The Triumph Of Hope Over Experience: The New Chemical Weapons Treaty Is A Dangerous Delusion

Samuel Johnson once said that second marriages represent "the triumph of hope over experience." The same applies to much of the experience with arms control — particularly of the multilateral variety. Rarely has that been more true than with the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) due to be signed by the United States and scores of other nations in Paris tomorrow.

The Center for Security Policy believes the United States is now poised to repeat the mistakes of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. As with the CWC, the U.S. entered into the earlier convention because it did not wish to maintain the relevant military capability and thought it would be better off signing up other nations to a ban — even one that was wholly unverifiable and unenforceable. The result was graphically illustrated in the course of the war with Iraq: Notwithstanding the Biological Weapons Convention, the enemy was equipped with lethal viruses and the United States was forced to rush hastily ginned-up and inadequately tested antidotes and less-than-effective defensive systems into the theater of operations. America had no option whatsoever to threaten in-kind retaliation.

The new Chemical Weapons Convention, and the fact that it enjoys official American support despite its fatal flaws, is — as much as anything — the result of U.S. President George Bush’s personal obsession with "ridding the world of chemical arms." However desirable this goal is, as a practical matter, it simply is not an achievable one. Such weapons are simply too easily manufactured, with too readily available technologies and ingredients and too concealable to be susceptible to international prohibitions.

Reckless Presidential Myopia

Chemical arms control is hardly the only area where the personal predilections of the President have prevented "the facts from getting in the way" of U.S. policy. Indeed (as the Center for Security Policy has assiduously documented over the past four years), the Bush practice of "personal diplomacy" has involved one astonishing example after another of subordinating realistic assessments of international problems — to say nothing of long-term U.S. interests — to Mr. Bush’s strongly-held, but fundamentally misguided, notions. Consider the following examples:

• Preserving ties with the PRC despite the Tiananmen Square massacre and subsequent pervasive repression. The net effect has been no appreciable diminution in the brutality of the Chinese regime and a $15 billion trade deficit (including illegal import of products made with Chinese slave labor).

 

• Betting on Mikhail Gorbachev — with, among other things, $3.75 billion in taxpayer-underwritten credit guarantees and sensitive dual-use technology. This was done long after it became apparent that he was an impediment to radical reform in the Soviet Union, not its champion and after it became clear that the loans would prove unrecoverable.

 

• Failing to provide vital support to the real reformers in the Soviet successor states until it was effectively too late, then failing to condition such aid as was given on wholesale structural change and institution-building. We are now confronted with the prospect of the complete cooption and/or elimination of the Russian democratic and free market movement by Old Guard forces coalescing behind organizations like "Civic Union," "National Salvation Front," etc.

 

• Coddling Saddam Hussein — even after the U.S. government knew that he was bent on acquiring an immense arsenal of offensive weaponry including weapons of mass destruction, some of which he was prepared to use even against his own people. Worse yet, such support for Saddam continued despite the fact that U.S. taxpayer funds were being used to underwrite some of these purchases.

 

• Toadying to the Syrian version of Saddam Hussein, Hafez Assad — a far smarter and more dangerous actor than the Iraqi despot.

Interestingly, all of these examples of misbegotten Bush investments in personal diplomacy have one other thing in common: Each of the aforementioned beneficiaries of U.S. protection and largesse during Mr. Bush’s tenure engaged in systematic efforts to amass large inventories of offensive chemical weaponry. In fact, every one of the foregoing nations is still — as are probably a dozen or more others.(2) That fact is a particularly inconvenient one in light of perhaps the most insidious instance of Mr. Bush’s wishful thinking — namely, his personal crusade to "ban chemical weapons from the face of the earth."(3) building chemical arms

An Ill-Conceived and Poorly Executed Accord

The result of President Bush’s monomania on chemical arms control is that the United States is about to become legally committed to a treaty that is neither "global" nor "verifiable," the two claims typically made on its behalf. In fact, it is basically an accord that will require the elimination of all U.S. chemical arms — even though others, including the world’s pariah states, may continue to possess them. The Convention will also likely exacerbate the present inadequacies of the United States’ chemical defensive posture.

The critical groundwork for such a dubious achievement was laid when, in May 1991, the Bush White House capitulated on two fundamental points. It announced that:

"The United States will foreswear the use of chemical weapons for any reason, including retaliation in-kind with CW, against any state, effective when the CWC enters into force."

 

"The United States will drop its position that we must be allowed to keep two percent of our CW stockpile (500 tons [of chemical agent]) until all CW-capable states have joined the convention."

These and other American concessions made it possible, after decades of negotiation, to find at last the lowest-common-denominator: a Chemical Weapons Convention essentially bereft of verifiability, equitability or practical utility. As a result, the treaty which will shortly be submitted to the United States Senate for its advice and consent is unquestionably the most ambitious and overreaching arms control agreement of all time. While there are innumerable technical points that materially contribute to the defective character of this Convention, there are three overarching issues that argue against its ratification:

First, the security of U.S. citizens and military personnel will, in all likelihood, be jeopardized — later, if not sooner — if this country is denied the right and the ability to deter chemical attack by the credible threat of in-kind retaliation. Historically, chemical agents have been used almost exclusively where such an in-kind deterrent threat was not present; in its absence, the use of the "poor man’s atomic bomb" has proven irresistible to a number of nations. Notwithstanding Saddam Hussein’s restraint in using CW in the Persian Gulf war (the cause of which can at this point only be surmised), it is likely that such a temptation will occur in the future if similar conditions pertain.

Second, thanks in part to the inherent nature of chemical weapons, in part to the myriad flaws in the CWC, virtually any other nation that wishes to do so can, and probably will, retain the capacity to conduct militarily significant CW attacks. The loopholes, circumvention options and verification problems inherent in the treaty will guarantee only that law-abiding nations like the United States will comply fully with its prohibitions.

Finally, the inevitable effect of the CWC will be to reduce still further the level of effort going into defenses against chemical weapons. The truth of the matter is that the U.S. military did not take the threat posed by chemical weapons seriously enough when it was an acknowledged danger from a monolithic and unremittingly hostile adversary like the Soviet Union. Without deprecating the valiant efforts of those who have struggled to provide American troops with quality CW protective gear, antidotes, reconnaissance, detection and analysis equipment, etc., there is no disputing the fact that these programs have suffered from the low priority traditionally accorded this threat by the United States armed forces. One can only imagine what priority they will enjoy — particularly over time — when there is not supposed to be any such threat at all!

The Bottom Line

The passing of the Bush Administration from the scene may have come in the nick of time. If a President whose monomaniacal attachment to wishful thinking is replaced by a man and an Administration prepared to reckon with the world as it really is — not just as we wish it to be — then the United States may yet be spared further travel down the dangerous road toward effective unilateral chemical disarmament.

It can only be hoped that President Clinton will recognize that far from enhancing the international arms control regime, agreements like the Chemical Weapons Convention actually serve to debase the value of that regime. Collecting signatures from renegade leaders of pariah states — instead of policing and enforcing existing, and violated, agreements like the 1925 convention banning first-use of chemical arms or the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention — is irresponsible escapism. The fact that some such states are now trying to manipulate Western interest in their enrollment in the CWC to catalyze international pressure against a peaceable democracy, Israel, and coerce it to abandon its alleged stockpile of nuclear weapons is but the latest evidence of the mischief that will be made of this treaty.

Unfortunately, both the new President and the Senate will be under immense pressure to honor the commitments to CW arms control made by the outgoing Bush Administration. Still, both have a responsibility to understand that any hope this country has of deterring and, if necessary, of defeating chemical attack will lie not in wishing the threat away but in remaining prepared to deal with it — both through defensive measures and through the credible threat to respond in kind.

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1. This Decision Brief is adapted from remarks by Director Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. at the 1992 U.S. Army Scientific Conference on Chemical Defense Research, Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, 17 November 1992.

2. The Yeltsin government recently incarcerated, in a manner reminiscent of the communists’ repression of Andrei Sakharov and other dissidents, a scientist — Prof. Vil Mirzayanov — who had the temerity to reveal that Russia was continuing to develop and produce deadly chemical warfare agents.

3. The genesis of Mr. Bush’s monomania about using arms control to eliminate chemical weapons has been documented in numerous Center for Security Policy papers, notably "Bush’s Myopia on Chemical Weapons Keeps Him From Seeing the Handwriting on the Arms Control Wall," (No. 91-P 37, 13 May 1991).