Introduction: UNSCOM and the future of WMD verification.

After the 2003 Iraq War, the Iraq Survey Group confirmed that Iraq had no remaining weapons of mass destruction and validated UNSCOM's findings, but as Duelfer puts it, at the time, "UNSCOM did not know how good it was." The weapons that were in existence were to be destroyed, either under UNSCOM supervision or by UNSCOM itself, and then UNSCOM would undertake on-site inspections to verify the declarations and destruction activities. There are also suggestions, by Stephen Black ([1]), for instance, that UNSCOM triggered renewed global efforts to strengthen the Biological Weapons Convention, as it demonstrated that even in the most antagonistic circumstances, international inspections can reveal an illicit biological weapons program. Many people will remember Colin Powell's historic speech to the UN Security Council describing Iraq's mobile production facilities for making biological weapons. [Extracted from the article]