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Security in an Age of Anxiety: What Can Verification Offer

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Security in an Age of Anxiety: What Can Verification Offer PAPE RS "Security in an Age of Anxiety":' What Can Verification Offer? ANTONIA HANDLER CHAYES INTRODUCTION Arms control and disarmament agreements are, by their nature, per- meated with distrust. This is as true now as it was during the Cold War. The would-be violator needs to be deterred. The complier needs reassurance in such a sensitive area as national security. Both objectives seemed achievable during the Cold War, although on a very limited basis. Verification supplied some measure of reassurance and deterrence at opposite ends of the spec- trum for many years of arms control agreements. But neither reassurance nor deterrence are fully relied upon in the post-September 11 world, nor can they be. Therefore, the task of verification has become far more complex and Antonia HandlerChayes is VisitingProfessor ofInternationalPolitics andLaw at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufs University. She had been teaching at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard,and will continue to teach at the HarvardLaw School, She chairs the Project on InternationalInstitutions and Conflict Management at the Program on Negotiation at the Harvard Law School. Chayes was Vice Chair and Senior Consultant of Conflict Management Group (CMG), a non-profit internationaldispute resolution organization. She occasionally serves as mediator of corporatedisputes for JAMS/ENDISPUTE, where she served for eightyears. She was a Board member of United Technologies Corporationfor 21 years, Chair of its Public issues Review Committee, and on its Executive Committee until retiring in 2002. During the Carter Administration she was Assistant and later Under Secretary of the U.S. Air Force, where she was awardedthe DistinguishedService Medal She has servedon severalFederal Commissions, including the Vice Presidents White House Aviation Safety and Security Commission, and the Commission on Roles and Missions of the United States Armed Forces. She has alsopracticed law in a Boston lawfirm. She is a member of the Council on ForeignRelations. She serves as a consultant to the Office of Compliance, Adviser, Ombudsman of IFC and MIGA of the World Bank. VOL.30:3 SPECIAL EDITION 2006 88 THE FLETCHER FORUM OF WORLD AFFAIRS demanding, throwing the entire notion of effectiveness of arms control and reduction regimes into question. These functions-reassurance and deterrence-remain critical, but they function in very different ways since the end of the Cold War. The United States has not yet made the shift to a world that it dominates mil- itarily, yet remains in a situation between war and peace with complex new security threats. Verification continues to rely on (1) technology, (2) intel- ligence, (3) cooperation, (4) the international law of treaties, and (5) pol- itics, but these elements operate in a wholly different context today. One main difference is the question "who verifies"? As bilateral arms control agreements have diminished in number and importance, so has party ver- ification. In a bilateral arrangement, each party was responsible for its own verification. In the shift to multilateral agreements, an external organiza- tion is likely to bear this responsibility-for example, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) of the Chemical Weapons Convention and the International Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA) that serves the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty. Reliance on an international organ- ization has raised issues of objectivity and competence, and in fact has cre- ated a separate cause for concern and distrust among parties. It is important to emphasize how the changed security landscape has caused adaptations in verification so that it might continue to provide both deterrence and reassurance in the new world order (or disorder). I will take these elements up one by one. Reliance on Technology During the Cold War, reliance on technology was paramount-and because nuclear systems were large and fixed, reliance on satellite technol- ogy gave an adequate approximation of the state of the systems that the United States and the Soviet Union had in place. For example, the parties cooperated by opening the silo roofs at the specific time a satellite passed over to facilitate verification that the declared missiles were still in storage and were not deployed elsewhere. Surveillance was costly and precise- constantly being improved. Yet both parties were unaware of how inade- quate that technology alone was to deal with all the dimensions and the magnitude of the problem as it evolved over time. An obsessive focus on equality of systems to assure stability character- ized all negotiations. Parity was enshrined in law, despite the fact that both parties had so many systems that a slight imbalance could not threaten either security or deterrence. Even with such an obsession, both parties were willing VOL.30:3 SPECIAL EDITION 2006 "SECURITY IN AN AGE OF ANXIETY": WHAT CAN VERIFICATION OFFER? to move to mobile systems that would have been unde- tectable once perfected. The U.S. "Peacekeeper" (MX) missile now sits in a museum, while the Russians maintain their mobile missiles. These moves and countermoves were not rationally designed to reduce the threats-in many ways, they increased nuclear insecurity. In fact, despite the mutual mistrust, there was a continuing reliance on the rationality inherent in the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction.' Yet the near catastrophe of the Cuban missile crisis underscored the fragile basis of rationality in two highly politicized systems of government, when miscalculation would have meant disaster. Remote technology, however, was known to be inadequate for verify- ing the existence of biological and chemical weapons. Any technology that might be sufficient to analyze the content of laboratories or sites containing chemical or biological materials that could be weaponized required a degree of cooperation that did not exist. On-site inspection could not be agreed upon between East and West. Since the Soviet Union resisted the U.S. demand for seven on-site inspections for a comprehensive test ban treaty, and the technology to detect underground nuclear tests was inadequate, negotiations to create chemical and biological verification systems floun- dered.4 The soPcalled "yellow rain" and the outbreak of an anthrax epidemic at Sverdlosk remained a mystery until the political climate had thawed, and information from the then Soviet Union was more freely available.' Today technology continues to play an important role, but our con- cern encompasses different and smaller weapons systems only detectable by more sophisticated, closer-in technology such as environmental sam- pling. Closer-in technologies require even more site knowledge and coop- eration. Remoteness of even 20km may be sufficient to defeat verification. Satellite imagery is no longer enough, as the American government's VOL.30:3 SPECIAL EDITION 2006 90 THE FLETCHER FORUM OF WORLD AFFAIRS embarrassment after labeling satellite images of trucks in Iraq as mobile weapons laboratories in order to persuade the UN Security Council to support an invasion of Iraq in 2002 demonstrates.' But even where satellite imagery serves a limited purpose, the interna- tional organizations that increasingly conduct verification lack funding to buy satellites-they buy satellite time. For example, if they ascertain the time that the satellite passes above a questioned site, the "cheating" state may also know when the satellite passes and stop all outlawed activities for that time-period. Even with the new technology that attends physical inspection, a higher level of cooperation is required, and we have not been able to attain it with the most worrisome states-North Korea and Pakistan. There had been a higher degree of cooperation with Iran, surprisingly, considering that it has not signed an Additional Protocol Agreement. But considerable doubt remains whether all Iran's production facilities have been discovered and whether cooperation may have been selective. Moreover, further coop- eration may be withdrawn. Any formula for use of technology must include cooperation to be effective. This is particularly the case with chemical and biological weapons. It comes down to people + technology. Inspection, when permit- ted, must employ technologies that can penetrate the near-impenetrable and seek to detect what is most carefully concealed. Intelligence: The ability to detect Intelligence has always been relied on to detect "cheating" and to call the defecting party on it. In the era of hostility between the United States and the Soviet Union, intelligence was primarily national technical means (NTM), with cost no object. Now that the threats are multiple, smaller, and far more difficult to detect and reliance on satellites is accordingly reduced, reliance on human intelligence looms larger in importance. Judgment in interpretation is equally significant. Evidence of violation often means piecing together odd bits of information. This is particularly true of biological weapons (BW) and chemical weapons (CW) where dual- use technology could mislead in either direction-of false accusation or missed dangerous activity-for example the pharmaceutical plant in 7 Sudan bombed by the United States under President Clinton. Unfortunately, the state of our "humint", or human intelligence, has been justly criticized,8 and even though the intelligence services have undergone structural reform, there is little satisfaction with the access of human intel- ligence to the areas of greatest concern-North
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