Truth or Consequences #4: No D.N.A. Tests Needed To Show That Claims About Republican Paternity of C.W.C. Are Overblown

(Washington, D.C.): The Clinton
Administration’s hole card in its bid to
persuade a Republican-controlled Senate
to agree to ratification of the
controversial Chemical Weapons Convention
(CWC) appears to be the contention that
the fathers of this treaty are Presidents
Ronald Reagan and George Bush. The most
recent and visible manifestation of this
gambit was Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright’s visit to Mr. Bush in Texas
last Saturday to secure a public
statement of his support for the CWC.

The Administration’s reasoning seems
to be that Republican Senators will be
willing to disregard myriad, serious
concerns about the substance of this
accord and vote for it simply because two
Presidents of their party were involved
in its negotiation. This tactic may be
explained by the fact that any arms
control for which Mr. Clinton is seen as
principally responsible will be viewed
with skepticism by more than a third of
the Senate — a number sufficient under
the Constitution to defeat treaties. href=”97-D24.html#N_1_”>⁽¹⁾
Still, the idea that
demonstrating Republican paternity for a
flawed agreement will be sufficient to
secure its ratification suggests a low
regard for GOP Senators and their sense
of responsibility when it comes to the
Senate’s constitutional role as equal
partner with the executive in
treaty-making.

Not So Fast — This is Not
Ronald Reagan’s Treaty

This proposition is even more
extraordinary since the degree of
Republican responsibility for the treaty
as it now stands is, in important ways,
less than the Clinton Administration
would have Senators believe.

For example, in Sunday’s New York
Times, a letter signed by a number
of senior Reagan Administration officials
takes strong exception to the suggestion
that the President they served is
implicated in the agreement ultimately
signed in January 1993. The signatories
are the following distinguished former
office-holders: Secretary of Defense Caspar
Weinberger, U.N. Ambassador Jeane
Kirkpatrick, Arms Control and
Disarmament Agency Director Eugene
Rostow, Under Secretary of
Defense Fred Iklé,
Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard
Perle and Deputy Assistant
Secretaries of Defense Douglas
Feith and Frank Gaffney.

This joint letter notes, in part:

“It is a distortion
of recent history for supporters
of the controversial new Chemical
Weapons Convention to describe it
as a product of the Reagan
Administration, implying that the
treaty has Ronald Reagan’s
imprimatur.

“The Convention now
being debated in the Senate is a
very different document from the
chemical weapons ban the Reagan
Administration was negotiating.
The principal difference is that
the Chemical Weapons Convention
is hopelessly unenforceable.
Cynical signatories like Iran,
China, Russia and Cuba know that
they could ratify it, make and
store nerve gas in violation of
it, almost certainly escape
detection and certainly escape
serious penalty.

“The Clinton Administration
has recently told Senate leaders
in considerable detail that it
has no intention of imposing
meaningful punishment on treaty
violators. It has also admitted
that American intelligence cannot
certify confidence in our ability
to detect illegal production and
stockpiling of chemical weapons
in secretive countries, even in
militarily significant
quantities.

“We know that the
Chemical Weapons Convention, in
its current form, would never
have been accepted as consistent
with President Reagan’s policies.
President Reagan was
clear-sighted and principled in
his opposition to arms control
treaties that could be violated
with impunity.” (Emphasis
added.)

Changed Circumstances Have
Significantly Altered President Bush’s
Treaty

What is more,
there have been 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 top Bush Administration
officials — 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. href=”97-D24.html#N_2_”>⁽²⁾

An illustrative 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 last week, href=”97-D24.html#N_3_”>⁽³⁾
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. href=”97-D24.html#N_4_”>⁽⁴⁾

• 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 simply 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. The rationale:
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.

This reduction 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
initiative was ultimately defeated, it
is 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 has stated its
intention to rescind this executive order
once the CWC is ratified. The
result could be to compel U.S. personnel
to choose between using lethal force
where RCAs would suffice or suffering
otherwise avoidable casualties.

Worse yet, the Clinton reversal of the Bush
Administration position on RCAs may mean
that promising new defense technologies
— involving chemical-based,
non-lethal weapons (for example,
immobilizing agents) — may be restricted
or prohibited by this Convention. If so, U.S.
forces may be denied highly effective
means of prevailing in future conflicts
with minimal loss of life on either side.

The Bottom Line

The foregoing considerations make
clear that Senators should consider the
Chemical Weapons Convention carefully on
its merits. They should, in particular,
resist the Clinton Administration’s
pressure to ignore this treaty’s flaws
out of some sense of duty to earlier
administrations. A treaty that has little
in common with Ronald Reagan’s approach
to arms control and that has undergone
material changes in circumstances since
George Bush’s presidency must be seen for
what it is: a defective agreement that is
unworthy of the intensive — and
increasingly misleading — campaign being
mounted for its ratification by the
current resident of the White House and
his team.

– 30 –

1. Presumably, it
is for this reason, that the
Administration has strenuously resisted
demands that major changes it has been
negotiating to the Conventional Forces in
Europe and Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty
be submitted for the Senate’s advice and
consent.