Conference on Disarmament continues work on chemical weapons accord.

Conference on Disarmament continues work on chemical weapons accord

The Conference on Disarmament, as it opened the second part of its 1990 session in Geneva on 12 June, continued consideration of a draft convention prohibiting chemical weapons, a nuclear-test ban and a comprehensive programme of disarmament.

Other topics on its agenda related to: conventional weapons; reduction of military budgets; reduction of armed forces; disarmament and development; and disarmament and international security, as well as collateral and confidence-building measures, and effective verification methods in relation to appropriate disarmament measures, acceptable to all parties concerned.

In opening remarks to the Conference, the President for June, Oswaldo de Rivero of Peru, said that the negotiations on banning chemical weapons had made the most progress in the Conference on Disarmament.

He urged speedy agreement on a unified and comprehensive text for the total and definitive destruction of chemical weapons. That included, he said, total destruction of the remaining stocks within the transitional period agreed upon in the convention.

M. Lyall Breckon of the United States informed the Conference about the bilateral agreement signed on 1 June by Presidents George Bush of the United States and Mikhail Gorbachev of the USSR. It calls for the destruction of the vast bulk of declared chemical weapons stockpiles to begin by the end of 1992, with on-site inspections to confirm the process and destruction of at least 50 per cent of declared stocks by the end of 1999. It also cites their intent not to produce chemical weapons when the agreement enters into force, without waiting for the entry into force of a global chemical-weapons ban.

The Soviet-United States bilateral agreement was designed to provide new impetus to the conclusion of a comprehensive verifiable global chemical weapons ban at the earliest possible date, he stated.

The Conference also heard reports on recent research experiments to improve verification of alleged used of chemical weapons. Oscar Vaerno of Norway presented two working papers, one explaining ongoing efforts to identify a general procedure to screen samples suspected of being contaminated with chemical warfare agents; and the other, addressing many outstanding problems in the use of regional seismic arrays in a test-ban monitoring context.

Marjatta Rautio of Finland, Director of the Finnish Research Project on the Verification of Chemical Disarmament, introduced the 1990 Blue Book that described the results of laboratory comparison tests involving Canada, Finland, France, Federal Republic of Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. The exercise tested existing procedures for sample preparation and analysis, and determined whether standard operating procedures would be required for the future convention.

Serguei B. Batsanov of the Soviet Union addressed the issue of improving the effectiveness of the Conference's work. He said the Conference should be given added expertise to enable it to identify problems related to disarmament and search for their solution. He also proposed measures to improve its effectiveness, such as more time-efficient schedules, the creation of additional consultations and new procedures for establishing Conference working bodies.

The first part of the 1990 session had concluded on 24 April with the President for April, Ahmad Kamal of Pakistan, reporting on the progress made at the session.

Paul Joachim Von Stulpnagel of the Federal Republic of Germany said that the necessary political and material prerequisites existed for the drafting of a comprehensive and global convention effectively banning chemical weapons. An early conclusion of the convention was necessary, he said, to demonstrate that multilateral disarmament could keep abreast with other international developments in the field.

The Conference on Disarmament is the single multilateral disarmament negotiating forum of the international community.