FEATURE

Chemical weapons: the quest for a ban

“Pentagon paid outside contractors” ato

By RICHARD CLEMENTS
On Feb. 12, a New York Times report,

datelined Feb. 11, stated: “The United ¥

States today dismissed a proposal by Mik-
hail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, for an
interim agreement barring the spread of
chemical weapons. The proposal, put for-
ward Jan. 15, had been characterized by the
Soviet Union as a preliminary step toward a
formal treaty banning production, storage
and use of chemical weapons.”

In rejecting the Soviet offer, Donald
Lowitz, chief of the U.S. delegation attend-
ing the 40-nation Conference on Disarma-
ment meeting in Geneva, said “the United
States remained committed to ‘mandatory,
short-notice challenge inspection’ of chemi-
cal weapons production and storage sites as
stated in the draft (U.S.) treaty presented to
the conference by Vice-President George
Bush in 1984.”

By continuing to insist on such intrusive
inspection procedures the U.S. was, of
course, once again forestalling any possible
joint U.S.-Soviet progress toward a chemi-
cal weapons agreement. The U.S. position,
however, is hardly new. Since 1981, against
stiff Congressional opposition, the Reagan
administration has been urging an end to
the 1969 unilateral moratorium imposed on
the manufacture of new chemical weapons
by the U.S. This important and positive

dent Richard Nixon.

While the Reagan administration has
been busy lobbying heavily for a resump-
tion of the U.S. chemical weapons program
it has also repeatedly charged the Soviets
with supposed chemical weapons use in
Afghanistan, and has accused Vietnam and
Laos, Soviet allies, of using an alleged chem-
ical weapon called “yellow rain” in South
East Asia.

Both the “mandatory” inspection issue
and the question of chemical weapons use
by the Soviet Union and its South East
Asian allies can only be viewed as a cynical
effort by the Reagan administration to
undermine serious negotiations on the
growing problem of chemical weapons,
while presenting the appearance of good-
faith bargaining in the face of pronounced
public and official concern over chemical
weapons proliferation and use. An interna-
tional conference on chemical weapons held
in Belgium in 1984, for example, drew a
record of 250 scientists, analysts and mil-
itary officials from 28 countries, in part
because of the documented use of chemical
weapons in the Iran-Iraq war, but also
because the estimated volume for protective
chemical weapons equipment contracts
offered by governments had tripled or
quadrupled between 1979-84.

To assuage this growing world wide
apprehension about chemical weapons the
Reagan administration made an apparent
“sweeping” proposal in April, 1984 to the
international Geneva disarmament confer-
ence. This proposal, put forward by Vice-
President Bush, is the one that the chief U.S.
delegate Donald Lowitz now insists that the
US. is sticking to. As outlined by the vice-
president, the key U.S. provision provided
that each party to the agreement “accept, at

_ 24 hours’ notice, a special inspection per-
mitting ‘unimpeded access’ to any facility
owned or controlled by the government of a
party, including military installations.”

With this provision, which went further
than any other arms control measure of
recent years, the U.S. was trying to hold
forth the prdspect of a guaranteed fail-safe
compliance, while simultaneously establish-
ing a gaping loophole which worked to the
benefit of the U.S. Since all chemical wea-
pons production facilities in the Soviet
Union are state-owned, they would all be
subject to the mandatory 24-hour notice of
inspection. But in the United States, nearly
all chemical agents are manufactured by
private corporations working under defence
contract. According to the U.S. proposal
these privately-owned chemical production

14 e PACIFIC TRIBUNE, APRIL 23, 1986

American initiative was taken by the presi-

1982 NOVOSTI PRESS PAMPHLET. . .Soviet Union
still pressing for chemical weapons agreement.

facilities would be exempt from the manda-
tory inspection rule.

The blatant inequality of this U.S. prop-
osal was rightly skewered by William
Epstein, a senior special fellow of the United
Nations Institute for Training and Research
who specializes in disarmament issues, and
who was the Canadian UN ambassador
from 1978 through 1982. Noting that the
Soviets had rejected the “one-sided verifica-
tion” offer made by the U.S., he stated in an
article in the Globe and Mail July 2, 1984:
“Not only was it clear that the Soviet Union
would reject such free-wheeling verification
as a means of gathering military intelli-
gence, it is doubtful whether even the Uni-
ted States or its industrialized allies would
be willing to accept it for fear of industrial
espionage. This may have been why the
U.S. proposal called for international
inspection only of ‘all military or govern-

1984 chemical weapons proposal at the
multilateral Geneva disarmament confer-
ence, broke a Senate tie vote on resuming
nerve gas production by voting in favor. In
a subsequent Senate vote on the issue held
the following November the vice-president
broke another deadlock by again voting for
nerve gas production.

The U.S. House of Representatives did
vote in May, 1984, “against the Pentagon’s
proposed $95-million purchase of compo-
nents for nerve gas bombs and shells,” on
the basis of an earlier released Congres-
sional report on the subject. The report,
researched by the Congresssional Research
Service, charged that, among other things,
the new chemical weapons “‘sought by the
Reagan administration (would) be less effi-
cient as weapons and more conducive to
arms proliferation and terrorist use than

existing type.”

East, West German accord
shows agreement possible
if United States willing.

ment-owned or government-controlled fac-
ilities,’ but not of privately owned industrial
companies.”

He added, “The credibility of the latest
U.S. proposal will also be regarded with
suspicion as long as the United States keeps
wanting to produce ‘binary’ chemical wea-
pons. These combine two harmless chemi-
cal agents in flight to make deadly nerve
gases. If produced, they would make the
extraordinarily difficult problem of verifica-
tion practically impossible. If the United
States proceeds with these binary weapons,
so too will the Soviet Union.”

The Reagan administration, in alliance
with the U.S. chemical industry and the
Pentagon, has since managed to get Con-

’ gressional approval to override the 1969

unilateral U.S. moratorium on the produc-
tion of new chemical weapons including
binary nerve gases. In July, 1983, Vice-
President Bush, who presented the U.S.

But Congressional resistance to the nerve
gas program was finally worn down. In
June 1985, the House voted to authorize the
nerve gas program but said that “no money
could be spent until October, 1987, to allow
time to negotiate an agreement on chemical
weapons with the Soviet Union.”

As part of its intensive lobbying effort in

‘Congress the Reagan administration had

appointed a supposedly “independent”
panel which recommended in favor of nerve
gas production. In May, 1985, Walter J.
Stoessel Jr., who headed Reagan’s Chemi-
cal Warfare Review Commission, was
forced by a barrage of Congressional criti-
cism to acknowledge that “‘there were no
known opponents of chemical weapons
among the panel’s eight members and that,
at the president’s order, all staff members
had been provided by the Pentagon along
with a budget of $174,000.” :
Subsequently it was learned that the

of “about $890,000 for (the) chemical Wa)

‘fare studies at (the) time when the mill?)

was trying to persuade Congress to aut

rize the production of modern chem)

weapons.”

Noting that it is “illegal for the Pent

to use public funds to influence Congt
Thoms &

the New York Times reported that
J. Welch, deputy assistant for

weapons to Secretary of Defence

Weinberger, nevertheless “agreed !
the resulting (Pentagon-sponsored) sf

)
had been used by the Reagan administ

tion in prodding Congress to approv’
production of chemical weapons.”

With the House of Representatives sf :

port for delayed funding of a U.S.

che:

chem

i
1
7

weapons program safely in its pockels”
Reagan administration again aired cha d
accusing the Soviet Union and its allies
using chemical weapons. The adml

tion also claimed that the new

wea!

were needed both as a “deterrent” and

arms control bargaining lever
Soviets.
Last August, the director of

wit

the

Arms Control and Disarmament Ag

(ACDA), Kenneth Adelman — the ®
ly esta

lished in order to act as a counterwel

of an agency which was original

the Pentagon — claimed: “Over

decade, Soviet surrogates, Laotial
Vietnamese forces, have used lethal
cal and toxic weapons (yellow rain) in
East Asia. More recently, Soviet f

themselves have, we believe, used
weapons in Afghanistan,” he told
York Times.

The ACDA director’s charges 40%)

che

‘he Fl

chemical-weapons used by the Soviet U!
in Afghanistan and by Soviet allies i>"
East Asia had been refuted long befor’

May 15, 1984, the New York Times repo")

|

+) el
TH

in a lengthy article on the subject: |

(U.S.) government...has quietly

pack?

away from some of the preliminary 18%"
tory evidence it once cited to demons””
that yellow rain (an alleged toxic agenY
being used in Afghanistan. This chatg®

rests on a single piece of physical evide??

gas mask obtained from undisclo

ces near Kabul, which was found t0

poison on its surface. Another gas
and a sample of vegetation that were
thought to contain toxic chemicals

out to be false alarms, accordit?,
government officials.” Without citin8
new evidence regarding alleged Soviet

ding

chemical weapons in Afghanistan, “
man, nevertheless, reiterated these ©

dited charges on behalf of the R

administration.

3

The charge that “yellow rain” was
employed by Vietnamese and Lao
ces was exploded by Matthew Mesels®
world-renowned U.S. molecular biol?

It is true, however, that there are

mate difficulties with verifying any
senior researcher at the Stockholm

the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists

che!
weapons agreement. Jozef Goldbl#

tional Peace Research Institute, obs¢

in 4

1985: “Under a verification system

has already been broadly accepted 4§

prising both human and automatic
toring, large-scale violations inv
militarily relevant quantities of ch d

ol
eC)

weapons in readily usable form cO
remain undetected, even without the F
inspections proposed by the United S#

“On the other hand,” he added,

“om

amounts of chemicals, which may
reptitiously retained, would have to be
den in remote places to escape detect! f
could not be important enough to S° 44

upset a balance of forces.” He com ds

“An element of uncertainty is un@
in any arms control treaty. But

yo!

incurred should be weighed: first, 9”

treaty violations on the national se¢

parties. On both counts, a chemi

cal

see GERMAN page 15 ©

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