Management of the International Regimes for the Verification of the Elimination of Weapons of Mass Destruction and Carbon Emissions
22 August 2023
Welcome to the first session of the course on International Public and NGO Management. The basic thesis of the course is that the international public sector will grow in size and importance over the 21st Century, building on its growth in the 20th. The main institution, the United Nations, turned 77 last year. Over the course, we will examine how this growth is taking place, in terms of different functions, and we will look at case studies of specific areas. We will focus on results-based management as a key tool for improving and controlling the international public sector. A major context is the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that were agreed in 2015 and are to be achieved by 2030.
In 2023, as we continue to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic, I have continued to realize that the international public sector will have to deal with what I have termed The Four Problems of the Apocalypse. These are problems that, if not solved, will destroy human life as we know it. And they are problems that cannot be solved by the actions of individual sovereign states or coalitions of the willing, or by the magic of the marketplace. They are essentially borderless and need a universal solution in each case. The four problems are pandemics, climate change, nuclear weapons and cyber-security. They are all current and all have only a limited time for solution.
We will begin with two of these: WMDs and climate change.
When I first started the seminar with a case study of the first specific management problem, I had no idea how important the problem would be. For two years, starting in 2000, this lecture took place on September 11. I did not realize then, nor did anyone, how vital and controversial part of the subject this would be. Then, when the climate change negotiations stalled at Copenhagen, in part on one issue, I began to realize that the second issue was even broader and more controversial. This has continued as we confront the implementation of the Paris Agreement and the change of leadership in the United States.
The major subject for today is verification of national commitments to international agreements. One of these is the elimination of weapons of mass destruction, a task that has been given, increasingly, to international organizations. The other is reduction of carbon emissions in the context of climate change management. We will look at it from two perspectives: as major issues of disarmament and environment that is related to international relations theory and as an issue of international public management.
In the context of disarmament, while the issue of eliminating weapons of mass destruction has always been important, it has become more so since the United States, one of the few countries with the capacity to use WMD, spent ten years seemingly backing out of, slowing or stopping or otherwise undercutting the treaties on which disarmament is based, mostly during the George W. Bush administration. These treaties are the structure within which contentious issues, such as Iran's nuclear program or North Korea's, or the Syrian Government's use of chemical weapons are set. The issue was seemingly addressed, at least partially, with the Iran agreement, from which the United States Trump administration withdrew but which the Biden Administration is working to rejoin. And, of course, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the threat to use nuclear weapons has again raised the significance of the issue.
Over the eight years of the Bush Administration,
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The US did not agree to the proposed verification approach to the
Convention on Biological Warfare
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The US has said that it will not ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban
Treaty
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The Chinese have announced that they will adhere to the CTBT even
though they are only signatories
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The anthrax that was sent after September 11 was determined to
have come from a US federal laboratory;
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The International Atomic Energy Agency stated that it could
account for all of the material held by Iraq under the Safeguards Program but
could not assure that the provisions of the Security Council resolutions were
met by Iraq, although it found no evidence that Iraq had re-started a program
to develop nuclear weapons and the main evidence presented by the US was either
unconvincing or false;
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The United States, despite continuous and intensive efforts, could
not find any weapons of mass destruction of any kind in Iraq.
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The North Koreans withdrew from the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and expelled the IAEA inspectors.
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North Korea announced that it was reprocessing plutonium to raise
it to weapons grade, was preparing to test weapons, but no one was able to
verify whether this was true or not.
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United States and other officials talked about the possible use of
nuclear material to create a "dirty bomb".
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The
US created a Proliferation Security Initiative involving stopping ships that
are suspected of carrying banned materials on the high seas, but without any
mechanism for identifying when ships will be carrying them.
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The
United States insisted that Iran is working towards a nuclear weapons program,
but the IAEA concluded that there was no evidence,yet,
that they were doing so.
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Iran
argued that their program is consistent with the NPT, but that acceptance of
expanded safeguards is one of the issues that will be part of "serious
negotiations". The Security Council has
approved limited sanctions on Iran, but the Iranians continue to insist that
they will not modify their efforts to re-process. Negotiations with the
European Union and the IAEA continue.
There was a change in the Obama Administration. Some of these included:
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The
US and the Russian Federation agreed to renegotiation the START treaty to
reduce nuclear stockpiles
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The
G-8, under US leadership, agreed to give higher priority to non-proliferation
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The
US supported the idea of negotiating a Fissile-Material Cutoff Treaty
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The
US given more priority to the use of multilateral institutions to deal with
global problems
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The
US used Syria's violation of the Chemical Weapons treaty as a possible basis
for intervention in its civil war
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The
US, together with the other P-5 countries and Germany completed negotiating a
solution to the problem of Iran's nuclear capability.
The Trump Administration took a different tack. They questioned the agreement on Iran, and then withdrew from it. They were confronted with the problem of North Korea's nuclear weapons, which are currently outside the international system, other than through sanctions agreed by the Security Council. More broadly, the Trump administration questioned the usefulness of the international system for many issues, including elimination of weapons of mass destruction. The US began the process of withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, to be completed the day after the presidential election in 2020, but thanks to the election, the US has returned and the Biden administration has a position like those before the Trump administration.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, at some points the Russians threatened to use nuclear weapons if NATO did things like guaranteeing a safe sky.
Some of the Bush and Obama-era policies, especially dealing with Iran and North Korea, have still remained in force and, as were seen in the Republican opposition to the Iran nuclear arms agreement, the unilateralists still have a major political following in the United States, reflected in the Republicans in Congress.
All of these point to some of the issues in managing the regime that seeks to eliminate weapons of mass destruction.
In addition, in the context of the climate change negotiations, the issue of how to verify whether States are in compliance with their obligations, given that reporting is national and voluntary, is became critical. Countries like China and India argued that there should be no oversight over their voluntary reporting, while developed countries like the US and the EU argued that there should be international standards and accountability for them. The model of verification of eliminating weapons of mass destruction is applicable, and was injected into the negotiations of the Paris Agreement, which agreed, in Article 13 which states "In order to build mutual trust and confidence and to promote effective implementation, an enhanced transparency framework for action and support, with built-in flexibility which takes into account Parties’ different capacities and builds upon collective experience is hereby established." The details are still to be worked out.
But, let us start with WMD's, since that is where there has been more experience.
The issue of how to eliminate Weapons of Mass Destruction was a major feature of international politics at the end of the Twentieth Century. The "balance of terror", the possibilities loosed by technology of weapons that could destroy all human life on earth provided an incentive to find solutions. At the same time, it was the highest expression of the "realist" approach to international politics, dealing as it does with the ability of a State to defend itself.
To recall, briefly, the problem, we should remember that it started with the one type of weapon that probably does not cause mass destruction: chemical weapons. The first international efforts focused on banning these weapons. They cannot cause mass destruction, because their delivery is localized. They were considered abhorrent because they were indiscriminant. They could affect soldiers and civilians alike, they were not really targetable in the same sense, for example, that a bomb or a mortar shell might be. Their prohibition in 1925 was largely respected during World War II and after, although there were some instances of use (Japan against China in the 1930's, Italy in Ethiopia also in the 1930's) and did not recur until the Iran-Iraq War of the late 1970's and early 1980's. The use by the Syrian Government of chemical weapons against rebel populations is a recent example, now added to the use of chemical weapons material by ISIS (or ISIL).
The real incentive came with the nuclear age, since nuclear weapons are truly for mass destruction, on a major scale and with indiscriminate effects. While it is also true that conventional bombing can also wreak mass destruction, it cannot do so quite as effectively and efficiently and, moreover, the quantity of nuclear warheads assembled during the second half of the Twentieth Century could destroy human life several times over if used. The fear of these weapons is such that they have only been used twice during warfare (Hiroshima and Nagasaki) seventy-seven years ago.
The advances of biological science in the Twentieth Century led to the development of biological weapons, what are now called "the poor man's atom bomb". Deadly diseases like anthrax, botulism and the plague, rather than being eliminated, have probably been improved. The reason that they are not a more public part of the arsenal is that the capacity to deliver them has lagged behind the production technology. This probably explains why Iraq did not use them during the Gulf War (although the fear of their use meant that the military during Desert Storm were all vaccinated against anthrax and during the invasion of Iraq, Coalition troops wore cumbersome chemical weapons gear.)
An additional factor today is the concept of the "rogue state", a government ruled by persons who are so irrational that they have no fear of using WMD, and who might not be willing to abide by international norms. Clearly, that was the position taken by the United States on Iraq and to a certain extent on North Korea. (Although one might consider that the North Korean effort to acquire a deterrent is eminently rational under the circumstances).
Add to this the idea that non-state actors, supported by states, might try to use these weapons for terrorism, as in the nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway by a quasi-religious group. And, of course, al-Qaida (although the videos on CNN only showed testing of cyanide gas on dogs in cages). And now we have the example of ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, a non-state actor)’
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To deal with the problem, over a period of years Nation-States have elaborated what could be called a Regime for the Elimination of Weapons of Mass Destruction. The term regime takes on a particular meaning here. It is derived from international relations theory, as a response to the dominant model to explain international behavior, realism. Realism posits that the international system is the consequence of the actions of individual states that weigh their national interest and use their power to have achieve those interests. It seems that the Bush Administration leaders fully accepted this approach. It is a good theory to explain conflict, but not as good to explain why states reach binding agreements. We will discuss the content and origins of regime theory in contrast to "realism" next week, but here is a quick introduction.
The classic definition of a regime was given by Stephen Krasner is a seminal issue of the journal International Organization in 1983.[1] He said a regime is
"an international regime is a set of principles -- explicit or implicit, norms, rules and decision-making procedures around which expectations of actors (States) converge in order to coordinate actors behavior with respect to a concern to them all.”
Note the components here:
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principles,
norms, rules and decision-making procedures. These are elements of
institutions, of regularity.
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"Around
which expectations of actors" It is about
expectations rather than actions. It is cognitive and perceptual rather than
active.
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"converge
in order to coordinate" The agreement is to
mutually affect possible behavior by indirect means rather than by
authoritative means.
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"a
concern to them all". The collective pay-off is considered more
important than the individual interest.
An international regime is an attempt to build an institutional structure of regulation without altering the basic institutional structure of the international system, based on State Sovereignty. Within that context, international public institutions have a unique character, to which we will return shortly.
The idea of regime theory was a response, ironically, not to the problem of creating a coordinated response to actor's behavior in the WMD field, but rather to explain what was happening in such agreements as the Law of the Sea and the environment. The realist model did not have a place for these kinds of agreements since arguably many of them were not in a narrow sense in the national interest of the most powerful States. It also came at a point when the neo-functionalists, scholars who saw an increasing amount of "supranationalism" in trade and the economy (e.g. the European Union) but where the main building blocks were still state sovereignty. Regime theory, in a Hegelian sense, was the synthesis between the realist thesis and the functionalist antithesis.
Regime theory went out of fashion by the end of the 1980's, replaced by new terms, like international political economy and "new institutionalism". The late Susan Strange's critique of regime theory in the 1983 volume of the academic journal International Organization, "Cave Hic Dragones!" was used by many as the definitive put-down. The problem with the concept is that it was difficult for theorists to apply in practice. While treaty-based regimes, like the Law of the Sea, could fit, most international agreements were more amorphous. There were some efforts to examine "trade regimes" like the automobile industry, but they were particularly elusive. Regime theory fell from favor.
Clearly the neo-conservatives in the United States government during the Reagan and Bush administrations were happy about that development. So would the Tea Party in the United States today, as well as the former US President.
But were they right?
One of the problems of all of the main IR theories, including regime theory, is that they do not have much of a place for international organizations. In the IR world, States perform their stately dances, but no one notices the orchestra. (In fact, there may be an assumption that the music is in the heads of the dancers, which would explain why IR is not like the Opernball in Vienna). As a scholar I missed almost all of the controversies that seem to inflame bodies like the International Studies Association and the APSA. I was working inside the United Nations Secretariat and regime theory resonated with me. It provided some very useful explanatory tools for our role. Let's elaborate:
Again, using Krasner's original definitions, the elements of a regime are the following:
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Principles
are beliefs of fact, causation and rectitude;
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Norms
are standards of behavior defined in terms of rights and obligations;
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Rules
are specific prescriptions and prohibitions with respect to actor's behavior;
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Procedures
are the prevailing practices for making and implementing collective choices.
To anyone who has participated, over a long period of time, in multilateral negotiations, this is exactly the order in which the negotiations proceed. You first have to have an agreement that a problem exists, its causal parameters and the need to resolve it through collective action ("rectitude"). You then have to define the normative parameters. Then you have to agree on rules and finally you have to set up institutions that will enable collective choices. A regime is not really complete until all four stages have been agreed, although things can begin to happen after stage two.
A complicating factor is that sometimes regimes overlap and often this overlapping makes the agreement process complex. In international negotiation this is called "linkage", where an issue in one subject area is connected with an issue in another and both have to be resolved together if either is to be agreed.
At the international level, regimes are usually embodied in conventions, multilateral treaties that are binding on their parties. This is not completely true, since there can be regimes that are formed somewhat less formally by less-binding kinds of agreements as long as the States act as though they are bound by them. Still, fully-articulated regimes inevitably have some form of treaty basis, simply because this is the only way to make compliance by states legally (as opposed to morally) binding.
Applied to the issue of WMD, we can see that there was a consensus that the existence and development of WMD were destabilizing international relations and threatened to produce unacceptable outcomes. There was an agreement that the weapons could produce mass destruction (i.e. they worked). There was an agreement that eliminating these weapons would reduce the threat of conflict (causation). And that eliminating them was good.
There was also agreement that states who had WMD should not develop them further or give them, or their components, to states that did not have them and that steps should be taken to eliminate and destroy them. States had an obligation never to use them. States who lacked them had an obligation not to try to obtain them.
So far, so good. These principles and norms are embodied in each of the four WMD conventions. These are:
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The
1968 Treaty on the
Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), which entered into force in
1970 and currently has 191 parties.
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The
1996 Comprehensive
Nuclear-Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), which is not yet in force but has 183
signatories and 166 ratifications, including 36 of the 44 annex II countries.
But it will not come into force until the remaining annex II countries ratify
(China, Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Egypt, India, Iran, Israel,
Pakistan and the United States of America).
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The
1992 Convention
on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of
Chemical Weapons and on Their Destruction that entered into force in 1997
and has 192 parties. Only two signatory states have not ratified the convention
(Israel and Myanmar) and only three states are neither signatories or parties
(Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Egypt and South Sudan). And
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The
1972 Convention on the
Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological
(Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on their Destruction that entered into
force in 1975 and has 110 signatories and 178 parties. Sixteen states are not
even signatories, mostly from the Pacific, but including Israel. Signatory
states that have yet to become parties include Egypt and the Syrian Arab
Republic.
All of these were negotiated within the context of the United Nations Conference on Disarmament and therefore have linkages to a broader potential regime. However, the extent to which this regime is complete is highly variable. What has not been completely agreed is the third and fourth stages, the rules and the procedures, and that is where the issue of verification comes into play.
Of course, if one of the major players, like the United States, suddenly changes and rejects either the principles or norms, the regime might become untenable. However, here, even the Neo-Cons in the United States have discovered how hard it is to tear down a regime once it is in place since the regimes are linked and messing with one regime can have unpleasant consequences for others.
A similar pattern has taken place in the area of climate change. Most of the debate, however, has centered on the principles and norms. The rules aspect has been reflected only in the Kyoto Protocol and the procedures can only be worked out after the rules are agreed, probably universally. This is what is being negotiated in the Conferences of Parties to the UNFCCC, including the Paris Agreement reached in December 2015. But here, like the WMD regime, the issue is also verification.
In the early disarmament treaties of the Twentieth Century, following the realist model, it was assumed that the agreements would be self-policing. States, run by gentlemen, would simply honor their agreements. Unfortunately, many of the states, it seems, were not run by gentlemen. And if we think it is only rogue regimes that are like this, consider the unilateral abrogation of treaties by the Bush Administration in the United States or by the Trump Administration, or, for that matter, the Putin Administration in Russia.
There are a series of dilemmas in implementation that have to be addressed, if compliance is to take place.
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States
involved in the elimination of WMD confront almost a classic version of the
Prisoner's Dilemma game. While the best outcome is that both parties
disarm, what happens if one does and the other doesn't? In that case the
one that doesn't will dominate the one that did, thus increasing the cost of
compliance. The same holds true for climate change.
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States
may be run by leaders who are unscrupulous and irrational and who might not
comply. If one of these "rogue states" acquires WMD, they could
wreak their irrational national interest on all states that had complied.
Thus, there is a reason for non-rogue states not to eliminate their WMD.
Similarly, a state could claim to reduce emissions (and claim exemption from
sanctions) and undercut the climate change regime.
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Non-state
actors who, by definition, are not bound by international conventions, might
obtain WMD from state or other non-state actors and pose a threat. In climate
change these non-state actors would be multi-national corporations who could
shield themselves in states with weak compliance mechanisms.
So, what to do? The answer is to have rules and procedures that can credibly verify that everyone is complying with their obligations. How this is done is very tricky.
On the one hand, the international system is based on sovereign states, so an intrusive verification system would threaten the wider issue of sovereignty. (E.g. a verification system that might lead to disclosure of trade secrets in the biochemical industry was considered unacceptable by the US in the case of the BWC, or that States were cheating on their obligations to reduce emissions.)
On the other hand, a system that relied on verification by one or the other of the states parties would not be trustworthy (e.g. Iraq argued that US inspectors in UNSCOM were actually spies, and it seems that some were; or that the emission inspectors were trying to make countries like the BASICs look bad).
Additionally, if adherence to the system were less than universal, there would be states whose behavior could not be verified.
The three disarmament treaties that provide for verification all try to cope with this, are intended to be universal, and, taken together constitute a kind of verification regime. (The BWC will eventually have one, and it will be based on the precedents of the other three.) The same could be agreed for the UNFCCC and its protocols.
The verification regime consists of a series of rules about what States are expected to do and a series of procedures to show that they are complying with these expectations. Since the WMD verification regime is in place (and climate change isn't yet), I will focus on it. Each WMD treaty is a bit different, but they have common elements in the procedures to be followed. In most cases, the procedures have not been tested. However, the experience of the United Nations Special Commission in Iraq has given very valuable lessons on the efficacy of the different elements. (There is a very good book on the UNSCOM experience, on which I have drawn, in Graham S. Pearson, The UNSCOM Saga: Chemical and Biological Weapons Non-Proliferation, London: Macmillan, 1999.) The experience of UNMOVIC will have been the same. Mohammad ElBaradei's memoir, The Age of Deception: Nuclear Diplomacy in Treacherous Times describes this well. You can look at coverage of the OPCW inspection in Syria for information on that. And, of course, the issue of verification has been a critical one in the Iran nuclear negotiations and in its agreed result.
The elements in the regime are designed to allow for independent verification without, however, intruding too greatly on State sovereignty.
The basic element is the declaration. Each State agrees to declare whether it has WMD or their components, how many they have and where they are located. The initial declarations set the baseline for determining the pace at which destruction is taking place. There are international procedures to determine the criteria and format of reporting and international organizations analyze the declarations to see whether they conform to the agreed criteria and formats.
The difficulty, of course, is that States might lie on their declarations. Iraq, for example, provided the IAEA with correct information about its declared program, but had a parallel, undeclared program. Had a bit more time passed, the undeclared program (involving enriching uranium) could have developed a capacity to enrich uranium to make it fissile which, added to that in the declared program, would have allowed Iraq to develop a usable nuclear weapon. And, on biological weapons, they simply lied about everything, as UNSCOM found out in 1998. Part of the controversy over the Iran agreement has been centered on whether all of the facilities have been declared (and therefore automatically inspected).
The issue of verifying that the WMD are not proliferating is addressed by monitoring trade in certain commodities. For nuclear weapons, there is a system of reporting on all movement of nuclear material from one country to another. Exporters are required to obtain licenses and the quantities exported under these licenses are reported to the IAEA, either directly or through subregional authorities (as in the EU). In the case of chemical weapons, so-called precursor chemicals are required to be licensed for export and these trades are to be reported to the OPCW. And there is an agreement among many states (the so-called Australia group) to report on precursors for both biological and chemical weapons.
The dilemma here is that there can be a time-lag in reporting and the material may have been shipped and received before this is noticed (as happened in the case of chemical and biological weapons in Iraq.) Also, there is a problem if some states do not report. Or that the shipment goes through third-parties who do not report.
At the same time, there are agreements, like the Australia group, that license the export of WMD technologies and help control it, although the arrangements are not foolproof.
However, they did serve to show the impossibility of the presumed effort of Iraq to obtain uranium in Niger, which was found subsequently to have been based on forged documents.
In order to provide a means to verify that does not depend on either declarations or accounting, procedures of different kinds have been agreed that allow indirect monitoring (in the sense of remote systems that are automatic). The CTBT is almost entirely about indirect monitoring. The International Monitoring System is a complex of seismic, radionuclide and maritime remote sensors that can detect automatically whether a nuclear explosion has taken place by sending data via satellite to the International Data Centre in Vienna, where analysts can determine whether the pattern of the explosion or the radionuclides came from a nuclear source.
In the wake of the Iraq problem, the new verification protocol for the IAEA provides for remote sensing at nuclear sites as a supplement to declarations and inspections. Putting these in place in Iran is one of the issues that was negotiated and agreed.
The ultimate means of verification is inspections. The three treaties with verification components all provide for on-site inspections. In the case of the IAEA, there are both regular (namely programmed) and unannounced inspections. This model is also foreseen in the CWC. In the case of the CTBT, the on-site inspection is triggered whenever one of the States alleges that another state has detonated a nuclear weapon. A similar challenge procedure exists in CWC and was used in Syria.
The problems with inspections have to do with the extent to which state sovereignty precludes surprises and the extent to which inspectors will have full access. The Iraqis were masters at trying to hide things from inspectors and a major change in the new IAEA protocol had to do with giving inspectors multiple entry visas so that they can appear unannounced. This issue is going on in the IAEA Board of Governors, as efforts are being made to encourage Iran to sign on to enhanced Safeguards.
Still, one of the problems noted with the BWC Protocol was that it was too restrictive to enable real inspection of large facilities (too little time).
For all of the conventions that have verification elements, a public international organization has been given the responsibility for managing verification. As with any institutional development, the newer institutions have learned from the older ones. It should be emphasized, however, that each institution is independent of the others and, to some observers, this is a disadvantage. There are many reasons why this took place: different professional bases, different patterns of states parties, the desire to have organizations located in different countries.
For example, when the CTBT was adopted, one idea was for the administration to be located in the IAEA which, after all, dealt with the NPT and things nuclear. The counter argument was that the IAEA lacked a capacity in the seismic field. It was also said that until the treaty entered into force, it was a temporary organization and should not be part of a permanent one. Cruel people said that making it a separate entity would create more jobs at the senior level. Even crueler people said that by making CTBTO a separate entity meant that staff didn't have to be paid at UN Scale, thus saving money.
The IAEA was established in order to facilitate (and, to an extent, regulate) the use of nuclear energy. In terms of WMD, its charge was to ensure that nuclear material for peaceful purposes was not diverted for other purposes. It did not, at the time, have a mandate to deal with existing nuclear weapons (that were, at the time, in the hands of the Permanent Five (the US, the then USSR, UK, France and China.)) Under the NPT, it was charged with monitoring nuclear facilities to verify that no diversion was taking place. The program to do this was called, appropriately, Safeguards. Each party to the IAEA Statute was expected to reach a safeguards agreement that would specify how the Agency would monitor and inspect nuclear facilities. In the wake of the Gulf War and the discovery of the clandestine Iraqi nuclear program, the safeguards procedures, after some study (under what was called the 92+3 program), were further strengthened. And the IAEA, in the context of UNMOVIC proved its capacity.
As nuclear energy has, for the time being, become reduced in importance in the private sector and certain countries, the IAEA has increasingly become the focus for intellectual and scientific work on things nuclear. It is the classical technical agency and one of its activities consists of research on new methods of monitoring, including the development of equipment and software.
The CTBTO in Vienna is probably the most complete verification organization. It's Provisional Technical Secretariat (of the Preparatory Commission for the CTBTO) is in the process of putting into place what one of their staff called "the world's first international burglar alarm". The premise is that if States cannot test nuclear weapons, they will not be able to convince anyone that (a) they have weapons and (b) that if they claim to have them, that they work. This in itself will help prevent the proliferation of these weapons. The International Monitoring System, designed by seismologists, will be able to detect when a building is dynamited in downtown Syracuse and, from the patterns, be sure that the explosion was not nuclear.
The treaty will only come into force, however, when all of the States who were deemed to have the potential to develop nuclear weapons have ratified. Most are waiting on the United States, which, of course, has the most weapons and does the most testing, although it had a moratorium throughout the Clinton presidency and still does today. There were fears, however, that the Bush administration actually wanted to be able to test nuclear weapons and that is why they did not ratify the treaty. The Obama administration indicated its intention to ask the Congress to ratify the treaty in the context of its larger nuclear non-proliferation objective. Good luck, given that Republicans in Congress do not like to ratify treaties of any kind (they have ratified less than half of the UN human rights treaties, not including those dealing with women, children, persons with disabilities as we will see later).
The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in the Hague has the task of monitoring the CWC. There are two types of chemical weapons: those used for warfare and those used by the police (tear gas, for example) but the production of the latter could mask the production of the former. The focus of verification is on precursor chemicals and the chemical factories in the country. The problem is that most precursors and most facilities are "dual use", that is they could be used for both peaceful and non-peaceful production. The task of the OPCW is to look at the data, and inspect the facilities, to be sure that it is the former use rather than the latter. They also have to oversee the destruction of existing weapons, not an easy process in the best of times. (It is interesting that is much more costly to destroy most WMD than to build them in the first place.) The organization has had major problems (including having its executive head fired.)
The BWC has no verification institution. The original treaty essentially passed the buck to the UN Security Council.
ARTICLE VI
(1) Any State Party to this Convention which finds that any other State Party is acting in breach of obligations deriving from the provisions of the Convention may lodge a complaint with the Security Council of the United Nations. Such a complaint should include all possible evidence confirming its validity, as well as a request for its consideration by the Security Council.
(2) Each State Party to this Convention undertakes to cooperate in carrying out any investigation which the Security Council may initiate, in accordance with the provisions of the Charter of the United Nations, on the basis of the complaint received by the Council. The Security Council shall inform the States Parties to the Convention of the results of the investigation.
Given the problems of the Security Council, it is not clear what this would mean.
Part of the problem with verification of this treaty was a belief on the part of the United States under the Bush administration that verification is, in fact, impossible. As an article in the July 26, 2001 issue of the Financial Times by Frances Williams and Richard Wolff put it:
At the heart of the US opposition is the belief that it is impossible to construct an effective inspections regime to detect biological weapons. Laboratories developing and producing such weapons look no different from facilities producing legitimate products such as vaccines. The US says the proposed inspection regime would give ample time for those guilty of pursuing biological warfare to destroy the evidence and mask their activities. "You could produce biological weapons in this office and you could get rid of the evidence in five minutes," said one administration official.
To underline their concerns, US officials pointed to the failure of United Nations weapons inspectors in Iraq to detect Saddam Hussein's biological weapons operations. [After the fact, the US found, among other things, that the biological weapons operations were not detected because they did not exist.]
Against that, the Bush administration said that the proposed inspections would undermine its own biotech and drugs industries. By imposing regular site visits, it says, trade secrets would be compromised under the guise of arms control. Officials also claim inspections would compromise US efforts to defend itself against a biological attack, as US defense facilities would come under scrutiny. However, other countries have taken the view that while the draft protocol would be no guarantee against cheating, it would enhance security by acting as a further deterrent to the use or production of biological weapons.
Disarmament campaigners point out that many of the deficiencies in the inspection regime were put there at the insistence of the US, concerned to protect military and commercial secrets.
The problem is that, without some international institution to do the verification, the problems noted will never be overcome. The US, the article continues, suggests as an alternative, a voluntary code of conduct. Good luck.
So now we finally come to the question, to what extent does the viability of the verification regime depend on public management?
The first point is that management of international public organizations is qualitatively different from the management of national public sector institutions or the private sector. What is learned from that national experience is only partially applicable to international management. Management of, by definition, non-sovereign international public organizations means that the direct enforcement of decisions is impossible, revenue cannot be collected, national political processes cannot be tapped and, most significantly, managers cannot appear to manage. If one applies the open systems approach to international public administration, one will learn that internal management is far, far less important than dealing with the external environment. In fact, the external environment is virtually the only space for management.
A second point is that who the managers are is not completely clear. On the one hand, they would seem to be the civil servants who staff the secretariats of the international organizations. Yet, constitutionally, it is the boards of governors and executive boards who are formally responsible for decision-making. In practice, as we will see, it is usually the civil servants, visibly the executive head, working with the elected government representatives (in the form of the chairperson of the executive board) who are the real decision-makers.
A third factor is that the organizations have to ensure geographic balance, in order to ensure credibility. The senior positions are distributed among different countries. For example, the IAEA today has a DG from Argentina (Latin America and the Caribbean). The DG is always from a country with nuclear knowledge, but not a nuclear power, the DDG for technical cooperation is from China, the DDG for nuclear energy is from the Russian Federation, the DDG for safety is from France, the DDG for nuclear sciences and applications is from Morocco, the DDG for safeguards is from Italy and the DDG for management is from the United States. Keeping these different nationalities working on a common basis is not easy.
The success of any organization, and especially of the verification organizations, depends on the ability of those managers to run their institutions in such a way that the tasks are carried out successfully. This is what the course is really about.
Let's look at a couple of the real issues today in WMD.
Leadership in an international organization is very different from that in a national government, a private sector corporation or an NGO. Leaders of international organizations have to lead without appearing to. If they take too many positions, they risk becoming part of the problem rather than part of the solution.
A case in point was Boutros Ghali, the SG before
Kofi Annan, who tried to please everyone but pleased no one. It was
largely a matter of style. Another is Mary Robinson, who as UN High
Commissioner for Human Rights, reflecting a moralist's view of human rights,
also managed to offend many countries, including especially the United States.
This contiinues to be true with the next High
Commissioner, Michelle Bachelet, who was previously the head of UN-Women and,
on two occasions, President of Chile.
The current High Commissioner is Volker Türk
of Austria. Prior to this, Mr. Türk was the Under-Secretary-General for Policy in the
Executive Office of the United Nations Secretary-General where he coordinated
global policy work. He also ensured UN system-wide coordination in the
follow-up to the Secretary-General’s “Call to Action for Human Rights” and his
report, Our Common Agenda, which sets out a vision to tackle the world’s
interconnected challenges on foundations of trust, solidarity and human rights.
He previously served as Assistant Secretary-General for Strategic Coordination
in the Executive Office of the Secretary-General (2019-2021). And before that he was Assistant High
Commissioner for Protection in the Office of the United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Geneva (2015-2019), Mr. Türk played a key role in the development of the landmark
Global Compact on Refugees.
In the case of verification, we have two quite different approaches: Mohammed El-Baradei of the IAEA (like his predecessor, Hans Blix who headed UNMOVIC) was very low key and correct. His successor, Yukiya Amano from Japan, was also a diplomat as was his successor, Rafael Masriano Grossi. The first head of the OPCW, Bustani, was direct (he was an ex-ambassador) and was fired, the first elected head of an international organization to meet that fate. The first two heads of the CTBTO, Wolfgang Hoffman and Tibor Toth, were both diplomats (Toth was the main negotiator in the failed effort to give the BWC a verification organization). The next head, Lassina Zerbo was from Burkina Faso, who had been the director of the CTBTO International Data Centre from 2004-2013. The current head is Robert Floyd from Australia.
The verification regime is one that is in many ways incomplete and evolving. Moreover, the funding of the system is not assured at all. And yet, the evolution of the system is one that is expected to take a long time (indeed, unlike national administration, where the time horizon is constrained by the electoral process, international administration can and must use a longer time horizon).
Each of the managers of the three verification institutions have to find a way to do real strategic planning in the face of uncertainty. The uncertainty has to do with issues of political support (who would have thought that George W, President 43, would take the exact opposite position on WMD as his father, President 41? And what was Donald Trump doing? How to deal with the Russian invasion of Ukraine?), finance and technological developments. Strategic planning means looking at a future desirable state and working back to the present by setting out things that need to happen.
A good example is the CTBT. The uncertainty lies in the date when the convention will come into force. As things now stand, this cannot happen until a president is able to convince the US Senate to ratify and this brings other other Annex II countries into agreement (and convincing Israel and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea to ratify will not be easy). One of the strange elements of the CTBT is that the monitoring system is expected to be in place on the date that the convention enters into force, so the estimated date for this is very important. A dilemma is that, as part of the compromise on staffing, governments stated that no staff could work longer than seven years. We will see how stupid that idea was when we look at the personnel issues; If correct, the day the convention comes into force, all of the experienced staff will have left. So, the Executive Directors, first Wolfgang Hoffman then Tibor Toth and then Lassina Zerbo, worked on a plan to phase in the system on the basis of an expected date based on limited fantasy.
Another example is OPCW. In a speech the year before he was fired, the former Director-General, Mr. Bustani, noted that plans had to be made to place the mandated inspections into effect on schedule. Yet, there was an assumption of a certain proportion of posts being empty in appropriating funds. The assumptions were wrong and not enough staff was available to carry out the plan.
In the case of the IAEA, the Director-General, Mohammed El-Baradei, had to plan to implement the results of the 92+3 reforms, but was told that he could have zero real budgetary growth. His staff indicated that to improve safeguards, additional resources would be needed. How to plan? (Well, he did fairly well, both politically and administratively, and was given a 15% increase in real terms, mostly for expanded safeguards). Because of the increasing importance of nuclear power, which is green, in the context of climate change, El-Baradei undertook an effort to develop a long-range plan to 2020. It is still being followed by his successors.
As you can see, much of the intellectual work is actually constrained by mundane details of finance and budget. Unlike a national administration that can levy taxes and receive revenue, or a private sector entity that can raise capital by selling shares, an international organization is dependent on the funds that the national legislatures of its members are willing to appropriate. Only one UN organization has to date been allowed to charge user fees (and it, WIPO, is doing very well) and only the Bretton Woods institutions are able to finance administrative costs out of interest income. This is somewhat of an anomaly. In effect the member states determine how much they are willing to give to the organization and, within that envelope, a budget can be drawn. Usually it is expressed as a kind of zero growth (real or nominal).
Convincing the member states that the budget needs are real, that adequate financial probity exists and that the money is well-spent is a major management imperative. So too is coping with the problems of late payment. All UN organizations use a calendar year budget, but few member states do. (The US fiscal year begins in October, whereas the UN systems begin in January, which means that the US payment is always late and is often based on a “continuing resolution” since the budget cannot be agreed by the Congress). The Financial Crisis of the United Nations has been an agenda item since the 1950's which probably makes it the longest-running crisis in history. It is essentially a cash-flow crisis and is continuing today.
El Baradei was considered fortunate in that for the last couple of years in his term, he had been given a zero real growth budget (others got zero nominal, which means a reduction in real terms). He also knew that this was not sufficient. So, what he did was to institute results-based budgeting, which the major contributors wanted but the Group of 77 didn't, and then asked for additional funds. And got a 15% real increase.
A main reason for having an international organization responsible for verification is that it is more credible than a national organization. Credibility is dependent on a combination of political neutrality and technical competence. This means hiring and socializing technically competent persons who will have the characteristics of neutral diplomats. Finding a way to achieve both is a major problem of personnel administration. It is a particularly acute problem in the verification organizations. Two stories illustrate this:
The IAEA has a strong policy of rotation. The assumption is that a staff member is only there temporarily. I have always found that a bit stupid: for many jobs, you want career people. I was told that the original reason for this was a desire to ensure that the safeguards department remained neutral and rotation was expected to solve this. The reason was that at the beginning of the Agency only the US and the USSR had technicians who could be inspectors, and many of these were in the intelligence services. Rotation was expected to prevent the Safeguards Department from becoming mini-CIA's or mini-KGB's. The irony is that the Agency is the only place in the world where inspectors can be hired, the Agency trains the inspectors and as a result the Safeguards Department has a very high percentage of staff on long-term (i.e. greater than seven years) contracts.
When the CTBTO was started on a provisional basis, almost all of the staff was new to international service. They tried to bring their national approaches to bear, and the result was not pretty. One solution was to have an outside consultant facilitate management retreats where they could learn how international management was different. Over time, I have noticed that the senior managers are becoming more adept at navigating the international external environment. The irony is that the rotation policy has already forced most of these to leave, just as they were becoming adept.
A similar problem has been reported regarding the OPCW.
I said that the verification institutions are a bit like the orchestra at a dance. It has to enable the dance, but not dominate it. In some respects, the institution and its management have to function as though there was no orchestra at all. In practice, most international civil servants are anonymous. Only the executive heads are noticeable, and some of them like to be in the background also. We will explore this matter further in the course. It is why I titled my book Invisible Governance.
We haven't talked much about non-governmental organizations today. In fact, they have not been major players in the WMD question, although they have been major players in conventional disarmament (like anti-personnel landmines). It was the NGO's of the nuclear freeze movement that helped promote the CTBT, peace campaigners had much to do with the NPT. The Drug and Chemical Industries, who would be considered part of civil society, have had a lot to do with blocking agreement on verification. Part of good management of the verification regime is bringing the NGO's on board. As we will see later, there are similar problems in managing NGO's. It is a subject to which we will return in subsequent sessions.
All of the issues that affect the verification regime for WMD apply to climate
change. The issues are complex, there are significant linkages. The amount of
money involved is immense (much greater than for WMD). There is a different
institutional structure -- the main actors right now are UNEP, WMO and, most
importantly, the Secretariat of the UNFCCC.
A new funding organization, the Green
Climate Fund, has been set up but is still not working well (it was not
helped when the United States in the Trump Administration said that it would
not contribute since it was withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, although that
has changed back). When the negotiations that started in Bali and have
continued through Poznan, Copenhagen, Cancun, Durban, Doha and Lima leading to
the agreement in Paris, there will eventually be a new institution (or revised
existing institution) charged with verification. Article 13 of the
Paris Agreement specifies that there needs to be a transparency
arrangement. However, how it will be organized (and what it is supposed to do)
is still being decided, complicated of course by the withdrawal of the United
States from the agreement and the resignation, in July 2018, of the executive
director. He was followed by Yannick Glemarec, a
French national, as the Executive Director
of the Green Climate Fund. He was appointed by the GCF Board at its
22nd meeting and took office on 3 April 2019. He was the
third Executive Director of the Fund.
He had 30 years of international experience in climate change, development and
finance, and their interrelationships. He served as UN Assistant
Secretary-General and Deputy Executive Director for Policy and Programme in UN Women from 2015 to 2018. He left the
office in 2023 and the Executive Director ad interim is Henry Gonzalez, the
Deputy Executive Director who is from Costa Rica. The Secretariat
staff shows the normal structure with geographical distribution.
We will be starting the course with a simulation. We are going to assume that agreement has been reached to establish a Climate Change Emissions Verification Organization (CCEVO) [pronounced See See Eee Vee Oh] as part of the UNFCCC Secretariat. You will all be part of the management team setting it up. You will be doing its first five-year medium-term plan for the period 2024-2028. Assignments will be sent to you weekly by e-mail or posted on the site for the first six weeks of the seminar and you will have some homework. Part of each session will be devoted to discussing that work with the Consultant, a professor from the Brooks School at Cornell, who has been hired to oversee the planning process.