The chemical weapons convention : strategic implications for the United States
Abstract : On January 13, 1993, in Paris, 130 countries signed the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), to ban the entire class of Chemical Weapons. Debate continues on the strategic implications of the Convention, as drafted, and whether it is in the U.S. national security interest. This paper explores the historical, moral, and legal aspects of chemical warfare, and the strategic implications of the Convention, including operational, policy, constitutional, and industry impact for the U.S. This paper concludes that, although 'imperfect,' the Convention represents a significant contribution to U.S. security objectives, and serves the national interest.
NGOs as catalysts for international arms control? The ratification of the Chemical Weapons Convention and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in the United States
The article investigates the role of pro-arms control non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in furthering the domestic ratification of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) in the United States. The study starts out from the two-level framework for analysing domestic ratification processes of international agreements, and it introduces the concept of audience gains to complement this framework: being the counterpart of audience costs, audience gains denote positive contributions of domestic non-state actors to formal ratification processes. The article distinguishes two complementary pathways for NGOs to generate audience gains, that is, the pathways of ‘mobilising consensus’ and of ‘persuading veto players’. Two in-depth case studies on the ratification of the CWC and the CTBT in the US explore the extent to which pro-agreement NGOs were indeed successful in employing the two pathways. The evidence of the case studies is that NGOs were more influential catalysts of the ratification of the CWC than with respect to the CTBT. The article's findings on the prospects for NGOs to push the domestic ratification of international agreements are expected to be of more general relevance beyond the field of arms control.
Global attractivity in time-delayed predator-prey systems
Abstract For a predator-prey model with time-delay due to gestation, criteria are obtained for persistence and global attractivity. The global attractivity criteria apply only to models with a decreasing prey isocline.