JPPR – The 4 letters that shaped my career
Dazed. Shocked. Stunned. Does any one of these words even begin to convey my reaction when around noon on 23 April I received the phone call informing me of Julian’s passing, having lost the battle against COVID-19 the night before? When I entered the field of chemical and biological warfare in 1986, his name immediately stood out. Julian Perry Robinson, a name immediately associated with the Stockholm International Peace research Institute (SIPRI) and the University of Sussex, near Brighton in the south of England. Our first encounter was in 1989. In hindsight, it was unsurprisingly at a workshop bringing together …
A Middle East Zone Free from Non-conventional Weapons (3)
Part 3: Defining the Middle East, a loaded question In November 2019 a conference at the United Nations in New York (report here) marked a fresh round of diplomatic efforts to eliminate non-conventional arms – essentially nuclear weapons, and to a lesser extent chemical and biological weapons (CBW) – from the military arsenals in the Middle East. As indicated in the second part of this series, participants in the new conference series depart from the definition of the Middle East used by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). At the UN Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) seminar ‘The Middle …
A Middle East Zone Free from Non-conventional Weapons (1)
Part 1: A new process to disarm the Middle East In November 2019 a conference at the United Nations in New York marked a fresh round of diplomatic efforts to eliminate non-conventional arms – essentially nuclear weapons, and to a lesser extent chemical and biological weapons (CBW) – from the military arsenals in the Middle East. The previous initiative died in 2015 as the review conference (RevCon) of the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) failed to agree on a consensus document. The new series of annual meetings takes place outside the NPT RevCon cycle, which consists of a quinquennial …