The global chemical weapons watchdog whose inspectors are monitoring the destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize – with an admonishment to both the United States and Russia that they must follow suit and eliminate their own stockpiles.
Experts from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) were dispatched to Syria last month after a sarin gas attack in a Damascus suburb killed some 1,400 people, a last-minute deployment that helped to prevent a US missile attack on President Bashar al-Assad.
The OPCW mission in Syria is unprecedented because the civil war there has already killed as many as 100,000 people, but also because its fast-track aim is to destroy Mr Assad’s chemical weapons production capability by November 1st and the stockpiles themselves by the mid-2014.
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