Testimony of Amoretta M. Hoeber before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee

Thank you for the opportunity to testify before you today. As you may recall, I was the
Deputy Under Secretary of the U.S. Army during the Reagan Administration, and I led the Army’s
efforts in chemical warfare matters between 1981 and 1986. I appreciate the chance to raise some
of my concerns about the Chemical Warfare Convention and to go on record recommending that
the Convention not be ratified.

There are a number of reasons why I believe the treaty should not be ratified that relate to the
foreign policy concerns of this Committee. However, given the limited time available to me to
offer my comments, I can only summarize a few of my concerns, and those only briefly. I hope,
should I succeed in raising any doubts, that the Committee will pursue this matter most carefully
and actively seek out more information and insights on the problems of the Convention prior to
concluding their deliberations.

First, it should be clearly understood by the Committee that, contrary to the statements of the
proponents, this treaty won’t “rid the world of chemical weapons.”

This is true for several reasons:

The treaty will clearly not be global, and, infact, several countries of foreign policy concern to
the United States, namely Libya and North Korea, have announced that they will not sign the
Convention.

Even if the treaty were universally signed, there is no assurance that it will be abided by in the
case of all the signatory countries, and little confidence that violations of military significance in
countries other than the major powers would come to the attention of the United States. I don’t
want to get into the details of the viability and efficacy of the verification regime — burdensome,
onerous and expensive as it is because others testifying today will do so, but I would like to
suggest that your Committee ask the intelligence community to honestly assess whether we could
have a reasonable likelihood of detecting a militarily significant violation that was done with an
intent to conceal. I do not believe such detection is probable.

Thus, even under the best of circumstances, chemical weapons will remain a threat. This treaty
does not change that fact of life. The only chemical weapons which the treaty will eliminate are
those which would be eliminated in the absence of a treaty — primarily ours, and, if we fund the
process, those declared stocks of the former Soviet Union.

Second, the Chemical Weapons Convention will reduce the ability of the United States to deter
chemical warfare by eliminating retaliation in kind from the menu of deterrence options available
to a President.

The issue of whether the United States should eliminate the bulk of its chemical weapons
stockpile has long since been decided, and correctly in my view. The unitary munitions have been
obsolete for some time. However, the decision to eliminate the more modern although minuscule
chemical retaliatory capability — the binaries — has been a function of the same wishful thinking that
has resulted in this treaty. Even though the use of the retaliatory binaries was forsworn by the
prior Administration, in my view their existence per se created an uncertainty in the minds of
anyone who might be considering using chemical weapons against our forces or against those of
one of our allies, and this uncertainty has enhanced deterrence.

This treaty will eliminate the flexibility that some retaliation in kind capability provides to our
President, jeopardizing in particular the potential security of U.S. military personnel.

Third, this treaty, by purporting to “rid the world of chemical weapons.” Guarantees
complacency, which will have an inevitable effect of reducing the level of effort going into
defenses against chemical weapons. What will suffer will not be the ability to acquire chemical
weapons for those who would use them, but rather our ability to provide for the defenses of our
own forces.

History has shown that in every case, the ratification of a treaty by the Senate has been seen as
reducing the threat to the United States military, whether such a reduction actually occurs or not.
As a result, expenditures on research, development and acquisition of measures to defend against
that threat are cut drastically. The only people who benefit by this have been our adversaries.

I cite as an example the Biological Warfare Convention, which resulted in more than a 50% cut
in research and development of protection against biological agents within a year after its
ratification, and a reduction in our ability to determine the actual facts of the Soviet biological
warfare activities — for example, at Sverdlovsk — until the change in the world order put the
Russians in a position to discuss the matter. Another example is that of the SALT treaties, which
resulted in severe cuts in research and development on both U.S. ballistic missile penetration
measures and defense of the U.S. population against third nation and rogue nation ballistic missile
threats.

It should be noted, by the way, that funding cuts do not have a linear effect. The cut of 50% in
the funding of biological defense efforts resulted in a cut in effectiveness of far more than that
amount, perhaps as much as 90%.

I also note that the limitations of research and development efforts on both biological warfare
defense and ballistic missile defense have come to be regretted as it has become clearer and
clearer that there are countries whose activities are not as constrained by what has come to be
referred to as “international norms.”

As a former Army official, and as the sometimes-called “mother of the Chemical Corps,” I have
very serious concerns about a reduction in the attention paid to maintaining chemical defense
preparedness. It is far more difficult to provide for defenses than it is for an adversary to
manufacture offensiver materiel in this case. Many, including those in Congress,, have supported
the Department of Defense’s efforts to provide American troops with quality chemical protective
gear. There is no disputing the fact that these programs had a relatively low priority even in the
face of a clear and defined threat from major adversaries during the Cold War. I am particularly
concerned about what will happen to these programs should this treaty be approved, for the
United States military remains in need of vastly improved protective gear, equipment
modifications, decontamination capabilities and training. One can only imagine what low priority
such pursuits will enjoy when there is not supposed to be any threat at all. And history has shown
us that adversaries — and there are always unexpected adversaries — will take advantage of such
weaknesses.

Fourth, and the final point I wish to make, the Chemical Weapons Convention makes a
mockery of arms control objectives themselves and sets an extremely dangerous precedent.

To see what this treaty does to the concepts of foreign relations and international law, it is
necessary to understand the context that has driven the completion of the CWC. And that context
is that the only reason for this Convention is that an existing Convention — the Geneva Protocol,
which prohibits first use of chemical weapons — is inadequate and has failed.

Why has it failed? The Geneva Protocol has failed because there are no international
mechanisms for enforcing it and “international norms” have not served to accomplish that
enforcement. The Chemical Weapons Convention before you today does not solve this problem.
Nor does it strengthen the ‘international norms.” And it is use, not possession, of such weapons
that is the fundamental problem faced by the nations of the world.

Let’s look at a specific example. When the Iraqis used chemical weapons against Iran, the
international community was horrified. The “international norm” against that use was as strong as
it has ever been. Yet the international community was still not able to figure out what to do about
it. No sanctions were ever imposed; no resolutions were ever passed condemning that use;
nothing was ever done about that treaty violation except to increase the arguments by some that if
that treaty had failed, another treaty should be concluded.

The logic of this escapes me. If “international norms” were not strong enough to effectively
isolate or punish a country whose violations resulted in the death of a significant number of
people, what makes us think that the “international norms” would be strong enough to prevent or
punish the violator of a new treaty which involved only the possession of a prohibited weapon?
This so-called solution is an exercise in escapism. It cheapens the currency of arms control as
well as avoids the real problem.

That real problem is what to do about violators. We clearly haven’t solved that problem, either
nationally or internationally. Witness the situation in North Korea today relative to the nuclear
non-proliferation treaty.

Unless we resolve the broader issue, in my view the Chemical Weapons Convention is worse
than meaningless. It’s a pretense. This is the foreign policy matter which should be addressed by
this Committee.

Thank you for your attention.