Vi publicerar här en artikel i Guardian från 2013 om inspektioner för avveckla kemiska vapen.
In 16 years, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons has overseen the destruction of over 80% of declared stockpiles. […]
The absence of publicity has helped the OPCW go about its business with a quiet but striking efficiency. Since its founding in 1997, it has overseen the elimination of over 80% of the world’s declared chemical weapons stocks, starting with a bunker full of mustard gas and arsenic-based chemicals left behind by the communist regime in Albania.
The entire stockpiles of India and South Korea have also been destroyed, as well as almost all of Muammar Gaddafi’s stocks in Libya, and well over 90% of the vast US arsenal. Russia’s – an ever bigger relic from the cold war – is two-thirds of the way to oblivion, and the OPCW is working on dismantling weapons left behind by Japan’s wartime occupation of China.
In terms of disarmament it is one of the world’s biggest achievements. Almost a century ago, in the trenches of the first world war, chemical munitions threatened to be the harbingers of an awful future. Saddam Hussein’s use of them against Iran and then against Kurdish civilians in Halabja in 1988 were a reminder of their indiscriminate nature, as were the haunting pictures of rows of white-shrouded corpses of children after the attacks in Ghouta, Damascus, in August. Läs artikel