Reflections of a negotiator on the BTWC Ad Hoc Group
Introduction to Historical Notes, Issue #3 The third issue of the Historical Notes series was prepared by Dr Robert (Bob) J. Mathews. From 1984 until 2017, he served as Scientific Adviser to Australian delegations during the negotiation and implementation of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) and efforts to strengthen the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC). In this third issue of Historical Notes, he reviews the efforts undertaken by the states parties to the BTWC to equip the convention with verification tools and set up an international organisation to oversee its implementation. As soon as the treaty negotiations came to …
CBW in Regional Disarmament in the Middle East and North Africa
Just published (Open access): Jean Pascal Zanders (2022): Chemical and Biological Weapons in RegionalDisarmament in the Middle East and North Africa, Journal for Peace and Nuclear Disarmament,DOI: 10.1080/25751654.2022.2092368 From the introduction: In November 2019, the Conference on the Establishment of a Middle East Zone Free of Nuclear Weapons and Other Weapons of Mass Destruction held its first session. The new series of annual one-week meetings to eliminate non-conventional arms – essentially nuclear weapons (NW), and to a lesser extent chemical and biological weapons (CBW) – followed the acceptance by the First Committee of the UN General Assembly (UNGA) of Egypt’s …
Catapulting Cadavers: A Medieval Practice of Biological Warfare?
Introduction to Historical Notes, Issue #2 The Mongol siege of Caffa in 1346 is closely associated with the spread of the plague epidemic to continental Europe and northern Africa. A major Genoese trading post in the Crimea, its citizens escaped via the Black Sea and the Bosporus, eventually bringing the Black Death to Mediterranean ports from where it spread inland or onward to coastal cities in west and north Europe, eventually reaching even Iceland. Bad as the medieval pandemic was, its transfer to the Mediterranean basin some authors have attributed to an act of warfare: the catapulting of plague-ridden corpses …
Prelude to chemical weapons use?
Late yesterday evening, adviser to Ukraine’s Minister of Internal Affairs Anton Garashchenko tweeted that Russia was using chemical weapons (CW) against the defenders of the encircled Black Sea town of Mariupol. Another statement, reportedly from the Azov regiment – notorious for its neo-Nazi ideology – defending the city, mentioned respiratory failure and vestibulo-atactic syndrome. There are references to dissemination of a toxic substance by a drone, but also that the incident has had no disastrous health consequences. Clearly, whatever the incident may have been, it is not (yet) a situation whereby Russia has unleashed CW, as a British tabloid was …
