After Decades, Accord Reached on Chemical Arms Draft Treaty

After more than two decades of negotiations, the U.N. Conference on Disarmament reached a historic agreement Friday on a final draft treaty for a worldwide ban on chemical weapons.

The draft treaty, running to nearly 200 pages, bans the acquisition, development, production, transfer and use of chemical weapons throughout the world.

It also provides for the destruction of all chemical weapons stocks and production facilities within 10 years after the agreement takes effect.

Further, it requires the monitoring of national chemical industries to ensure compliance, through both routine and so-called challenge inspections. Under the latter, countries would have to open up to international examination any facilities suspected of producing chemical weapons.

According to negotiators, the verification measures are among the most binding ever included in a treaty.

With the approval of the 39 member nations in the Geneva-based Disarmament Conference, the language of the draft treaty will be presented to the U.N. General Assembly in New York on Aug. 26. Later, individual nations will begin signing the agreement. It takes effect when at least 65 have signed, a process that could take up to two years.

U.S. Ambassador Stephen J. Ledogar said in a telephone interview: “This is a substantive landmark. We have high hopes we’ll get everyone eventually to agree to the treaty text.”

The draft, according to official sources, was a compromise text put together by Ambassador Adolf Ritter von Wagner, the German chairman of the Disarmament Conference’s working group on chemical weapons.

Ledogar, the U.S. chief negotiator, called on all 39 member countries to accept the treaty text, which must either be accepted or rejected in full, since no further revisions will be made.

Some nations involved in the negotiations, such as China and Pakistan, had wanted some of the language watered down, sources in Geneva said, because they feared overly intrusive inspections of their chemical industries. When it is taken up in New York, the sources said, these nations might decide not to sign.

But major powers such as the United States, Russia, India and the European Community nations have agreed to the language.

The new treaty will replace the Geneva Convention of 1925 banning the use of chemical weapons. That treaty was largely observed until the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War, during which Iraq used chemical weapons against both Iranian troops and some of its own political dissidents.

Treaty negotiators reached a critical turning point last year, officials said, when the United States agreed to stringent verification procedures, over the objections of some firms in the American chemical industry.