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ENMOD: A Distraction from More Urgent Matters?
"To be quite frank, we would have preferred the Committee to take up first of all a number of other matters of unquestionably high priority which have been pending on its agenda for some considerable time."
- Argentina to the CCD (CCD/PV.695; 18 March 1976, p. 6)
The negotiation of ENMOD consumed a large amount of the CCD's energies in 1975 and 1976. While no country questioned the underlying need for a treaty, many said that other disarmament issues were more important. Addressing hostile environmental modification, they argued, should come after creating a comprehensive ban on nuclear testing and a convention on chemical weapons.
Some countries argued that environmental modification was a matter for the future. Biological weapons had recently, finally, been put on a track to global prohibition with the completion of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention and, to these countries, more landmark agreements appeared potentially attainable.
Others went further, arguing that the ENMOD negotiations were a deliberate stalling tactic used by the US and USSR to appear busy on arms control while avoiding nuclear and chemical issues. (See Barnaby, F. 1976. Environmental Warfare in: Bulletin of the Atomic Sciences, 32(5). May 1976, pp. 36-43.)
Whether or not ENMOD was a cynical superpower arms control delay, it was not the CCD's agenda, but the end of the Cold War that created political conditions conducive to banning chemical weapons and nuclear testing. The Conference on Disarmament (successor to the CCD) adopted the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) in September 1992. The CWC came into force on 29 April 1997, after being ratified by 65 states (now 145).
The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) was approved by the General Assembly on 10 September 1996; but as of February 2002 lacks 13 ratifications from the 44 potentially nuclear-capable states listed in its Annex B. All 44 of these countries must ratify the treaty for it to enter into force.
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