Chemical Warfare: Beware Bush’s Perilous Delusions

In no area has the Bush administration ‘s preoccupation with the public-relations aspects of arms-control policy been more clearly in evidence than in last week’s U.S.-Soviet byplay at the United Nations concerning chemical weapons. President Bush proposed that as part of an effort to accelerate progress toward a global ban on such weapons, the U.S. and the Soviet Union should agree to massive reductions In their CW arsenals.

The goods news is that the Bush proposal implicitly endorses a key concept: Until every country capable of producing chemical weapons agrees verifiably to eliminate that capability, the U.S. needs to retain a modest CW stockpile. The bad news is that the president undermined this concept by reiterating his commitment to expediting an agreement prohibiting chemical weapons.

From a purely tactical point of view, this approach was incredibly shortsighted. It invited the Soviet response that Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze obligingly supplied the next day: If the Americans are so determined to eliminate chemical weapons, let the superpowers agree immediately not to produce such weapons any more and to destroy their stockpiles without waiting for a global ban.

Within hours of its unveiling, the Bush chemical-weapons proposal was run off the road by the Soviet counteroffer. By trying to beat the Soviets at their game — using arms-control initiatives in a bidding war for public opinion — the administration was quickly shown to be less imaginative, less willing to "take risks for peace" and determined, despite its rhetoric, to build the very weapons it says should be banned.

Which brings us to the strategic problem with chemical-arms control: The record of efforts to impose effective negotiated limitations on them is not good.

In 1925, following the horrific experience of chemical warfare in World War I, an international convention banning the first use of chemical weapons was signed. Even this modest agreement has proved extremely difficult to verify and enforce. As blatant a case as Iraq’s repeated use of CW during its war with Iran and on the Kurds failed to precipitate global condemnation to say nothing of sanctions.

The prospects are worse still for verifying and enforcing compliance with an infinitely more ambitious world-wide ban on chemical weapons. CW agents can be manufactured in any chemistry laboratory. They can even be created in relatively austere, confined spaces with no telltale signatures to provide outsiders with evidence of the character of the work under way. What is more, virtually any plant used to manufacture fertilizers, pesticides or pharmaceutical products can be readily adapted to churn out large quantities of the stuff. Such facilities exist all over the world.

The draft CW accord now being developed in Geneva would require only that 60 countries have to enroll before the treaty enters into force. Clearly this is well shy of any reasonable definition of "global."

The prospects that a comprehensive CW ban could be verifiable are no better. Due to the inherent character of chemical agents, the ease with which they can be concealed, and the great similarities between facilities that manufacture them and those that make non-military chemical products, there is no effective way to monitor covert CW programs.

Why, then, is the Bush administration pursuing a ban so aggressively?

Regrettably, the answer seems to be that Mr. Bush has become — even, according to published reports, in the eyes of his own staff — "fixated" on a CW ban. The president’s obsession evidently dates from 1982 when, as vice president, he was obliged to cast the first of three tie-breaking votes in the Senate needed to resume U.S. chemical-weapons production, suspended in 1969. Mr. Bush’s mother, who is a devoted arms controller, is said to have given him unshirted hell for this pivotal role in starting American production of safer, binary chemical munitions.

By way of penance, Mr. Bush apparently resolved to become the champion of a new chemical-arms control regime aimed at banning all such production and stockpiling. In 1984, he personally introduced at the Conference on Disarmament In Geneva a U.S. draft treaty prepared in great haste for the occasion.

Worse yet, Mr. Bush’s interest in a CW ban prevented the Reagan administration in 1987 from adopting a more honest and responsible position toward such an accord: As the U.S. binary modernization program got under way, the Soviet Union became ever more determined to conclude a CW ban quickly. Suddenly, U.S. demands for intrusive inspection arrangements that previously had deadlocked the chemical-arms-control talks were acceptable to Moscow. Unless it modified its position, the Reagan administration faced the prospect of reaching agreement on a treaty to which it and its predecessors had paid lip service but that it knew to be dangerously unverifiableable.

Every relevant agency in the U.S. government concluded that the U.S. needed to alter its position. But for the intervention of a representative of then-Vice President Bush, the U.S. would have given up the quest for a near-term CW ban in favor of other, less ambitious objectives.

What remains to be seen is whether the president’s personal attachment to this cause will force the potentially crucial stipulations he enunciated In his U.N. speech to be set aside. It must be expected that the Soviets, Western European nations and some in Congress will try to get Mr. Bush to abandon his implicit commitment to continue binary production and maintain an effective retaliatory CW stockpile until the unlikely time when there is a legiti- mate basis for believing that every CW capable nation is verifiably eliminating that capability. Should he do so, U.S. national interests are headed for a possibly fatal head on collision with dangerous arms-control delusions.

Mr. Gaffney, formerly a senior of official in the Reagan Defense Department, is director of the Center for Security Policy.