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never totally absent from consideration, however.
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In the CBW realm the
Geneva Protocol was widely viewed as an inadequate instrument, yet
strategies for addressing its inadequacies differed greatly. Some policy dis-
cussions demonstrated a reluctance to undermine the Protocol further by
drawing attention to its weaknesses.
The extraordinary achievement of banning an entire class of weapons
became possible only through the convergence of several phenomena in
quite different spheres. The demonstration of the power of nuclear weap-
ons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the subsequent development of nu-
clear weapons by the US, USSR (1949), UK (1952), France (1960), and
China (1964) strengthened the institutions and motivations for multilat-
eral arms control and disarmament. Simultaneously, serious academics
developed a sophisticated literature on arms control and disarmament.
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Third, in spite of the Cold War, the countries of NATO and the Warsaw
Pact demonstrated their ability, together with the nonaligned countries,
to reach agreement on multilateral nuclear weapons treaties, most im-
portantly the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963 (also known as the Limited
Test Ban Treaty) and the Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968. Fourth, the
negotiations on these multilateral treaties revealed a chasm between the
US and Soviet approaches to arms control that would affect arms negotia-
tions for decades: the Western insistence on verification (President Ron-
ald Reagan's famous synopsis: “Trust but verify”) and the consistent So-
viet rejection of on-site verification measures.
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Fifth, nongovernmental
organizations concerned with arms control and disarmament, such as
the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, promoted dis-
cussions of CBW by governmental and nongovernmental participants.
Finally, the Western European Union encountered technical difficulties
with the implementation of portions of the Brussels Treaty of 1954 relat-
ing to BW.
The conceptual origins of the BWC can be traced to the Modified Brus-
sels Treaty of 1954, in which treaty members created an obligation for
Germany not to produce BW.
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The Western European Union Armaments
Control Agency (ACA) had responsibility for ensuring that Germany
lived up to this obligation. The concept of “nonproduction control” had
its origins in the ACA's effort to fulfill its task. A second provision of
the Brussels Treaty established “quantitative control” of the size of stocks
of BW on the mainland of Western Europe. Thirteen years later these
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