After years of contentious relations with the international community due to the risks that Libya's expansive CW capabilities posed and its refusal to sign the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), Libya has finally agreed in the past year to cease its pursuit of WMD, including CW, and to open its doors to international inspections. It has also become a signatory party to the CWC and taken the initiative to transparently destroy its chemical weapons equipment.

History

The motivation behind Libya's move to initiate and to pursue the development of CW capabilities was based on several factors. First, it represented a bid by Libyan dictator Colonel Mu'ammar al-Qadhdhafi to offset Israel's larger conventional military forces and nuclear capabilities with weapons such as chemical weapons, which are considered the "poor man's atomic bomb." Libya embarked on a full-scale effort to develop CW capabilities as the most cost-effective means of bolstering its overall military posture, which lacked effective conventional military forces or nuclear weapons. According to Western and Libyan exile sources, Libya's effort to acquire chemical weapons was coupled with an aggressive strategy to acquire ballistic missiles that could be used to deliver them. Because chemical weapons are cheaper to produce and easier to conceal than nuclear weapons, the possibility loomed that Libya could employ chemical weapons either directly or through surrogates, such as terrorist groups.[2]

Second, Libya's motivation to develop CW capabilities may have stemmed from its thwarted efforts to obtain its own nuclear capabilities. Libya's official position was that it did not have a CW program and chemical production facilities were intended solely for peaceful purposes.[3] But as demonstrated by the Libyan government's revelations in late 2003 about the true extent of its CW program, these denials demonstrated al-Qadhdhafi's past history of covert proliferation.

During the mid to late 1980s, Libya began the construction of three chemical weapons facilities. The first was located 75 miles south of Tripoli at a site called Rabta. The facility, named Pharma-150, posed as a pharmaceuticals facility to conceal the nature of its offensive chemical weapons program. Construction at Rabta was completed in 1988, after which the facility was able to manufacture at least 100 metric tons of blister and nerve agents over the next three years.[4] Libya built the second facility called Pharma-200 underground at an army base 650 miles south of Tripoli at Sebha. The third chemical weapons facility built in Libya during the 1980s was Pharma-300 or Rabta II located south of Tripoli at Tarhuna. This site promised protection from air attacks by building two 200-450 ft. tunnels covered by 100 ft. of sandstone shields and lined with reinforced concrete.[5] For the international community, the development of these three sites were cause for alarm as Libya's government under al-Qadhdhafi had proven unpredictable after a series of incidents including threats in May 1981 that Col. Al-Qadhdhafi was planning the assassination of U.S. diplomats in Rome and Paris and the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland by Libyan intelligence officers on 21 December 1988.[6]

As allegations filtered in claiming that the Rabta plant was potentially the most expansive chemical weapons facility in the world, the United States in particular became increasingly concerned with al-Qadhdhafi's willingness to utilize chemical weapons. Libya had already resorted to chemical warfare on a small scale as an asymmetric response to conventional military inferiority. In September 1987, Libya's military operation in Chad was near defeat following a series of dramatic reversals. When Chadian forces, with French support, launched a surprise attack on a military base inside Libya, al-Qadhdhafi ordered his forces to attack the Chadian troops by dropping Iranian supplied bombs containing sulfur mustard from an AN-26 transport aircraft.[7] Although this use of chemical weapons was not extensive enough to be militarily decisive, it set a worrisome precedent.

Therefore, when the United States caught wind of allegations that the Rabta plant was capable of producing roughly 10,000 lbs. of chemical agents such as Sarin and Tabun per day, it prepared to launch a pre-emptive air strike to destroy the facility.[8] (Note: it is not evident how the 10,000 lb per day value was determined; hypothetical calculations of production quantities often represent idealized scenarios that are rarely realized, as is evident from Libya's declared CW stocks that are much smaller than such a calculated capacity would indicate.) If it had not been for a fire at the Rabta site in May 1990 that reportedly destroyed the facility's production capabilities just before the pending U.S. attack, the United States might have launched a bombing campaign that would have wiped out the entire Rabta compound.[9] The truth came out later, however, that the smoke shown in the reconnaissance satellite photos was, in fact, caused by a pile of burning tires on fire a significant distance from the buildings at the Rabta facility, discrediting the reports claiming that the facility had been damaged. The United States called the fire a hoax intended to discourage U.S. military action against Libya's CW facilities.

Rumblings within the international community began to emerge during the late 1980s that exposed the involvement of foreign companies in supplying Libya's chemical weapons program with materials, technology, contractor services and technical expertise. In January 1989, the world found out that Imhausen-Chemie, a West German chemical company, had been serving as the "prime contractor" for the facility at Rabta since April 1980.[10] This exposure plus the involvement of several other West German companies made West Germany the scapegoat for international criticism, even though countries such as Belgium, France, Denmark, East Germany, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the United States, Yugoslavia, China and Thailand had also participated in equipping Libya with various means for developing its chemical weapons program. Nevertheless, a number of countries reacted to international pressure spearheaded by the United States and took steps to ensure that companies under their jurisdiction ceased transactions with Libya that lead to the further development of Libya's chemical weapons program. A total of three Imhausen employees, including the director, were convicted of illegally supplying CW materials to Libya in October 1991 and a fourth German national was convicted in 1996 for facilitating Libya's acquisition of computer technology and other equipment to enhance chemical weapons development.

The Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) entered into force on 29 April 1997. Despite participating in the convention negotiations, Libya did not sign, largely in protest to Israel's continued refusal to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). Libya attended the first CWC Review Conference (RevCon) as a non-state party, during the week of 28 April to 9 May 2003. By October of that same year, Libya would consent to U.S. and British investigators examining laboratories and military facilities. And, by December, Col. Mu'ammar al-Qadhdhafi would announce his pledge to abide by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the IAEA Safeguards Agreement and the Biological Weapons Convention, the Additional Protocol of the IAEA Safeguards Agreement, the Biological and Chemical Weapons Treaty, and to rid Libya of all weapons of mass destruction, including chemical weapons. Five and half years after refusing to become a signatory party to the CWC, Libya signed the convention on 6 January 2004, pacifying some of the diplomatic tensions established between Libya and the United States by the years of WMD posturing.

Status

By the mid-1990s, Libya's chemical warfare capabilities reportedly included an indigenous production capability for chemical weapons (CW) manufacture and storage at three primary facilities in isolated parts of the country (Rabta, Sebha and Tarhunah), as well as personal protective equipment, Soviet-type decontamination units, and a stockpile of chemical agents. Libyan leader Qadhdhafi's pursuit of CW capabilities was of concern to the international community because of his often erratic behavior and the fact that Libya was believed to possess, in Rabta and Tarhunah, two of the largest CW production complexes ever constructed in the developing world. According to Western and Libyan exile sources, Libya's effort to acquire CW was coupled with a program to acquire ballistic missiles that could be used to deliver them.

On December 19, 2003, the Libyan government surprised the world by publicly announcing its decision to abandon its programs for developing weapons of mass destruction and intention to immediately open its WMD facilities to international inspections. According to published reports, Libyan leader al-Qadhdhafi's renunciation of WMD followed nine months of secret negotiations with the United States and Britain. Until its WMD program was officially acknowledged, Libya's official position was that it did not have a CW program and that its chemical production facilities were intended solely for peaceful purposes.[11]

On 20 February 2004, the OPCW received a partial declaration from the Libyan Government detailing the country's chemical weapons stockpiles. In the following weeks, OPCW inspectors monitored the destruction of 3,500 aerial bombs designed to deliver chemical agents and verified a report from the Libyan Government claiming possession of 50,700 lbs. of mustard agent precursors and 2.9 million lbs. of nerve agent precursor chemicals. By 19 March 2004, inspectors confirmed finding 20 metric tons of sulfur mustard and enough material to produce thousands of tons of Sarin nerve agent. (Note: this is far less than would have been expected based on the alleged 10,000 lbs, or 4.5 metric tons, per day production capacity alleged in May 1990, which would have corresponded to an excess of 42 million pounds of agents.) The discovery of the expansiveness of Libya's chemical weapons capabilities elucidated the degree of risk reduction that resulted from Libya's newfound transparency.

Since renouncing chemical weapons and joining the CWC Libya has sought to play an active role in the operations and activities of the OPCW. It regularly attends meetings and has sent representatives to a number of regional events. Furthermore Libya has on a number of occassions called on onther regional states to follow its example and jointhe Convention. Despite swift initial progress in destroying munitions the process of destroying Libya's existing CW agent stocks has ben slower than expected. In December 2006 Libya secured an extension of its destruction deadlines from the OPCW that gives it until 31 December 2010 to complete the process. Although Libya and the United States initially agreed to cooperate on, and share the cost of, destroying Libya's CW agent stockpile this agreement was repudiated by the Libyans in June 2007. Neither the United States, nor any other party has seen the breakdown of this agreement as a sign that the Libyans are stepping back from their committments. It is generally agreed that the agreement was ended due to disputes over bureaucratic arrangements and the distribution of costs. 

Key Sources:
[1] Burck, Gordon M and Charles C. Flowerree, International Handbook on Chemical Weapons Proliferation (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991), p. 267.
[2] As evidence that Qadhdhafi has few inhibitions about turning over highly destructive weapons to terrorist groups, in the 1980s Libya provided the Irish Republican Army (IRA) with surface-to-air SA-7 missiles and tons of the plastic explosive Semtex. David Ottaway, "Middle East Weapons Proliferate," The Washington Post, December 19, 1988, p. A1.
[3] Serge Schmemann, "Belgian Charged in Illicit Shipment for Libyan Plant," The New York Times, January 13, 1989, p. A14.
[4] Department of Defense, the United States of America, Proliferation: Threat and Response, November 1997, http://www.defenselink.mil/pubs/prolif/me_na. html.
[5] Timmerman, Kenneth R., Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Cases of Iran, Syria, and Libya (Los Angeles, CA: Simon Wiesenthal Center, August 1992), p.80.
[6] "Terrorist Attacks on Americans,1979-1988: The Attacks, the Groups, and the U.S. Response," PBS Frontline, 2001, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/target/etc/cron.html.
[7] Proliferation: Threat and Response (Washington, DC: Office of the Secretary of Defense, April 1996), p. 26.
[8] Gertz, Bill, "Chinese Move Seen as Aiding Libya in Making Poison Gas," Washington Times, July 12, 1990.
[9] Timmerman, Kenneth R., "The Poison Gas Connection: Western Suppliers of Unconventional Weapons and Technologies to Iraq and Libya," Middle East Defense News, Simon Wiesenthal Center, 1990, p.31.
[10] Timmerman, Kenneth R. Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Cases of Iran, Syria, and Libya, (Los Angeles, CA: Simon Wiesenthal Center, August 1992), p. 80.
[11] Serge Schmemann, "Belgian Charged in Illicit Shipment for Libyan Plant," The New York Times, January 13, 1989, p. A14.

	Updated June 2008