable records, and the like;

• uncertainties caused by active efforts to conceal and deceive by the inspected party, including efforts to hide or destroy documents or evidence; • uncertainties brought about by limits on the way intelligence can be brought to bear on a problem — sharing or public airing of the information — because of fears of compromising sources or methods or other concerns (for example, revealing to a state the limits of what it needs to own up to);

• uncertainties of political judgments, particularly those made by multiple parties (multilateral, national, nongovernmental), officially and unofficially, in a contentious political environment marked by divergent interests;

• questions about whether apparent violations or anomalies are deliberate or accidental;

• questions about whether political authorities knew about apparent violations or anomalies, or whether any actions were taken by a "rogue" employee or other actor; and

• resource limitations that can reduce actual collection and processing of data germane to some verification (or to related intelligence) efforts can lead to the development of future verification regimes of lesser effectiveness and can jeopardize future technical capabilities by providing inadequate resources for research and development (R&D).

The verification and compliance process is thus deeply affected by ambiguity. Technology can itself introduce ambiguities into both arms control and nonproliferation verification and compliance discussions, but by and large it has been important in limiting ambiguity to some extent. And it has the potential to do so in the future. It can in some cases provide something like "smoking guns" that are difficult (if not impossible) to dismiss. Technological measurements, for example, may provide the only "concrete" evidence of a treaty violation usable in a highly charged political atmosphere. Technology cannot take the place of political judgments, however, and as a tool used by governments or nongovernmental actors it can be "politicized."

There are limits (technical, political, budgetary) that will curb the real application of technologies to the verification and compliance problems in the future. There are potentially significant tradeoffs between cost and other objectives (from governmental and perhaps public perspectives). Increasingly, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are able to bring — and have been bringing — technologies to bear to some degree on verification and compliance issues. The emergence of commercial capabilities (such as Google Earth) that have the prospect of rivaling those of governments is dramatically changing the current picture, although with uncertain prospects. What will happen, for example, when the differing views of some activities put forward by certain governments are compounded by dramatically different views among some NGOs and perhaps international organizations, such as the IAEA? These issues will more frequently arise as the increasing role of NGOs, industry, individuals and other nontraditional actors in the verification and compliance process becomes more evident.

A key element in assessing the potential success of monitoring and verification is whether the regime takes place in a cooperative or coercive environment. Clearly, monitoring and verification have a much greater chance of success when a state actively and positively participates in the verification process (though we must be aware that the appearance of cooperation can also be a method of deception). If the state is uncooperative — creating a coercive verification regime — the chances of success are much lower.

The Current Mechanisms for Monitoring and Verification

Monitoring and verification are being carried out at the international, regional, and national levels. The international community has established a set of regimes for monitoring and verification. Some of these regimes, such as those overseen by the International Atomic Energy Agency or the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, have been established through negotiated arrangements with the backing of international law and are carried out by longstanding international organizations tasked with verification responsibilities. Others are carried out by ad hoc groups that are tasked with verifying specific, exceptional cases — such as UNSCOM or the group of American and British experts who oversaw the verification and dismantlement of Libya's WMD programs. Still other monitoring and verification activities are conducted by the intelligence communities of individual nations (known as national technical means), various NGOs, and increasingly on the individual levels. We discuss these various monitoring and verification mechanisms in the following sections.

The IAEA and Nuclear Safeguards

The safeguards system established by the International Atomic Energy Agency has served as the cornerstone of monitoring and verification mechanisms in the nuclear realm. Although the first safeguards system was oriented mainly toward preventing the export of nuclear-related items, nuclear safeguards have evolved substantially over time. The safeguards system was later significantly expanded with the introduction of INFCIRC/153 and "full-scope" safeguards — and then later was modified again with the introduction of the Additional Protocol (INFCIRC/540).

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Stanford Security Studies
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0804797439
• ISBN 13: 9780804797436
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400