Just Which Chemical Weapons Convention Is Colin Powell Supporting — And Does He Know The Difference?
(Washington, D.C.): Starting tomorrow,
the Clinton Administration intends to
make General Colin Powell — the former
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff —
its Poster Child for the campaign to gain
Senate approval of the controversial
Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC).
According to the Associated Press, this
campaign will be kicked off at a
“high-powered, bipartisan gathering
of treaty supporters…featuring
congressmen, veterans’ group leaders,
arms experts, religious organization
heads and military leaders, past and
present,” including Army Gen. Colin
Powell.
Does Powell Know What He Is
Endorsing?
A warning to General Powell is in
order, however: The Senate was recently
treated to the spectacle of another
accomplished retired flag officer,
General Norman Schwarzkopf, who had to
acknowledge that — while he is on record
as supporting the CWC — he is not
familiar with its details. For example,
under questioning by Sen. Jim Inhofe
(R-OK), chairman of the Armed Services
Committee’s Readiness Subcommittee, the
following exchange occurred:
Sen. Inhofe: “Do
you think it wise to share
with countries like Iran our most
advanced chemical defensive
equipment and technologies?”
Gen. Schwartzkopf:
“Our defensive
capabilities?”
Sen. Inhofe:
“Yes.”
Gen. Schwartzkopf: “Absolutely
not.”
Sen. Inhofe: “Well,
I’m talking about sharing our
advanced chemical defensive
equipment and technologies, which
I believe under Article X [they]
would be allow[ed] to [get]. Do
you disagree?”
Gen. Schwartzkopf:
“As I said Senator, I’m
not familiar with all the details
— I — you know, a country,
particularly like Iran, I think
we should share as little as
possible with them in the way of
our military capabilities.”
Beware the ‘Bait and Switch’
General Powell
and others who served under President
Bush should also be aware that there
have been — as the Center noted
on 10 February 1997
— significant changes in a
number of the assumptions, conditions and
circumstances that underpinned the Bush
Administration’s judgment that the
Chemical Weapons Convention was in the
national interest. These changes
have prompted several of General Powell’s
former colleagues — including Secretary
of Defense Richard Cheney,
Air Force Chief of Staff Merrill
McPeak, Assistant Arms Control
and Disarmament Agency Director Kathleen
Bailey, Assistant to the
Secretary for Atomic Energy Robert
Barker and Principal Deputy
Assistant Secretary of Defense J.D.
Crouch — to urge that the
present treaty be rejected by the Senate.
A sample of the changes that have
materially altered the acceptability, if
not strictly speaking the terms,
of the Chemical Weapons Convention
include the following:
- Item: Russia’s
Evisceration of the Bilateral
Destruction Agreement
The Bush Administration anticipated
that a Bilateral Destruction Agreement
(BDA) forged by Secretary of State James
Baker and his Soviet counterpart, Eduard
Shevardnadze in 1990, would critically
underpin the Chemical Weapons Convention.
As the Center for Security Policy
observed in early February,
this agreement obliged Moscow to provide
a full and accurate accounting and
eliminate most of its vast chemical
arsenal. The BDA was also expected to
afford the U.S. inspection rights that
would significantly enhance the more
limited arrangements provided for by the
CWC.
These assumptions about the
BDA have, regrettably, not been
fulfilled. To the contrary,
Russian Prime Minister Victor
Chernomyrdin declared last year that the
Bilateral Destruction Agreement has
“outlived its usefulness” for
Russia. What is more, it is now public
knowledge that Russia is continuing to
produce extremely lethal binary munitions
— weapons that have been
specifically designed to circumvent the
limits and defeat the inspection regime
of the Chemical Weapons Convention.
- Item: On-Site
Inspections Won’t Prevent
Cheating
When the Bush
Administration finalized the CWC, there
was considerable hope that intrusive
on-site inspections would meaningfully
contribute to the detection and proof of
violations, and therefore to deterring
them. Five years of experience with the
UN inspections in Iraq — inspections
that were allowed to be far more
thorough, timely and intrusive than those
permitted under this Convention — have
established that totalitarian
rulers of a closed society can
successfully defeat such monitoring
efforts.
In a 4 February
1997 letter to National Security Advisor
Samuel Berger, Senate Foreign Relations
Committee Chairman Jesse Helms noted
that:
“Unclassified portions of the
National Intelligence Estimate on
U.S. Monitoring Capabilities
[prepared after Mr. Bush
left office] indicate that it is
unlikely that the U.S. will be
able to detect or address
violations in a timely fashion,
if at all, when they occur on a
small scale. And yet,
even small-scale diversions of
chemicals to chemical weapons
production are capable, over
time, of yielding a stockpile far
in excess of a single ton [which
General Shalikashvili described
in congressional testimony on 11
August 1994 is a level which
could, ‘in certain limited
circumstances…have a military
impact.’] Moreover, few
countries, if any, are engaging
in much more than small-scale
production of chemical agent. For
example, according to [the 4
February 1997] Washington
Times, Russia may
produce its new nerve agents at a
‘pilot plant’ in quantities of
only ’55 to 110 tons
annually.'”
- Item: Facilitating
Proliferation: ‘Poisons for
Peace’
In the years since the Bush
Administration signed the Chemical
Weapons Convention, it has become
increasingly clear that sharing nuclear
weapons-relevant technology with would-be
proliferators simply because they promise
not to pursue nuclear weapons programs is
folly. Indeed, countries like North
Korea, Iran, Iraq, India, Pakistan,
Argentina, Brazil and Algeria have abused
this “Atoms for Peace” bargain
by diverting equipment and know-how
provided under the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to
prohibited weapons purposes.
Unfortunately, commercial chemical
manufacturing technology can, if
anything, be diverted even more easily to
weapons purposes than can nuclear
research and power reactors. For this
reason, recent experience with the NPT
suggests that the Chemical Weapons
Convention’s Article XI — an article
dubbed the “Poisons for Peace”
provision — is insupportable. It
stipulates that the Parties shall:
“Not maintain among
themselves any restrictions,
including those in any
international agreements,
incompatible with the obligations
undertaken under this Convention,
which would restrict or impede
trade and the development and
promotion of scientific and
technological knowledge in the
field of chemistry for
industrial, agricultural,
research, medical, pharmaceutical
or other peaceful purposes.”
Such an obligation must now be judged a
recipe for accelerating
proliferation of chemical weapons, not
restricting it. Even if the
United States were to become a party to
the CWC and choose to ignore this treaty
commitment, other advanced industrialized
countries will certainly not refrain from
selling dual-use chemical manufacturing
technology if it means making a lucrative
sale.
- Item: U.S.
Chemical Defenses Will be
Degraded
When the Bush Administration
signed the CWC, proponents offered
assurances that the treaty would not
diminish U.S. investment in chemical
defenses. Such assurances were called
into question, however, by an initiative
unveiled in 1995 by the then-Vice
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
Admiral William Owens. He suggested
cutting $805 million from
counter-proliferation support and
chemical and biological defense programs
through Fiscal Year 2001.
This was followed by a recommendation
from JCS Chairman General John
Shalikashvili in February 1996 — a few
weeks before he told the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee that the Department
of Defense is committed to a
“robust” chemical defense
program. He sought to slash
chemical/biological defense activities
and investment by over $1.5 billion
through 2003.
The rationale for both these gambits?
Thanks to a perceived reduction in the
chemical warfare threat to be brought
about by the CWC, investments in
countering that threat could safely enjoy
lower priority. Such reductions would
have deferred, if not seriously
disrupted, important chemical and
biological research and development
efforts, and delayed the procurement of
proven technologies. While the Owens and
Shalikashvili initiatives were ultimately
rejected, they are a foretaste of
the sort of reduced budgetary priority
this account will surely face if the CWC
is approved.
Changes in the military postures of
key U.S. allies since the end of the Bush
Administration raise a related point:
Even if the United States manages to
resist the sirens’ song to reduce
chemical defenses in the wake of the CWC,
it is predictable that the already
generally deplorable readiness of most
allied forces to deal with chemical
threats will only worsen. To the extent
that the U.S. is obliged in the future to
fight coalition wars, this vulnerability
could prove catastrophic to American
forces engaged with a common enemy.
- Item: Clinton
Repudiates Bush Commitment to the
JCS on R.C.A.s
At the insistence of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff in 1992, President Bush signed
an executive order that explicitly
allowed Riot Control Agents (for example,
tear gas) to be used in rescuing downed
aircrews and in dispersing hostile forces
using civilians to screen their movements
against U.S. positions. The
Clinton Administration initially
indicated that it intended to rescind
this executive order outright once the
CWC is ratified. The result of
doing so would have been to compel U.S.
personnel to choose between using lethal
force where RCAs would suffice or
suffering otherwise avoidable casualties.
In the face of Senate opposition to
such a recission, Mr. Clinton has
apparently decided to allow tear gas and
other RCAs to be used in these selected
circumstances, but only in peacetime. In
wartime, however, such use would be
considered a breach of the treaty. The
Administration has yet to clarify under
what circumstances the Nation will be
considered to be “at war” since
there has been no declaration of that
state of belligerency in any of the
conflicts in which the U.S. has engaged
since 1945.
What is particularly troublesome is
the prospect that the Clinton reversal of
the Bush Administration position on RCAs
will impinge upon promising new defense
technologies — involving chemical-based,
non-lethal weapons (for example,
immobilizing agents). If so, U.S.
forces may be denied highly effective
means of prevailing in future conflicts
with minimal loss of life on either side.
Other, No Less
Distinguished National Security Experts
Disagree with General Powell
In a letter sent to Senator Trent Lott
last fall, when the Chemical Weapons
Convention was last under consideration
by the Senate, a host of former top
civilian and military officials expressed
their opposition to this treaty in its
present form. Among the distinguished
retired flag officers were:
General John W. Foss,
U.S. Army (Retired), former Commanding
General, Training and Doctrine Command; Vice
Admiral William Houser, U.S.
Navy (Retired), former Deputy Chief of
Naval Operations for Aviation; General
P.X. Kelley, U.S. Marine Corps
(Retired), former Commandant of U.S.
Marine Corps; Lieutenant General
Thomas Kelly, U.S. Army
(Retired), former Director for
Operations, Joint Chiefs of Staff ; Admiral
Wesley McDonald, U.S. Navy
(Retired), former Supreme Allied
Commander, Atlantic; Admiral
Kinnaird McKee, U.S. Navy
(Retired), former Director, Naval Nuclear
Propulsion; General Merrill A.
McPeak, U.S. Air Force
(Retired), former Chief of Staff, U.S.
Air Force; Lieutenant General
T.H. Miller, U.S. Marine Corps
(Retired), former Fleet Marine Force
Commander/Head, Marine Aviation; General
John. L. Piotrowski, U.S. Air
Force (Retired), former Member of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff as Vice Chief, U.S.
Air Force; General Bernard
Schriever, U.S. Air Force
(Retired), former Commander, Air Research
and Development and Air Force Systems
Command; Vice Admiral Jerry Unruh,
U.S. Navy (Retired), former Commander 3rd
Fleet; and Lieutenant General
James Williams, U.S. Army
(Retired), former Director, Defense
Intelligence Agency.
Among the civilian leaders who signed
the open letter to Sen. Lott were: Richard
B. Cheney, former Secretary of
Defense; William P. Clark,
former National Security Advisor to the
President; Alexander M. Haig, Jr.,
former Secretary of State; John
S. Herrington, former Secretary
of Energy; Jeane J. Kirkpatrick,
former U.S. Ambassador to the United
Nations; Edwin Meese III,
former U.S. Attorney General; Donald
Rumsfeld, former Secretary of
Defense; and one of General Powell’s past
bosses, Caspar Weinberger,
former Secretary of Defense.
The Bottom Line
The Center regrets General Powell’s
decision to lend his authority to a
treaty that even he has freely
acknowledged is completely unverifiable.
It fears that he may also come
to regret it. In any event, the Nation
surely will, if the Clinton-Powell
razzle-dazzle campaign induces the Senate
to take its eyes off the ball — namely,
the fatal flaws that make the Chemical
Weapons Convention unworthy of that
institution’s advice and consent.
– 30 –
1. See the
Center’s Decision Brief
entitled Truth or
Consequences #4: No D.N.A. Tests Needed
To Show That Claims About Republican
Paternity of C.W.C Are Overblown
(No. 97-D 24,
10 February 1997).
2. See the
Center’s Transition Brief
entitled Here We Go Again:
Clinton Presses Anew For Senate Approval
of Flawed, Unverifiable, Ineffective
Chemical Weapons Treaty (
January 1997).
3. See the
Center’s Decision Brief
entitled Truth or
Consequences #3: Clinton ‘Makes a Mistake
About It’ in Arguing the C.W.C. Will
Protect U.S. Troops (
February 1997).
4. See the
Center’s Decision Brief
entitled Russia’s Covert
Chemical Weapons Program Vindicates Jesse
Helms’ Continuing Opposition to Phony
C.W. Arms Control (
February 1997).
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