Thirty Years of The Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC): Histories, Achievements, Challenges

This open-access volume consists of papers presented at the conference “Thirty Years of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC): Histories, Achievements, Challenges”, held in Berlin, 5–6 October 2023, as well as of additional contributions.

The volume’s twenty-two individual chapters reflect on the history and achievements of the CWC over the past thirty years and explore existing and future challenges as the world realigns itself with a new geopolitical and security environment amid ongoing conflicts in volatile regions such as Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

Highlights of the volume include:

• Contributions by government officials, renowned scholars, and esteemed members of civil society.
• A keynote address by the former Director General of the implementing agency of the CWC, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), providing insights into the treaty’s evolution.
• A section examining the potential of the CWC as a model for the abolition of nuclear weapons.

Bretislav Friedrich is a Research Group Leader at the Fritz-Haber-Institut and Honorary Professor at the Technische Universität Berlin. Apart from his research in molecular physics, he maintains an abiding interest in the history of science and is engaged in efforts to eliminate chemical and other weapons of mass destruction. Besides numerous research papers and several books, he co-authored and co-edited One Hundred Years of Chemical Warfare: Research, Deployment, Consequences (Springer Nature, 2017).

Ulf Schmidt is Senior Professor of Modern History at the University of Hamburg, founding-director of the Centre for the Study of Health, Ethics, and Society, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. His interests are in the history of modern medical ethics, warfare, and policy in twentieth-century Europe and the USA. He is especially interested in the history of authoritarian regimes and modern dictatorships. He is the author, among others, of Justice at Nuremberg: Leo Alexander and the Nazi Doctors’ Trial (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Karl Brandt: The Nazi Doctor. Medicine and Power in the Third Reich (Continuum, 2007); Secret Science. A Century of Poison Warfare and Human Experiments (OUP, 2015); co-editor of Propaganda and Conflict: War, Media and the Shaping of the Twentieth Century (Bloomsbury, 2019), and Ethical Research: The Declaration of Helsinki, and the Past, Present, and Future of Human Experimentation (OUP, 2020). He is Principal Investigator of a six-year ERC Synergy Grant on “Taming the European Leviathan: The Legacy of Post-War Medicine and the Common Good”.

Paul Walker coordinates the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) Coalition, is Vice Chair of the Arms Control Association, and is a member of the US Department of State International Security Advisory Board. He has worked on chemical weapons demilitarization since undertaking the first US on-site inspection of a Russian CW stockpile in 1994 when he was a Professional Staff Member of the US House of Representatives Armed Services Committee. He led the Green Cross International Program on Environmental Security and Sustainability for 20 years and was awarded the Right Livelihood Award in 2013 “for working tirelessly to rid the world of chemical weapons.” Walker holds an M.A. from Johns Hopkins SAIS and a Ph.D. in international security from MIT; he is also a US Army Vietnam-era veteran.