Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation

Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation

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Eleven Questions about the U.S.-Russia Framework to Rid Syria of Chemical Weapons

On September 14th, 2013, the U.S. and Russian foreign ministers announced an agreement to rid Syria of its chemical weapons. Later that day, Syria submitted its articles of accession to the Chemical Weapons Convention to the Secretary-General of the United Nations.  The Convention prohibits Member States from producing, stockpiling, stockpiling or using chemical weapons and sets out a 10-year time line for stockpile destruction.  The U.S.-Russian framework seeks to disarm Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile by early or mid 2014.

The U.S. has begun to talk about the timeline in the framework as goals rather than hard-and-fast deadlines.  The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons must approve this framework agreement and the UN Security Council needs to pass a resolution requiring that Syria comply with the plan and establish an enforcement mechanism.

The U.S. and Russia have set forth an ambitious timeline to declare, verify, inspect, secure, manage and destroy Syria’s estimated 1,000 metric ton chemical weapons arsenal during an ongoing civil war.

This framework raises several questions, which he address in a detailed analysis over at the Center website here.

Don’t blame Moscow

On July 12, the US State Department released a major annual report on arms control compliance that has riled up nuclear weapons hawks. In its annual “Report on Adherence to and Compliance With Arms Control, Nonproliferation, and Disarmament Agreements and Commitments,” the Department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance assessed whether numerous countries complied with treaty obligations in 2012. Most of the media attention, though, has been on what the report says (and doesn’t say) about Russia. Since the report came out, Republican members of Congress and their supporters have repeatedly accused Moscow of violating arms control treaties, and the State Department of ignoring the problem.