| Publication |
2013.
|
| Summary/Abstract |
The U.S.-Russian agreement on Syria's chemical weapons is a recent, powerful reminder of the extraordinary value of arms control. An arduous process to find and destroy the chemical arsenal of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad lies ahead. Yet, it is made much simpler by the aggregation of expertise and baseline of protocols and procedures under the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), which was negotiated under President George H.W. Bush and ratified under President Bill Clinton. Imagine the difficulty of starting this effort without those assets. Why then is the United States degrading its capability to design, negotiate, and lead efforts to enforce agreements such as the CWC? In late 1999, the independent U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) was folded into the Department of State, a process in which I was deeply involved as ACDA's last director. I had high hopes for the reorganization. While creating an institutional home in a larger, more powerful agency, the plan on which ACDA and the State Department had agreed, with congressional approval, preserved ACDA's two most irreplaceable assets-an independent voice for arms control and nonproliferation priorities at the highest levels of the government and protection of job security and career opportunities for the technical experts whose skills and insights were indispensable to success.
|