This story which popped up through the Environmental News Service back in October was encouraging. It notes that South Korea has successfully completed the lengthy process of destroying its chemical weapons arsenal though without actually saying exactly when this happened.
It is unfortunate that the this significant achievement which actually took place on July 10th, has not received more attention. The OPCW has made relatively little public reference to the development while the South Koreans have, in keeping with their past practices, made absolutely no mention whatsoever.
The first public(ish) mention of the South Korean’s completion of their demilitarization activities was in a speech by the OPCW Director-General delivered to the U.N. General Assembly’s First Committee on October 15th. This was followed by a mention in the statement delivered at the most recent Executive Council meeting by the US Permanent Representative to the OPCW on October 14th (but only released on October 16th).
It is truly regrettable that the South Korean government has preferred to maintain its ineffective silence on this matter over the last 10 years. Rather than publicly acknowledge that it had developed and produced a CW arsenal during the Cold War it preferred secrecy. Although the OPCW obliged the South Korean government in this matter by avoiding mentioning the ROK by name in its documents and public statements addressing matters of CW destruction this attempt to maintain secrecy was never effective. Most notably, up to and including the 2003 OPCW Annual Report a clear sign of what was happening could be found in the table providing a Summary of Inspection Activity. Every year the ROK entry blanked out the details of how many inspections took place at each type of inspectable facility while at the same time it had an anomalously high total number of inspections for a state that did not have a CW stockpile (2003, p. 32).
The ROK has been an active member of the OPCW and has funded or hosted a variety of meetings and seminars that have been of great benefit to other member states. Nevertheless it has not been willing to publicly discuss the factors that led to its developing a CW arsenal or that contributed to the decision to ultimately repudiate that arsenal. This is a pity as past experience has clearly demonstrated that nonproliferation efforts have been improved by public discussion of the history of national WMD programs. Members of the nonproliferation community can only hope that now that the process of destroying its CW arsenal is out of the way South Korea may be more willing to discuss the history of its CW program.
The South Korean achievement is of much greater significance than that of the Albanian government in destroying its much smaller stockpile in 2007. The Albanian stockpile was only 16 metric tonnes which in terms of the amount of effort required has much more in common with that of Libya (23 metric tonnes). In contrast the South Korean stockpile, which Global Green has “estimated” was 3,126 metric tonnes, was the 3rd largest of all the declared stockpiles to date, exceeded only by those of the United States and Russia.
On a related note it should not be long now before we hear that India has also completed destruction of its CW arsenal which will mean that 3 out of the 6 declared CW possessor states have eliminated their CW arsenals along ith all of the facilities for their production. this represents a very real accomplishment of the CWC.
Proliferating Thoughts 