Transparency in Armaments

These historical insights on the treatment in the CD of agenda item 7, Transparency in Armaments, were offered by UNIDIR as background to the debate on that issue in the Conference on 14 August 2012 under the presidency of Ambassador Jean-Hughes Simon-Michel (France).

During the 1991 session of UNGA the EU and Japan sponsored a resolution on transparency (46/36L). Recalling the 1990 Gulf War, the resolution asserted that no single state especially in areas of tension should be able to strive for levels of armaments that did not bear any relationship to its self-defence needs.  The CD was requested to address the question of the excessive and destabilizing accumulation of arms and to elaborate universal and non-discriminatory practical means to increase openness and transparency in this field.

Initially, there was no consensus in the CD on inscribing this issue as an agenda item. However, agreement was eventually reached to hold informal meetings chaired by a Special Coordinator. In 1993 the CD established an Ad Hoc Committee on Transparency in Armaments. Disagreement soon emerged over whether resolution 46/36L did or did not limit the mandate just to the UN Register of Conventional Arms. Some members took the view that the subsidiary body should focus on the gradual expansion of the Register to include all categories and types of arms including WMD. Other states, however, opposed inclusion of WMD in the Register because to do so would imply international acceptance of transfers of such weapons.

Work in the Ad Hoc Committee came to an end in 1995 when members were unable to reach agreement on its re-establishment. Since then, CD delegations, as with agenda items 5 and 6, have not envisaged re-convening a subsidiary body, preferring instead the appointment of a Special Coordinator to seek the views of members on the most appropriate way to deal with this issue. The item has become a place of convenience for raising issues about conventional weapons rather than for seeking new agenda items to cover those issues.

This posting was published for UNIDIR by Tim Caughley, Resident Senior Fellow

More Unacceptable Harm

The second review conference of the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention commenced yesterday in Cartagena, Colombia, which is obviously this week’s big news on the multilateral conventional weapons front. Good luck to all of the folks over there and congratulations to a regime that despite its ongoing implementation challenges has retained its vitality after a decade and made a positive difference to people’s lives on the ground in many mine-affected countries. Even the United States – which, to date has resisted joining the regime – recognizes this: it’s attending the summit as an observer. (It would be even better if the US would choose to come in from the cold and join the treaty, which already has 156 state parties.)

We have a bit of a news of our own: the history I’ve been working on for the last two years of international efforts to deal with the humanitarian impacts of another problematic weapon, cluster munitions, is now printed.

The book is entitled Unacceptable Harm: A History of How the Treaty to Ban Cluster Munitions Was Won. The cover image (see above) is of a French F.1 ‘Ogre’ submunition, with the gracious permission of the French artist and photographer Raphael Dallaporta. There are also colour plates in the middle of the book, with some great images by the Norwegian photographer Werner Anderson and others. The book also has a foreword written by Dr. Eric Prokosch, one of the pioneer researchers on cluster munitions, and author of the classic book The Technology of Killing: A Military and Political History of Anti-Personnel Weapons (1995).

Unacceptable Harm explains how the Convention on Cluster Munitions was achieved through the ‘Oslo process’, a partnership of governments, international organizations and civil society not unlike the one that resulted in the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention in 1997. The book examines why it took the world so long to act on cluster munitions, why it eventually did, and what lessons banning cluster munitions might hold for future efforts on a pressing challenge of our time: protecting civilians from the effects of explosive weapons. (For further info on explosive weapons, see also Landmine Action's recent report).

The book will initially be launched in Geneva on 11 December, to be followed by events in Oslo and elsewhere in early 2010. Stay tuned to the blog for further updates.

John Borrie

Consensus rules the Arms Trade Treaty. Or does it?

The recent adoption of a United Nations resolution to produce legally binding international standards for the transfer of conventional arms is a real boost to the cause of international peace and security. Overwhelming support in the First Committee of the UN General Assembly for the negotiation of these new rules has set the scene for a series of preparatory meetings leading to the convening in 2012 of the United Nations Conference on the Arms Trade Treaty.

This is an important development on at least three levels. First, it surely reflects the international community’s new-found urgency for pursuing arms control, disarmament and non-proliferation initiatives. It follows hard on the heels of the Cluster Munitions Convention adopted in 2008. Russia and the United States in the meantime are negotiating radical cuts to their nuclear arsenals. Efforts are intensifying to resolve long-standing nuclear weapons differences with Iran and North Korea. Nations of Africa have just brought into force the Pelindaba Treaty, significantly increasing the nuclear-weapon-free areas of the world. And the Conference on Disarmament (CD) is on the threshold of pursuing, alongside other major issues, a global ban on the production of fissile materials, the essential ingredient of nuclear warheads.

The Arms Trade Treaty has thus clearly caught the mood. More significant – and this is the second level on which the resolution is so important – is the intrinsic worth of this initiative. As proponents of an arms trade treaty have made clear, with hundreds of thousands of people dying each year from armed violence “Governments must ensure that negotiations live up to the promise of setting the highest possible standards”.

This leads directly to the third noteworthy aspect of this development. The terms of the resolution require the 2012 Conference to achieve a strong and robust treaty “on the basis of consensus”. Are these aspirations contradictory? Is it impossible to live up to the “promise of setting the highest possible standards” if governments are only allowing themselves to reach an outcome to which none of them objects? Is this a prescription for a lowest common denominator outcome, rather than a strong and robust treaty?

The answer to these questions must, for the sake of all the victims of inadequate arms transfer controls and in the interest of sustaining the current global arms control and disarmament momentum, be a resounding “no”. The fateful words “on the basis of consensus” should be interpreted with circumspection. First, the rules of procedure of the 2012 Conference are yet to be drafted, let alone adopted. Second, the phrase “on the basis of consensus” cannot and must not be equated with, for example, the consensus rule in the CD’s rules of procedure which state baldly and without qualification that that body will “adopt its decisions by consensus”.

If the phrase in question does not mean the automatic application of the notion that the eventual draft of the Arms Trade Treaty will be adopted only if no State voices an objection to the text (and thus without voting), what does it mean? This remains to be settled by the governments that will participate in the elaboration of the new treaty under United Nations auspices.

It is to be hoped, however, that they will be guided by UN precedents. The Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea, for instance, proceeded to settle fundamental new laws governing all uses of the oceans through a procedure that contemplated voting but with a very significant rider. Before a matter of substance was put to the vote it was required that the Conference make a determination, by a two-thirds majority, that all efforts to reach general agreement had been exhausted. A Declaration, which was appended to the Rules of Procedure provided as follows: “Bearing in mind … the desirability of adopting a Convention on the Law of the Sea which will secure the widest possible acceptance, the Conference should make every effort to reach agreement on substantive matters by way of consensus and there should be no voting on such matters until all efforts at consensus have been exhausted.”

The Law of the Sea approach is the classic way of proceeding “on the basis of consensus”. Voting is a last resort. But it is not foreclosed. Even the UN Standard Rules of Procedure for UN Conferences envisage the possibility of a vote (Rule 51). And, to give a more recent example, the Rules of Procedure for the UN Conference on the Establishment of an International Criminal Court make it clear that if "in the consideration of any matter of substance, all feasible efforts to reach general agreement have failed, the President of the Conference shall consult the General Committee and recommend the steps to be taken, which may include the matter being put to the vote" (Rule 34.2).

The remote possibility of voting concentrates the minds and improves the ultimate product by raising the level at which compromise is finally brokered. Had this rule existed in the CD, the efforts made to reach consensus on the programme of work would patently not have spanned over a decade. (see my post of 18 June)

Let’s not beat about the bush. Some governments prefer outcomes that they see as being representative of the breadth of views in the international community, while others regard them as watered down outcomes. This is the quantitative approach: lower standards but with more adherents. It is the dichotomy represented on the one hand by the efforts of the parties to the Certain Conventional Weapons Convention (CCW) in dealing with landmines and cluster munitions, and on the other by the Ottawa and Oslo processes which have surpassed the CCW in terms of imposing higher standards - the qualitative approach.

With at least a third of a million people killed directly with conventional weapons and many more injured, abused, forcibly displaced and bereaved as a result of armed violence every year, the negotiators of the Arms Trade Treaty will surely be aspiring, as their recent decision envisages, to the highest possible common standards for regulating the transfer of conventional arms. It is to be hoped that as the work intensifies the negotiators will drive the process in an enlightened manner, taking along as many governments as possible but without succumbing to the tyranny of the minority.

This is a guest post by Tim Caughley. Tim is a Resident Senior Fellow at UNIDIR.

Photo Credit: " Knotted Gun at the United Nations" by Tankwart on Wikimedia Commons

What could the CCW do about improvised explosive devices?

If there is a weapon that reflects our times, it is the improvised explosive device (IED). These weapons come in myriad forms– whether it's the suicide bomber wearing an explosive vest approaching a checkpoint in Afghanistan, the command-detonated roadside bombs encountered by troops in Iraq or, indeed, the seizure of passenger planes in mid-air by hijackers to be used as flying bombs – as occurred on 911.

Most often on this blog, when we’ve provided commentary on the work of the UN Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW) it’s been with reference to its Group of Government Experts’ efforts on cluster munitions. However, the CCW is a framework treaty that contains five protocols, two of which – Amended Protocol II on mines and booby traps, and Protocol V on explosive remnants of war – have active sub-processes of their own.

Last week, in a discussion facilitated by the Swiss, states party to Amended Protocol II began a discussion about IEDs. Presenting were Chris Clark from the UN Mine Action Service, Richard Moyes from UK NGO Landmine Action, Erik Tollefsen from the Geneva International Centre for Humanitarian Demining, and Colin King, an independent explosive ordnance consultant.
An IED is

“A device placed or fabricated in an improvised manner incorporating destructive, lethal, noxious, pyrotechnic, or incendiary chemicals or explosives and designed to destroy, incapacitate, harass or distract. It may incorporate military stores, but is normally devised from non-military components.” (IED Factsheet)

Colin King observed there has been an evolution of attacks using IEDs over the last few decades. In the 1970s, non-state armed groups like the Irish Republican Army (IRA) really did have to improvise using commonly available materials such as nitrogen-based chemical fertilizers, stolen blasting caps and mechanical or electronic timers cannibalized from devices like alarm clocks. The IEDs tended to be unreliable, and to have uncertain effects in terms of explosive yield and signature. In other words, these types of IED were low-tech, basic weapons not particularly well suited to their targets.

The 1970s seem rather halcyon days now. Armed groups making and deploying IEDs in conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq have become highly sophisticated in terms of funding and organisation: as their experience and access to materials began to match the scale of their ambitions and inventiveness, it has made life increasingly hazardous for both soldiers and civilians.

The IRA’s best chance of destroying a vehicle in Britain or Northern Ireland in the 1970s, for instance, was by physically attaching a time-delay bomb. More recently, insurgents in Iraq and many other places have long had access to shaped-charge explosives like the High Explosive Anti-Tank (HEAT) rounds launched from rocket-propelled grenade launchers. But in recent years they’ve also been able to hold of explosively formed penetrators able to destroy modern armoured vehicles - potentially from a significant distance, we were told. And along with the technology, methods of attack involving sophisticated means of coordination have made counter-measures against IEDs a difficult cat-and-mouse game for military forces.

And, as Richard Moyes pointed out, IEDs are certainly an issue in humanitarian terms too. Landmine Action’s research into incidents of explosive ordnance based on English language news reports of 1,836 incidents in 38 countries over six months revealed that 60 per cent related to IEDs causing many civilian deaths and injuries.

It’s a moot point what the CCW can actually do – if anything – about IEDs, not least because the primary makers and users of IEDs are armed non-state actors, not governments bound by agreements like Amended Protocol II. And, as the International Committee of the Red Cross pointed out, there isn’t anything especially novel about the fact a munition is improvised from a humanitarian law perspective. IHL rules still apply.

Nevertheless, in a ‘food for thought’ paper for the meeting, the Swiss set out some possible avenues for discussion about specific measures such as:

“What are specific best practices to cut the supply?
• What can be done in order to avoid that AXO, UXO, badly managed stockpiles, and commercially available products provide the explosives)?
• Could the CCW APII work towards a best practice guide for the improved storage, security, and transport of explosives?
• What mechanisms would help better controlling the manufacture and trafficking of explosives?
• Are there different approaches to deal with IEDs under domestic criminal law?”

Certainly last week’s CCW talks didn’t come up with any clear answers about what to do next. But, as presenters like King pointed out, a lot of IEDs are ‘local manufactures’ – mass produced, but using parts like abandoned or stolen military munitions. Artillery shells have become a favoured source of explosive for many roadside or vehicle-borne IEDs in Iraq, for instance.

So, governments undertaking practical work at the national level to tighten up stockpile management and storage of explosive material in places under their jurisdiction or control would be an important start. Another thing states can do is to join and fully implement the CCW’s ERW protocol to ensure that unexploded and abandoned ordnance is cleared up quickly, and not diverted to putting the bang into IEDs. Not sexy stuff, but worthwhile.

John Borrie

Image: IEDs made from military munitions found in Baghdad (retrieved from Wikipedia Commons, sourced in turn from U.S. Department of Defense).

White Phosphorus: Setting off Firestorms of Protest

Along with the global financial crisis and Obama’s presidential inauguration, events in Gaza have occupied news headlines for the last three weeks as Israel undertook a military campaign it said was to stop Hamas’ indiscriminate rocket attacks on surrounding Israeli settlements. Despite Israel’s denial of access to international journalists to see what was happening in Gaza for themselves, reports from inside the Palestinian enclave indicate massive destruction from Israeli bombardment, and an escalating humanitarian crisis. Yesterday ‘The Times’, a British newspaper, estimated the terrible damage to the 1.5 million people in Gaza, who had nowhere to run during the conflict: 1,300 men, women, and children dead, 5,000 maimed and injured, 100,000 homeless, and 14 per cent of Gaza’s buildings damaged or destroyed.

Humanitarian agencies are now taking advantage of the Gaza cease-fire to try to deliver much-needed aid, and in due course a more detailed sense of the full scale of the suffering and devastation will come to light. The dreadful conditions in which much of the civilian population are made to live, and the fact that the majority of direct casualties from the fighting are civilians, has led to sharp criticism about the way in which the war was conducted by both Israel and Hamas.

Some incidents, such as the killing of refugees at UN schools, the bombing of the UN Relief and Works Agency’s compound with white phosphorus (burning, in the process, a large quantity of food and medical supplies), and the failure to provide medical aid to wounded civilians were particularly shocking. In a rare public rebuke, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has publicly stated with respect to one incident that it believed 'the Israeli military failed to meet its obligation under international humanitarian law to care for and evacuate the wounded' and that the delay in allowing rescue services access was 'unacceptable'.

These incidents have led to a renewed debate about Israel’s targeting decisions and weapons choices. In particular, Israel was accused of using cluster munitions, although currently there seems little evidence to support that claim. In contrast, there is ample evidence emerging that Israel used devices containing white phosphorus (WP). WP is a toxic chemical agent that ignites when exposed to air. It produces extremely high temperatures, is luminous in the dark and emits white smoke: its potential for use on the battlefield was noted as early as 1789, according to SIPRI’s 1975 report on incendiary weapons, although use was sporadic until World War I. WP was deployed extensively during World War II, and later in Vietnam. Since then WP has been used in Grozny, Chechnya (1994) and Iraq. Its use by US forces in Fallujah (2004) was the subject of much controversy.

The use of WP as an incendiary weapon (for instance, to set off firestorms like those that devastated Hamburg in 1943) is greatly restricted by 1980 Protocol III (on Incendiary Weapons) to the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW). And the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention prohibits the reliance on the toxic properties of WP as a method of warfare. (A legal analysis of WP under these conventions is available here.) But phosphorous compounds are used by military forces in devices such as artillery shells as an illuminant, to mark targets, or to create a smoke screen. These uses of WP are not specifically prohibited under international law.

Nevertheless, the fallout from air-burst WP covers a wide area, as photographs from Israeli use over Gaza published in various newspapers appear to show. The danger this creates to civilians can be enormous, both through their direct contact with WP and due to the fires it causes. In contact with the skin, WP causes painful, deep chemical burn injuries that require specialized medical treatment. Burning WP is very difficult to put out, and it burns until the material is consumed or deprived of oxygen (see a film here).

Until yesterday, the Israeli authorities would neither deny nor confirm allegations of WP use, but said that all weapons their forces deployed in Gaza were used in accordance with international law. Now, they acknowledge that its troops may have used WP shells in contravention of international law.

Israel is neither a party to Protocol III to the CCW, nor to the Chemical Weapons Convention. But Israel is bound by conventional and customary international rules on the conduct of hostilities and is therefore prohibited from employing a weapon the effects of which cannot be limited as required by international humanitarian law (IHL) and which is consequently of a nature to strike combatants and civilians without distinction. Israel also has to take all feasible precautions in the choice of the weapons it uses. When incendiary weapons are used, customary law requires that 'particular care' be taken to 'avoid, and in any event to minimize, incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians and damage to civilian objects.' (Rule 84, ICRC Study on Customary International Humanitarian Law). In the opinion of NGOs like Human Rights Watch, the use of WP in densely populated areas as seen in Gaza violated this requirement.

Israel has always claimed that its use of cluster munitions in the 2006 war in Southern Lebanon did not violate international law either. And, cluster munitions were not prohibited at that time. But the hazards of cluster munition use as shown by such conflicts has since led to an international treaty banning them on the basis that the harm they cause to civilians is unacceptable – whatever their purported military utility. Although there are important differences between cluster munitions and WP, both can affect a wide area and are unable to discriminate between civilians and combatants.

The question with regard to WP should therefore not so much be whether an existing treaty prohibits every one of its many uses (incendiary, target marker or smoke screen) or whether it would in principle be permissible under existing international law. Rather, we should ask what the effects of WP on civilians and combatants really are in conflicts where they have been used. We should document these, collect victims’ statements and consult health professionals on the matter. And militaries should be expected to convincingly demonstrate why the harm WP use causes is acceptable. Arguably, WP is another case where 'the necessities of war ought to yield to the requirements of humanity'.



Maya Brehm

Reference: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), Incendiary Weapons (Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1975).

2009: Learn, adapt, succeed report now out...

Well, we're back for the New Year, and we hope all of our readers had happy holidays.

In November last year, we convened a two-day symposium as part of the Disarmament Insight initiative in Glion, Switzerland, entitled Learn, Adapt, Succeed: Potential Lessons from the Ottawa and Oslo Processes for other disarmament and arms control challenges, which brought together more than thirty individuals from invited governments, United Nations agencies, the International Committee of the Red Cross and representatives of civil society.

My quick post about the DI symposium in late-ish November before grabbing my bag for a couple of weeks of travel to the UK, and to Oslo for the Convention on Cluster Munitions signing ceremony, didn't go into much detail about the discussions in Glion. So I'm pleased to say that a summary report of the meeting can now be downloaded in PDF format from the 'Disarmament as Humanitarian Action' project page on UNIDIR's website by following this link. (Click on the 'DI Glion seminar report' link to Open, or right-click to see the Save option, on most computers.)

The symposium was conducted according to the Chatham House Rule, which means that we didn't identify individual speakers or affiliations there. But we hope that the report conveys a sense of what was a very thought-provoking and positive discussion on a range of human security related themes and processes - involving, for instance, ongoing efforts to curb the illicit trade in small arms and light weapons, the Arms Trade Treaty, the Geneva Declaration on Armed Violence and Development and, of course, the CCW and new CCM.

This week a certain North American country will inaugurate a new President. His campaign catchphrase - "We can do it" - is already gently lampooned, even among his many supporters. Maybe, along with renewed sense of hope, there is a gnawing collective sense that no person can live it up to such expectations, especially in a country with so varied and even conflicting interests, and the massive challenges before it.

Well, maybe so. But the slogan isn't a bad one: the Ottawa and Oslo processes on anti-personnel mines and cluster munitions respectively, and to some extent progress in other arms control domains like implementing the UN Programme of Action on small arms, do show that positive change and progress on human security objectives is possible at the multilateral level, even in a pretty unpromising political environment over the last few years. It'll be interesting to see to what extent that improves with the new guy.

John Borrie

Picture by John Borrie.

CCW: Hark, a new Chairman's text

In our post of 24 October ('A Global Year of Cluster Munitions') we noted that preparations are underway for the fifth round of expert talks as part of the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons' attempts to "negotiate a proposal" on cluster munitions. One element impatiently awaited was a new text by the Chairman of the group of experts, Ambassador Bent Wigotski of Denmark, containing his take of a possible draft protocol.

At an informal consultation earlier this week, and having just arrived that morning from UN 1st Committee in New York, Ambassador Wigotski told those present that despite delays, he would bring out a new text before the end of the week. And so he has. As of earlier today this text could be downloaded from the webpage of the UN Office for Disarmament Affairs in Geneva.

A key Article in this Chairman's text - as he highlighted at his informal consultation - is Article 4, which contains general prohibitions and restrictions on cluster munitions. These were always likely to be less comprehensive or far-reaching than those of Article 2 of the Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM) agreed in Dublin, Ireland on 30 May in view of the CCW's membership (including some big cluster munition user and producers who shunned the Oslo Process). The formulation of these provisions became a key point of difference at the preceding sessions of the Group of Governmental Experts (GGE) this year.

The newest version of Article 4 in the Chairman’s text is as follows:

"Article 4. General prohibitions and restrictions

1. It is prohibited for a High Contracting Party to use, develop, produce, transfer or otherwise acquire cluster munitions that do not meet the criteria in paragraph 2.

2. The prohibition in paragraph 1 shall not apply if:

(a) The cluster munition is capable of being directed to a pre-defined target area and each explosive submunition possesses one or more of the following safeguards that must effectively ensure that unexploded submunitions will no longer function as explosive submunitions:

(i) a self-destruct mechanism;
(ii) a self-neutralization mechanism;
(iii) a self-deactivating feature; or
(iv) two or more fuzing features.

or

(b) The cluster munition is capable of being directed to a pre-defined target area and incorporates a mechanism or design which, after dispersal, results in no more than 1% unexploded ordnance across the range of operational environments.

3. A High Contracting Party may defer compliance with Paragraph 1 of this Article for a transition period not exceeding [8/10/12/15] years from the Protocol’s entry into force for it. This deferral shall be announced by declaration at the time of its notification to be bound by this Protocol. In case a High Contracting Party is unable to comply with paragraph 1 of this Article within this [8/10/12/15] year period, it may notify a Conference of the High Contracting Parties that, with the exception of transfers, it will extend this period of deferred compliance for a period of up to [5] additional years.

4. Notwithstanding a High Contracting Party’s deferral, pursuant to paragraph 3, of the application of the provisions of paragraph 1, each High Contracting Party undertakes, immediately upon entry into force:

(a) Not to develop new cluster munitions which do not meet the requirements of paragraph 1;

(b) To use cluster munitions that do not meet the criteria in paragraph 1 only after approval by its highest-ranking operational commander in the area of operations;

(c) To take steps in any design, procurement, or production of cluster munitions to minimize the unexploded ordnance rate or incorporate additional safeguard mechanisms or designs;

(d) To improve, to the extent possible the accuracy of their cluster munitions;

(e) To endeavour to use only cluster munitions with the lowest possible unexploded ordnance rate, consistent with military requirements; and

(f) To complete an evaluation of the military requirements and remove the stocks of cluster munitions in excess of these requirements from active inventory as soon as possible and designate these stocks for destruction.

5. The obligations in this Article do not apply to cluster munitions acquired or retained in a limited number for the exclusive purpose of training in detection, clearance, and destruction techniques, or for the development of cluster munitions countermeasures.

6. The High Contracting Parties in a position to do so are encouraged, through bilateral or multilateral mechanisms established between them, to facilitate the exchange of equipment, material, and scientific and technological information that will lessen the humanitarian impact of cluster munitions."

We have only had a preliminary look at the new text. While we commend the Chairman for his efforts in drafting a text that he hopes might be adopted by consensus as a new protocol to the CCW, we are nevertheless slightly bewildered at the formulation of Article 4. The key question in our minds is: Will this version move the different poles of opinion within the CCW on the nature of core prohibitions closer together?

For instance, we were struck by the absence of previously included provisions, such as cumulative criteria that weapons would have to fulfill in order to be allowed (similar to Article 2 of the CCM), or a requirement that all submunitions be capable of engaging single point-targets. The brackets around the concept of a transition period have now been removed. Accordingly, a state party may defer application of article 4(1) for 8,10,12 or even 15 years, and even extend that period by another [5] years, if the concerned state feels it is unable to comply. Next week’s discussions at the CCW are going to be very interesting.

John Borrie and Maya Brehm

Photo Credit: 'le ring' by sgoralnick on Flickr.

Hi-Tech Cluster Munitions: Lingering Humanitarian Questions

This is the second to last of four blogs addressing issues raised by Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute. While recognizing the dangers to children posed by old order cluster munitions, Thompson bemoans the fact that the United States' Sensor Fuzed Weapon (SFW) will be banned by the Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM). Echoing the claims of Textron, the manufacturer of the SFW, Thompson posits that the SFW harms children less because using it to attack point targets is better than using outdated cluster munitions. Thompson takes those claims at face value, and seems unaware that SFW performance has been called into question. He also complains that the Europeans protected their hi-tech weapons, but not those of the U.S.
In this post and the next, I will address these points.

Humanitarian Parameters on Technical Fixes: What did the CCM do and why?

As has been reported on this blog over the course of the Oslo process, the hardest nut for the CCM negotiators to crack was how to define cluster munitions that cause “unacceptable harm to civilians.” The problem is dealt with in the CCM by excluding certain weapons that “avoid indiscriminate area effects and the risks posed by unexploded submunitions” from the definition of cluster munitions. These “smart” weapons are not cluster munitions under the CCM and therefore are not banned, so long as they have all of the following characteristics:

(i) Each munition contains fewer than ten explosive submunitions;
(ii) Each
explosive submunition weighs more than four kilograms;
(iii) Each explosive
submunition is designed to detect and engage a single target object;
(iv)
Each explosive submunition is equipped with an electronic self-destruction
mechanism;
(v) Each explosive submunition is equipped with an electronic
self-deactivating feature;

Each required characteristic responds to attributes that have made current submunitions indiscriminate and a danger to civilians. The scattering of huge numbers of small submunitions each incapable of engaging single targets creates hazards to civilians encountered in the field. Technical fixes involving mechanical (as opposed to electronic) self-destruction and self-deactivation features – like those in some variants of the M85 used in the 2006 Southern Lebanon conflict (see our last post) - have failed to meet expectations.

If a system that meets those technical requirements still results in unacceptable humanitarian harm, it arguably would still be banned under the CCM notwithstanding all of its bells and whistles.

Healthy Skepticism about Technical Solutions

Why is the CCM definition so stringent? Simply put, past claims made by militaries and munitions manufacturers have often turned out not to be true.

Example 1: In his history of anti-personnel weapons, The Technology of Killing (1995), Eric Prokosch relates how, in the mid-70s, a British military expert told government delegates at an international conference that banning cluster munitions was unnecessary. Why? Because the newly developed (British) BL-755 cluster munition had not only a very tightly defined “footprint,” but also such reliable fuzes on its bomblets that no duds would be left behind. It turns out that the footprint was up to a hundred times larger than claimed and the failure rate in the area of at least 10-12 percent, according to UN and British estimates.

Example 2: In December 2001, the Swiss government proposed to members of the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) that future production of submunitions would have to include a fuze mechanism ensuring the deactivation and self-destruction of all explosives to at least a 98% standard. Switzerland was perhaps convinced that its newly designed submunition would surpass that standard. What was that submunition? An M-85 variant. Yet two M-85 variants were found wanting when used in Iraq and Lebanon, as detailed in a report that rocked the Vienna CCM conference last year. Rather than a 1% failure rate, on average every tenth bomblet failed to explode on impact.

How the U.S. Arsenal Failed to Smarten up

Thompson claims that all cluster bombs in the U.S. arsenal would become illegal. To begin with, there are precious few weapons with “smart” submunitions in the U.S. inventory because programs failed to meet production standards. One example is the Sense and Destroy Armor (SADARM) 155mm smart artillery munition with individually targetable submunitions. While some prototypes did enter service and were used in the Iraq War in 2003, Congress had cancelled the program in 2001 after SADARM fell “just short of meeting its 80 percent submunition reliability requirement.” (Neil Baumgardner, “3rd Infantry Division Commander Praises C2V, Communications During OIF,” Defense Daily, May 16, 2003.)

What about the BLU-108 and its Skeets? Thompson focuses on what sounds like the U.S. BLU-108 Sensor Fuzed Weapon and its “smart” skeet submunitions, a “smart” weapon that remains in the U.S. arsenal. He is correct to say that it will be banned under the CCM - because of numbers (40 submunitions per SFW) and size (each submunition weighs less than 4kg).

Thompson’s description of the system is remarkably similar to that of the manufacturer. If the system works as claimed, a carrier munition deploys ten subunit “posts”, each in turn containing four explosive “skeet” submunitions designed to seek out and destroy individual targets.
Submunitions that don’t find a target reportedly either self-destruct or self-deactivate.

But why didn’t the BLU-108 SFW survive in the CCM negotiations in Dublin? Diplomats there heard from Rae McGrath, an experienced deminer, about failures of the SFW to live up to the claims of the manufacturer when deployed in Iraq. Among his observations were the following:

This research . . . raises a number of serious questions regarding the reliability of BLU-108, especially when measured against claims made for the weapon by manufacturers, specifically as follows:

- 99% reliability: While it has not been possible to calculate a percentage reliability without full details of the number of weapons actually deployed in the Mosul area, it is clear from the clearance team’s overview and generally available figures for use of BLU108 during Operation Iraqi Freedom that the percentage of submunitions which have failed is higher than 1%. Perhaps substantially so.

- No Hazardous UXO: It seems probable that manufacturers and users would claim that the failed submunitions had self-neutralised and were therefore non-hazardous. However, given that many of the submunitions appear to have failed to operate as designed this is not a safe assumption. At best, these unexploded submunitions would deny access to land for civilian communities until cleared.

McGrath provided multiple photos of SFWs where “failures have occurred at different times in the deployment cycle.” The photos bear a look. There are for instance submunitions still attached to the “posts” (suggesting complete failure of the munitions); others lay scattered about on the ground. He also noted that the copper in unexploded submunitions make them prime targets for scavengers.

At the July 2008 CCW Group of Governmental Experts meeting in Geneva, Textron made its own presentation, likely because it saw the market for its weapon suddenly start to shrink with the impending signature and ratification of the CCM. (The Textron presentation was shown but not made publicly available.) Textron stated that a mine clearance specialist in Iraq had shot at an unexploded skeet submunition and that it had failed to detonate.

In communications with McGrath since then, he has raised some additional concerns with me. Firing at such weapons is not a controlled means of destroying them, as it may put them in an even more sensitive state if they survive the high velocity round. Ironically, the option of firing a bullet at the SFW submunition is a method sometimes used with the old fashioned and highly unstable BLU-97B, the submunition this SFW is intended to replace. Shooting at cylindrical unexploded submunitions causes them to tumble. This makes them potentially more unstable and also could turn them on their sides (most of the time they land face down). The shaped charge that makes them so devastating against tank armor could therefore travel up to a kilometer if detonated, rather than firing down into the ground.

When the subunit “posts” entirely fail to eject their four submunitions, they present a tempting target for the hacksaws and hammers of scavengers – tools that might well detonate the weapon. In sum, humanitarian concerns remain about the BLU-108.



Virgil Wiebe.

Ideas, Homework and Message

Randall “Randy” Forsberg was best known as the creator of the Nuclear Freeze idea that blossomed into a movement in the early 1980. Randy passed away in the fall of 2007 after the recurrence of cancer that had first appeared twenty-some years earlier (see Patricia Lewis' posting, "Randy Forsberg: A tribute to an inspiration").

In today’s political culture she would be seen as a great messenger. The idea of a “freeze” on the nuclear arms race was the right way to frame an issue for the times and, indeed, it took off as a popular movement in way that nothing had for arms control before that time.

Today it is important to remember that the Freeze did not come about as a result of a messaging exercise. Randy did not say to herself that she wished for disarmament and that the freeze might be a good way to market that dream. Rather, Randy came to the freeze idea from analysis of data. Randy was someone who believed passionately in the power of ideas when grounded in rigorous analysis of facts established by carefully assembled data.

After laboring for years over accounts of national holdings of armaments and delivery vehicles, in a sort of gestalt moment, she recognized the fact of essential parity in the arms race. Parity to her mind meant a precious moment when serious arms control measures could be pursued without one side in the Cold War exposing to the other a prolonged period of vulnerability to the other’s advantage.

The moment could only be seized for the cause of disarmament if there was a “stop in place” for the arms race. Negotiations take time and an arms race ‘stop’ would be a necessary confidence building measure. From understanding the logic of the dynamics of the nuclear arms race, grounded as always in analysis of data, Randy came upon the notion of a Freeze.

The Freeze had its years in the ‘80s. Meanwhile Randy was already thinking beyond the Freeze. She moved to endorse the concepts of cooperative security and alternative defense which had been developed in Western Europeand ultimately helped end the Cold War when Gorbachev took up the core ideas in Moscow – thereby creating new opportunities for disengagement and disarmament in central Europe. Randy traveled to Moscow in those years and maintained regular contact with Gorbachev’s security thinkers.

Randy wrote:

The ultimate goal of cooperative security policies is to demilitarize the international system and end large-scale conventional warfare.

Again and again she would tell all who would listen that the surest route to nuclear disarmament was through ending large-scale conventional warfare.

In 1987 she and Rob Leavitt wrote that:

Reducing the risk and fear of major conventional war is necessary in order to reduce the risk of nuclear war…

Popular attitudes continue to accept the legitimacy of using military force for purposes other than true national defense. Alternative defense policies challenge this status quo by looking to 1) end intervention, 2) de-legitimize the use of military force as a tool of international power politics, 3) increase proficiency at using nonmilitary means of resolving conflicts and crises, 4) reduce and restructure conventional forces so they are less threatening, less capable of aggression, less vulnerable to attack and more purely defensive.

In probably Randy’s most ambitious engagement with ideas, her 1997 Ph.D. thesis called “Toward a Theory of Peace: The Role of Moral Beliefs”, Randy wrote:

…this essay attempts to articulate imaginable conditions under which war might end, and plausible paths – sequences of events reaching out from the present into the future – along which these conditions could be realized.

For too long, the general question of the conditions for peace has languished, leaving the field of war and peace studies to narrower issues.

Randy was a great believer in the power of ideas!!


This is a guest posting by Charles Knight, Co-director of the Project on Defense Alternatives at the Commonwealth Institute


Photo: "Everything starts with an idea" by Voodooboo (A.S.) on Flickr

The Arms Trade Treaty that States Want

I've just arrived back to Geneva from an eventful week spent in New York at the First Committee of the UN General Assembly, the one that deals with disarmament and international security. In my last posting, I described the First Committee as a "carnival," and it certainly lived up to expectations. Imagine representatives of almost 200 States crammed into a conference-room, each trying to persuade the others to support draft resolutions on some aspect of arms control that they are preparing. And that's just what happens on the margins! Only when one puts on an ear-piece does it become apparent that, somewhere in the cacophony of noise, a delegate is actually making an official statement or participating in a thematic debate.

Last week was the week for thematic debates on such issues as conventional weapons, regional disarmament and security, and the "disarmament machinery." This week, States will be voting on all draft resolutions before the First Committee wraps up its work on Friday. Once all the votes have been registered, I will do a retrospective posting analysing what has been achieved this year (you can also follow what is going on, week by week, by subscribing to the First Committee Monitor).

For now, I would like to focus on a number of lunchtime events that took place last week on an Arms Trade Treaty (see our previous posts on this issue). To recap, last year's First Committee passed a resolution calling for a new treaty to regulate the trade in all conventional weapons. As a first step, States were encouraged to send their views to the UN Secretary-General on the feasibility, scope and draft parameters of such a treaty. To date, some 97 States have done so; an unprecedented number for such an exercise.

These submissions have been analysed by two organisations, working independently. The United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) presented an initial statistical analysis of the submissions, constituting the first part of a two-part analysis that UNIDIR plans to complete by the end of the year. You can listen to the presentation at the UN Audio Library. A coalition of NGOs - including the leaders of the Control Arms Campaign; Oxfam, Amnesty International and IANSA - presented a comprehensive analysis of the submissions entitled, "A Global Arms Trade Treaty: What States Want." So what do these two studies tell us about the kind of Arms Trade Treaty that States want?

First and foremost, it would seem that most States agree that such a treaty is feasible. 153 States voted in favour of the Arms Trade Treaty resolution last year. Of the States that have submitted their views to the Secretary-General, 89 specifically state their belief in its feasibility. Also, a number of regional and international instruments relating to the arms trade already exist. Finally, an Arms Trade Treaty would largely collect and codify fundamental principles of international law that also already exist.

What States think about the scope of an Arms Trade Treaty can best be illustrated by a quote from the UNIDIR study:

"Most States indicated that an Arms Trade Treaty should cover 'all conventional weapons.' Many gave specific examples such as 'tanks and other armoured vehicles', 'combat aircraft', 'helicopters', 'warships' and so on. Most states included 'small arms and light weapons', 'landmines' and 'Man Portable Air Defence Systems (MANPADS)' in their lists.

In addition, some States included within the scope of the treaty such items as ammunition, parts and components, technology, and manufacturing equipment, as well as activities like brokering, licensed production and technical assistance.

The criteria that States consider most important to take into consideration before authorising arms transfers are: Security Council arms embargoes, human rights considerations, potential violations of international humanitarian law, and possible diversion to terrorists or use in terrorist acts.

The Geneva Forum will bring the authors of the two studies together at the beginning of next year to compare results and to help transmit any lessons learned from the analyses to the Group of Governmental Experts that will conduct an Arms Trade Treaty feasibility study beginning in February 2008.


Patrick Mc Carthy


Reference

Photo credit: Control Arms