Mr. President, I would like now to deal in more detail with a number of specific aspects of the future convention. As is well known in this Conference, Finland has for a long time centred its own activities on verification analysis and instrumentation. We have been glad to see that interest in these technical issues has been growing rapidly CD/PV.559 6 (Mr, Karhilo. Finland ) during the last year or so. Meetings of the Technical Group on Instrumentation seem to become a regular part of the work programme rather than remain isolated events. There is also a growing tendency to increase national resources devoted to CW verification research. It is often said that once the remaining political issues are resolved, the other pieces will fall into place. But it is also true that the speed of dealing with these other pieces is largely determined by the technical credibility of the proposed verification régime. Many of the technical details can and indeed must be left to the Preparatory Commission. Nevertheless, before that can be done there must be a clear understanding of the technical requirements of the convention and of the ways to meet them reliably. As a first attempt to test and possibly improve the reliability of the analytical methods that the verification mechanism depends on, 10 laboratories organized an international inter-laboratory comparison test, a so-called round-robin test, last autumn. The Finnish Project on the Verification of Chemical Disarmament acted as the co-ordinating laboratory of that test. A summary of the results of that test was circulated in the Ad hoc Committee on Chemical Weapons last April (CD/CW/WP.288). The full account of all the findings has been prepared and will be circulated shortly in the Blue Book series. A second round-robin test with more laboratories participating will be conducted later this year. It is our view that comparison tests of this 
**Analysis**
The text appears to be discussing a specific convention related to chemical disarmament, and the technical aspects of verification and instrumentation. It mentions laboratories, testing, and research, which suggests a strong focus on science and technology.

**Category**
Science and technology