Holding our noses against gas attack

Of the many military, political and human dramas relating to the Persian Gulf crisis that television has played out in U.S. living rooms over the past few weeks, one should provoke special unease in the American public — and yet has received scant attention.

Interspersed among the many reports and interviews about the threat of Iraqi chemical warfare have been occasional stories concerning the bitter debates this danger has inspired in Israel. Given Saddam Hussein’s announced intention to destroy half of the Jewish state with chemical weapons, Israeli citizens’ anxiety is entirely understandable.

Interestingly, these debates are not concerned with the strategic question of whether Israelis should be protected against chemical warfare. Instead, they involve rather more pedestrian and tactical — if emotionally supercharged — questions such as when and to whom the government should distribute its stockpiles of chemical defensive equipment.

For example, Cabinet ministers in Jerusalem have been publicly squabbling over whether to issue protective masks and other equipment at once or only when a chemical attack is underway. At the same time, ethnic tensions have been inflamed by suggestions that only Jews should be protected against the threat of Arab chemical warfare, leaving Palestinians to die should their co-religionists engage in genocidal assaults on Israel.

Virtually unremarked in the extensive coverage accorded these controversies, however, is the quantum difference between the choices facing Israelis and those that would be available to the American public if confronted with a similar danger of chemical attack. After all, where the government of Israel has had the foresight and the tenacity of purpose to stockpile gas masks for every one of its citizens, the U.S. government has consciously chosen not to defend the American people in the event chemical weapons are used against this country.

In fact, there are today scarcely enough protective outfits even for the U.S. military’s personnel; rush orders are being placed to augment those required to support forces assigned to Operation Desert Shield. Needless to say, there are no stocks of masks and other gear for American civilians.

Similarly, there are neither facilities dispersed around the country to provide a measure of collective protection for the non-combatant population nor well-developed contingency plans for evacuating to uncontaminated rural areas city dwellers who may be the targets of chemical strikes. What is more, where the average Israeli is exposed to regular training in chemical defense, the training provided even front-line U.S. troops often leaves much to be desired; there is no chemical-weapons training to speak of for American civilians.

In short, where the Israeli government views it as a sacred responsibility to prevent the wholesale slaughter of its people — a practical, as well as moral, stance given the Jews’ historical experience — Washington has a very different philosophy: In the event of attack on the United States involving chemical weapons (or for that matter nuclear, biological or any other means of mass destruction), it would be every American for himself.

Much of the impetus for this absurd situation — the strategic equivalent of "a thousand points of light" or "voluntarism" — arises from a notion of deterrence enshrined in the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. This notion holds that the only certain means of preventing nuclear war is to ensure that the American people are utterly vulnerable to its consequences.

Through the device of prohibiting effective defenses against ballistic missiles, the ABM Treaty’s drafters hoped to institutionalize the principle of mutual vulnerability, a "balance of terror" in which the peoples of the United States and the Soviet Union are perpetual hostages. In the absence of such defenses, investments in protective equipment, preparation of fallout shelters and development of evacuation plans were usually villified as pointless, wasteful or "destabilizing."

Eighteen years later, however, whatever logic may once have justified the ABM Treaty and the antipathy to U.S. population defenses it fostered are clearly obsolete. For one thing, the Soviet Union never bought the idea of mutual vulnerability. To the contrary, it has taken great pains to protect those elements of its leadership and workforce deemed necessary to the survival of the Soviet Union through an array of ballistic missile, air and civil defenses — even as it has strived to increase U.S. vulnerability through a relentless buildup of offensive nuclear arms.

For another, the time is long past when only the Soviet Union could threaten the United States or its interests with ballistic missiles. As many as a dozen nations either now have or are acquiring this technology; by the turn of the century, many may be capable of fielding intercontinental-range missiles.

Finally, Soviet ballistic missile-delivered nuclear weapons are hardly the only — or, at present, even the most imminent — threat to the security of the American public. Unfortunately, there is no evident basis for assuming that the esoteric, and in any event dubious, theory of mutual vulnerability will serve to deter emerging threats like that posed by Iraqi-sponsored terrorists armed with Mr. Hussein’s chemical weapons.

Consequently, if the American people are to be given an alternative to their present, involuntary and absolute exposure to the gamut of weaponry of mass destruction, they must begin at once to demand of their government what every Israeli expects of his: a commitment to public survival and investment in a variety of defensive technologies and equipment needed to honor that commitment.

Frank J. Gaffney Jr. is the director of the Center for Security Policy.