John Mathiason

An International Perspective on Aging and the End of Life

Globally, the population is aging. In 2000, approximately 10% of the world’s population was older than 60 years old. By 2050, 21.1% will be older than 60. The issues now confronting the United States and other developed nations will emerge for other nations as their populations age, demographics change, and populations become more urban. In the next 50 years, we will see three worlds of aging—those of the developed nations, the developing nations, and the nations whose economies are in transition. Each world will face unique challenges and also offer insights into the best ways to care for those at the end of life.

Controlling Supply: Procurement and Import/Export Monitoring

While remote monitoring, such as is envisaged by the Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty and the Expanded Safeguards Agreements, can determine with reasonable certainty whether a State is testing nuclear weapons or has moved material around internally, it cannot actually prevent or control the development and production of weapons, especially chemical and biological weapons.

Compliance Issues and Recourse

We have earlier explained that verification is a means to determine whether a State is complying with its disarmament or non-proliferation obligations under a particular agreement. Compliance issues are, therefore, our first area for specific attention. Compliance measures become necessary only if the verification process detects significant violations. They result from a thorough evaluation of information at different stages: the analysis of information from declarations and other sources, from ongoing technical monitoring, from import/export monitoring and, ultimately, from on-site inspections.

Building Effective Management for the Regime

The regime for the verification of the elimination of weapons of mass destruction is only as good as the organizations that have been set up to implement the agreed procedures to verify compliance. The question has to be asked, and has been asked: are the international organizations up to the job?

The Structure and Logic of the WMD Ban Regime

The issue of how to eliminate weapons of mass destruction was a major feature of international politics at the end of the twentieth century. It was also an essential part of the debate about international relations theory. The ‘balance of terror’, the possibilities loosed by technology of weapons that could destroy all human life on earth provided an incentive to find solutions. At the same time, it was the highest expression of the realist approach to international politics, dealing as it does with the ability of a State to defend itself.

Building an Effective WMD Control Regime

The history of the WMD control regime began in the early years of the United Nations with the most ambitious plan, the Baruch Plan, to create an international authority responsible for the development and peaceful use of nuclear energy. It would take custody of all fissionable material and technological information essential for producing nuclear weapons. It would also verify the freeze on weapons production and the destruction of existing stockpiles of nuclear weapons. Although the plan was not accepted, it launched a process that broadened the arms control objective to include chemical and biological weapons and classified them all together as weapons of mass destruction, a concept used to distinguish them from conventional weapons. All the proposals that evolved during the first decade were then pulled together to form a comprehensive model for General and Complete Disarmament (GCD). The model was then considered to be unrealistic as a basis for negotiating a convention for phased across-the-board disarmament to be implemented by a single international disarmament and verification organization. However, it established a firm conceptual foundation and an outline of partial or collateral measures that would be separately negotiated as building blocks towards verified disarmament in all areas.

Baseline Information: Declarations and Data Collection

The foundation of disarmament inspections is the declaration of weapons capabilities and of activities with dual-use purposes. The information submitted is crucial for effective verification, but it does not exist in a vacuum. Its accuracy and completeness cannot be guaranteed irrespective of the goodwill of submitting States, but needs to be checked against the totality of available information assembled from other sources, including existing data banks, media sources and future inspections.

Verification by On-Site Inspection

For over half a century, on-site inspection (OSI) was presented by the US and its allies as the ultimate tool within a verification mechanism to monitor compliance with arms control agreements. It has formed the core of a system of mutually reinforcing elements of verification ranging from national means of detection to cooperative measures, including exchange and evaluation of information, ongoing technical monitoring and procurement control that were examined in the preceding chapters.

Evolution of the WMD Control Regime

A historical perspective is necessary for understanding the importance of verification as an indispensable element of any disarmament process, especially with respect to weapons of mass destruction. Verification is the process of gathering, analyzing and evaluating information to determine whether a State is complying with its obligations under a treaty or another type of agreement.1 The concept of verified disarmament is an integral part of the broader concept of arms control, which includes the regulation of armaments, the limitation of armed forces and the various measures to ensure transparency and build mutual confidence. Arms control was first defined in the 1960s as including ‘all the forms of military cooperation between potential enemies in the interest of reducing the likelihood of war, its scope and violence if it occurs, and the political and economic costs of being prepared for it’.2 A more concise recent definition broadens the concept to apply it to the century-old process by stressing security enhancement as a goal of all States: it presents arms control as ‘measures directly related to military forces, adopted by governments to contain the costs and harmful consequences of the continued existence of arms, within the overall objective of sustaining or enhancing their security’.3