A former weapons inspector with the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) has called for an international auditing authority that could focus on examining trading documentation, including letters of credit (L/Cs), with the aim of detecting components of or complete weapons of mass destruction (WMD) trading on the black market.

Geoffrey Forden suggests the authority could be just one in a series of measures needed to prevent the growth of trading networks such as the nuclear black market masterminded by Abdul Qadeer Khan in the 1990s.

Nuclear circus

Forden argues that the existence of Khan's nuclear circus, which supplied entire uranium-enrichment plants to the Libyan nuclear weapons programmes, should cause a fundamental rethink about the speed, nature, and ways further proliferation might occur in the 21st century.

Khan's network, far from being the exception according to the former weapons inspector, is likely to prove closer to the rule for how states will try to acquire nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons and related delivery systems in the coming years he warns.

Auditing authority

One of Forden's suggestions is to reduce today's reliance on customs agents in individual countries to spot the transfer of components for WMD production, which he says is an impossible task for individual countries.

An international auditing authority, he suggests, could however use access to L/Cs, bills of lading, customs reports, and other international trading documentation to unearth the correlation of shipments among purchasers, manufacturers, and trading companies and reconstruct a complete picture of proliferation deals.

Bank co-operation

Private banks wanting to do business with major industrialised countries could, suggests Forden, be required to grant auditing privileges to the international authority and to do business only with participating banks. Suspicious trade activity could be tagged and examined in detail, including underlying contracts, yielding further insight into suspicious shipments he adds.

Forden is a research associate with the Science, Technology, and Society Programme at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He served as chief of the multidisciplinary analysis section of UNMOVIC.

This article represents the views of the author and not necessarily those of the ICC or any of the other partners in DC-PRO.