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ONE OF THE GREAT success stories of the Cold War was the development by the United States of intelligence sources and methods that were su‹ciently eªective to make it possible to understand the Soviet strategic threat more accurately, thus making worst-case military planning unnecessary. At last the United States could see into the interior of Soviet territory; limiting strategic arms became possible because for the first time the basic verification tools were available 6 1 To Verify or Not to Verify to both sides. To permit formal limitations on strategic nuclear weapons systems, the central deterrent systems of the Cold War, verification had to be eªective and reliable. For the United States, there had to be a way to discern independently the military activities, capabilities , and, if possible, intentions of the Soviet Union, which as a closed society had nearly absolute control over all of its national security information. What Is Verification? In its most basic sense, verification is the ability of one side to ensure unilaterally and reliably that the military activities of the other party are not inconsistent with agreed treaty obligations and cannot put its national security at risk through cheating. In his testimony on the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on January 28, 1988, Ambassador Paul Nitze stated that the United States insists that any agreement must be eªectively verifiable if it is to improve stability and make a lasting contribution to peace and security.1 “Eªectively verifiable,” he said, meant if the other side moves beyond the limits of the treaty in any militarily significant way, we would be able to detect such a violation in time to respond and, thereby, deny the other side the benefit of the violation. He concluded by saying that the U.S. ability to detect and respond to violations helps to deter them in the first place. Declarations vs. Verification Limits on the activities related to some weapons systems are inherently unverifiable, such as biological weapons which can be made in a laboratory. In addition, there are some cases where independent verification of military activity is not essential because violations would not be strategically significant. Finally, there are cases where mere declarations rather than rigorous verification activities are all that is TO VERIFY OR NOT TO VERIFY 7 desired by the parties involved. Thus, several pre-1970 arms control treaties did not require verification because in those particular cases it was not possible, strategically essential, or politically necessary. Therefore, it should be understood that verification of arms control agreements as we understand the concept today is generally a product of the nuclear arms race and the Cold War. Before the latter half of the twentieth century, verification was rarely an issue since most early eªorts at arms control were declaratory, often taking the form of rules of warfare. Meaningful verification was simply either not relevant or feasible before a weapon system was used in combat. For example, the 1899 and 1907 Hague Peace declarations prohibited the use of poison gas weapons. When the German Army violated The Hague declarations on April 22, 1915, near Ypres, Belgium, by dispensing an estimated 150 tons of chlorine gas from thousands of cylinders, sophisticated verification systems were not necessary to detect this fact. More than five thousand Allied soldiers lay injured and dying from chlorine gas inhalation.2 In a similar vein, the Geneva Protocol of 1925, which prohibited the use in war of chemical and biological weapons and is considered the first modern arms control agreement, is a rule of warfare and not a disarmament agreement , and it also has no verification provisions.When the Italian Army used poison gas against the Ethiopian Army in 1935, the Egyptian Army against Yemen in 1967, and Iraq during the war against Iran in the 1980s, it was the use of chemicals in combat that confirmed violation of the protocol. Finally, theWashington Naval Treaty of 1922, which established equipment limitations but never came into force, also had no verification provisions. The battleship ratios and other limits on naval vessels were considered to be easily observable. And even in recent years there have been important arms limitation agreements concluded that contain no comprehensive verification provisions. The debate about the importance of verification has continued to the present. During the...

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