Chemical Reaction

ONE of the less-noticed legacies of Saddam Hussein is now being considered by
the Senate: the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), a 1993 treaty that would prohibit
possession of chemical weapons. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee supported
ratification, with half of the Republican members voting in favor.

Chemical weapons pose a serious threat. They can be manufactured easily and
stored without detection. Their production is not a high-technology enterprise:
a factory or laboratory that makes fertilizer, pharmaceuticals, or plastics
can readily be adapted for the purpose. As a result of widespread recent advances
in bio-technology, toxic agents can be produced by means that provide little
or no intelligence "signature" at all.

Chemical weapons appeal to potential aggressors because small quantities that
could be stored in a single warehouse of moderate size-could hamstring an enemy
in its efforts to mobilize, receive reinforcements, maintain air-sortie rates,
and the like. For forces deployed defensively, using limited active-duty units
and relying on rapid mobilization in the event of warforces such as those in
NATO (especially during the Cold War) and in South Korea and Israel-time is
of the essence, and mobilization delays can have strategic consequences.

If chemical weapons were difficult to manufacture or hide or if they were militarily
significant only in large quantities, it might make sense to attempt to ban
their possession. But when the opposite is the case, the ban cannot be expected
to work against countries whose governments have a history of acting in bad
faith.

It is bad practice for the United States to enter into arms-control agreements
that cannot be verified. Signing on implies either that we trust the other parties,
or that, if we do not trust them all, we can satisfactorily monitor those of
concern to us.

When addressing the CWC’s unverifiability, the treaty’s supporters often remark
that there is no such thing as "perfect" verification. But the problem
with the CWC is not that our intelligence agencies would be able to detect only
90 per cent or 80 per cent or even 50 per cent of significant violations. The
issue is not how much confidence is enough. The problem is flat and stark. The
countries now of greatest concern to us-the People’s Republic of China, North
Korea, Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Iran-could become parties to the agreement knowing
that they could produce and stockpile chemical weapons without detection.

EVENTS in recent years should have resolved once and for all the question of
whether a ban on chemical-weapons possession can be verified effectively. The
mandate of UNSCOM-the United Nations Special Commission on Iraq-was to see to
the dismantling of Iraq’s offensive-warfare programs: chemical and biological
weapons, nuclear weapons, and longrange missiles. It has had more than a thousand
inspectors combing Iraq on the ground ever since Iraq’s defeat in Desert Storm
in 1991. The Iraqi regime, under military threat and the pressure of severe
economic sanctions, has permitted this intrusion and allowed UNSCOM inspectors
access to its facilities and personnel to a remarkable degree.

The UNSCOM inspectors have had more extensive and thorough access in Iraq over
a longer period of time than inspectors would have in any country under even
an extreme reading of the CWC. Nevertheless, after three, four, and five years
of persistent (and courageous) on-the-ground investigation, UNSCOM inspectors
continually make significant new discoveries about Iraq’s chemical- and biological-weapons
activities. In other words, years of intense scrutiny of a single country that
was compelled to cooperate have not sufficed to uncover all the major elements,
let alone the finer points, of the Iraqi programs. Under the circumstances,
one can hardly maintain that inspections under the CWC, burdensome though they
will be, can ensure effective monitoring. Ambassador Rolf Ekeus of Sweden, who
heads UNSCOM and who helped negotiate the CWC, remains a supporter of the new
treaty, but he has stated candidly and categorically that it would not be effective
against countries like Iraq that act clandestinely and in bad faith.

If the CWC will not be effective against countries like Iraq, it is reasonable
to ask, what is the need for it? If we want to ensure that countries like the
United States, Canada, and Britain do not have chemical weapons, we can achieve
this without a burdensome new international bureaucracy. It can be done by the
friendly democratic countries themselves, acting jointly or in parallel. The
CWC’s purpose is precisely to constrain dangerous, secretive, nondemocratic
countries like Iraq, and if it clearly will not do so, then the treaty has no
reason for being.

Another Iraq-related piece of recent history deserves careful consideration.
During the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, Iraq used chemical weapons against Iran.
This included the first military use ever of nerve gas. Iran invited a United
Nations inspection team onto its territory to examine the victims, witness the
damage, and study the unexploded chemical munitions fired from Iraq. Through
gruesome videotapes, laboratory analyses, and other means, the inspectors proved
that Iraq had used chemical weapons in violation of the 1925 Geneva Protocol,
to which it is a party. That venerable treaty banned the initiation of chemical
warfare. In other words, it banned use-as opposed to possession, which the CWC
would ban. Iraq’s widely publicized flouting of the Geneva Protocol led, a few
months later-in January 1989-to the convening in Paris of a large international
conference to do something to uphold the old treaty. But the conference could
not agree upon any sanctions against Iraq. It did not resolve so much as to
censure Iraq. Indeed, it could not pass a resolution even mentioning Iraq by
name.

The governments that fell down on the job of upholding the Geneva Protocol then
strove to demonstrate their commitment to arms control by agreeing upon an unverifiable
ban on possession of chemical weapons. Thus we have the CWC. If Iraq’s use,
in violation of the Geneva Protocol, of nerve gas and other chemicals against
Iran-a UN-confirmed illegality about which there was no verification dispute,
a violation that produced horribly disfigured victims and lurid corpses, all
displayed on television around the world-produced no condemnation of Iraq, let
alone punishment, then what basis exists for believing that non-compliance with
the CWC would produce such action? If the Geneva Protocol cannot be enforced,
then much less could the CWC. And if the Geneva Protocol is properly enforced,
then the CWC is unnecessary.

CWC supporters often fall back on the argument that the new treaty would, at
least, strengthen international norms against chemical weapons, especially if
the United States would lead by example, by destroying its own chemical arsenal.

If the Administration is intent on eliminating the U.S. chemical arsenal in
any event, as a "statement" against chemical weapons in principle,
it would be better to do so unilaterally than through ratification of an unverifiable
and ineffective treaty. That way, if circumstances justified maintaining our
renunciation, we could do so. If it were necessary in the future to alter our
unilateral policy so as to maximize the disincentive for anyone to use chemical
weapons against us or our allies, we could do that instead.

Rather than impose on our government, industry, and people the costs and constraints
of the CWC, U.S. officials could more constructively direct their energies to
devising means to enforce the existing ban on chemical-weapons use, the Geneva
Protocol. This would be a worthy arms-control initiative. The ban on use makes
much more sense than a ban on possession. It is inherently easier to verify
because there is a victim, who has incentives to prove the violation to the
world. It does not require elaborate, bureaucratized verification measures.
And there should be greater general outrage in the world, and therefore a stronger
political basis for punishing violations of a treaty that bans use than of one
that bans stockpiling. No approaches to enforcing the Geneva Protocol, however,
have ever been agreed upon in advance. Our policymakers and diplomats should
attend to this, proposing methods, for example, by which the assets abroad of
violators of the Protocol could be seized to satisfy victims’ claims as adjudicated
in an appropriate forum.

Aside from not accomplishing its purpose, the CWC would do various types of
harm. It would impose substantial administrative burdens on industry, and not
just the chemical industry. The new international bureaucracy created by the
treaty would be expensive. Less obvious but even more important is the harm
done by false advertising.

Questions of honesty aside (and honesty on the part of governments is more important,
especially in the field of national security, than many people realize), the
CWC’s putative benefits will tend to reduce concern about a problem that deserves
increased concern. Reduced concern translates into reduced investment by us
and other law-abiding states in programs for countering the threat. Chemical
weapons are most useful against targets that are not well defended. So, the
fewer resources devoted to defense, the greater the incentive for outlaw states
to employ chemical weapons.

A clear view of the unhappy realities in this area should lead us to invest
in such things as protective gear, detection equipment, and medical-treatment
capabilities-not to mention active measures such as methods of intercepting
missiles that could carry chemical warheads. This would affect the cost-benefit
calculations of potential users of chemical weapons so as to discourage use.
U.S. ratification of the CWC, however, would have the opposite effect, and thus,
despite the good intentions of many of those who produced the treaty, create
conditions that would make chemical warfare more rather than less likely.

The world does not need a large, new international bureaucracy under the CWC
supervising an ineffective and costly inspection regime. What it needs is for
the civilized powers to muster the will to agree on penalties for states that
violate existing law against chemicalweapons use. The CWC makes complex new
law when proper enforcement of the simple old law would accomplish much more.
If we want to use law as a weapon against chemical weapons, we should reject
the CWC and shore up the Geneva Protocol.