Thirty Years of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC)

Bretislav Friedrich is a Research Group Leader at the Fritz-Haber-Institut and Hon-orary Professor at the Technische Universität Berlin. Besides his research in molecular physics, he maintains an abiding interest in the history of science and is engaged in efforts to eliminate chemical and other weapons of mass destruction. He co-authored and co-edited One Hundred Years of Chemical Warfare: Research, Deployment, Consequences (2017). 

Ulf Schmidt is Senior Professor of Modern History at the University of Hamburg, founding-director of the Centre for the Study of Health, Ethics, and Society, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. His interests are in the history of modern med-ical ethics, warfare, and policy in twentieth-century Europe and the United States. He is especially interested in the history of authoritarian regimes and modern dictator-ships. He is the author, among others, of Justice at Nuremberg: Leo Alexander and the Nazi Doctors’ Trial (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Karl Brandt: The Nazi Doctor. Medicine and Power in the Third Reich (Continuum, 2007); Secret Science. A Cen-tury of Poison Warfare and Human Experiments (OUP, 2015); co-editor of Propa-ganda and Conflict: War, Media and the Shaping of the Twentieth Century (Bloomsbury, 2019), and Ethical Research: The Declaration of Helsinki, and the Past, Present, and Future of Human Experimentation (OUP, 2020). He is Principal Investigator of a six-year ERC Synergy Grant on “Taming the European Leviathan: The Legacy of Post-War Medicine and the Common Good”.

Paul F. Walker coordinates the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) Coalition, is Vice Chair of the Arms Control Association, and is a member of the US Department of State International Security Advisory Board.  He has worked on chemical weap-ons demilitarization since undertaking the first US on-site inspection of a Russian CW stockpile in 1994 when he was a Professional Staff Member of the US House of Rep-resentatives Armed Services Committee.  He led the Green Cross International Pro-gram on Environmental Security and Sustainability for 20 years and was awarded the Right Livelihood Award in 2013 “for working tirelessly to rid the world of chemi-cal weapons.”  Walker holds an MA from Johns Hopkins SAIS and a PhD in interna-tional security from MIT; he is also a US Army Vietnam-era veteran.