For decades the Achilles heel of the Chemical Weapons Convention was the failure of key Middle Eastern states to ratify it. Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Libya and Syria have all been known to possess chemical weapons (CW) at times, with Egypt and Israel now sharing a regional monopoly on these weapons of mass destruction. Syria’s powerful CW capability, backed up by tailor-made Russian missiles, was a threat to Israel’s population centres and would have been a major strategic factor in a war with Israel.
Like other disarmament and arms-control treaties negotiated 40 or so years ago, the convention critically assumed that only governments would be capable of developing, producing and using CW. That assumption is now outdated: new technologies and production methods facilitate the production of CW in backyard laboratories, and violent, non-state organisations have become increasingly powerful, organised and well-funded.
Given that Iraq, Libya and Syria have recently acceded to the convention, only Angola, Egypt, Israel, Myanmar, North Korea and South Sudan now need to join for state membership to be universal. But if non-state entities, such as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State (IS), are capable of developing and producing CW, is the convention obsolescent?
