That's easy, white goes with lobster! but I think we're a bit OT and GZ might be upset with me! So...
By Mike Toner
Cox News Service
(11-11-02)
ATLANTA — As United Nations weapon inspectors prepare for their return to Baghdad and U.S. military forces gather in the Persian Gulf, representatives of more than 100 nations are meeting in Geneva to seek a better way to rid the world of biological weapons.
The outlook isn’t promising. The Biological and Toxins Weapons Convention is now more than a quarter of a century old. There’s still no way to enforce it, and this meeting of parties to the treaty is virtually assured to end in a stalemate.
Treaty members have been negotiating the verification protocol — the machinery meant to assure that nations that renounce such weapons live up to their word — for seven years. The dim prospects are even dimmer now, because the United States has decided that the current proposal is so unworkable it doesn’t want to discuss the matter until 2006, when the parties are due to confer again.
European nations say situations like Iraq are exactly why the treaty needs teeth. The United States insists Iraq is why the currently proposed dentures won’t work.
This meeting — officially the resumption of the Fifth Review Conference of States Parties to the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological and Toxin Weapons — is only the latest in the long history of the world’s attempt to control chemical and biological arms.
More than 160 nations have declared chemical and biological weapons too horrible to be used in modern warfare. In contrast, rocket-propelled grenades, cluster bombs, cruise missiles and other weapons that maim and kill are adjudged OK.
But not “gas and bugs.”
“It probably doesn’t make a lot of sense that these weapons are considered so abhorrent,” says Eric Croddy, senior research associate at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. “But there is something in the human psyche that says this kind of warfare is just not right.”
For most of the last 100 years, nations have wrestled with the destructive potential of chemical and biological weapons — at first racing each other to perfect their killing power and then, as the weapons proliferated, hurrying to develop defenses against them. And now they are desperately seeking ways to put gas and bugs back in the box.
Started in 1864
A ban on chemical weapons, first envisioned in international declarations as early as 1864, became a reality only in 1997, when the Chemical Weapons Convention came into force. In all, 174 nations have agreed to accept inspections of suspected chemical facilities on 12 hours’ notice.
Getting a handle on biological weapons has proved to be more difficult. The Biological and Toxins Weapons Convention was opened for signatures in 1972, but the 164 parties to the treaty so far have failed to agree on an inspection regime that would assure that members actually comply with the agreement.
Despite heightened concern over Iraq’s biological weapons, the United States has opposed the rigorous on-site inspection system suggested by European nations in the mid-1990s. The Bush administration contends that it would allow nations like Iraq to continue to hide their weapons and lie about them — but gain access to U.S. biodefense technology.
“It’s not simply a question of finding more steps to get people to agree on, but getting people to comply with what they’ve already agreed to,” says John Bolton, the undersecretary of state for arms control and international security.
All three of the nations that the Bush administration has identified as the “axis of evil” — Iraq, Iran and North Korea — have signed the treaty. Because all three are suspected of having active bioweapons programs, European nations contend that any inspection system is better than nothing.
The United States disagrees. “The better-than-nothing argument really is a formula that would simply reward hypocrisy and permit further violations of arms control conventions,” Bolton says.
The administration also contends that the current proposal would intrude on the rights of U.S. biotechnology companies, whose legitimate research might be open to inspections because of possible bioweapons applications.
The American position, which dismayed European nations when it was announced earlier this year, puts the United States in some curious company.
“The states that most impeded progress during this period were Iran, Russia and the United States,” says Milton Leitenberg of the University of Maryland’s Center for International and Security Studies. The Bush administration’s outright rejection of the proposal, he says, has “delivered the death blow to the entire effort.”
Leitenberg says opposition by the United States is particularly troublesome in light of its renewed efforts, after last year’s anthrax incidents, to develop stronger defenses against biological weapons. “Few doubt that the United States has a solely defensive biological weapons program,” he says. “But if the United States found the same projects taking place in Russia, Iraq, Iran or any of several other countries, it would consider them to be part of an offensive bioweapons program.”
Because the development of biological weapons employs the same facilities and same organisms used by public health agencies and the pharmaceutical industry, any inspectors would have to figure out how to differentiate the two.
“This is going to be very tough to do,” says Amy Smithson, an analyst at the Henry L. Stimson Center in Washington. She says biological weapons facilities are smaller and more easily disguised as engaged in legitimate activities than chemical weapons plants.
Long negotiations likely
If the history of efforts to ban chemical weapons is any indication, negotiations over a bioweapons inspection regime may take years to bear fruit.
After decades of wrangling, a chemical weapon ban became a reality only in 1997. In all, 174 nations have agreed to accept “challenge inspections” of any suspected chemical facilities on 12 hours’ notice.
Compliance with the treaty is policed by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, a member-supported international organization based in the Netherlands. The organization’s work is independent of that of U.N. inspection teams assigned to Iraq.
To date, the organization’s staff of 500 has conducted more than 1,200 inspections in 51 countries and presided over the destruction of 28 production facilities and 2 million chemical munitions.
Still, much remains undone. The total destroyed so far is only about 10 percent of the total chemical weapons known, most of them in the United States and Russia.
Even in the United States, which has led the way in destroying chemical stockpiles, the task is a formidable one. So far, about 8,000 tons of chemical weapon materials have been destroyed. Efforts to get rid of the remaining 23,000 tons have been slowed by technical problems and local opposition to disposal facilities. At the U.S. Army’s Anniston, Ala., chemical depot, for instance, state objections to the federal plan to incinerate chemicals have delayed the burn for many months.
Ambivalent attitudes toward gas and bugs, colored by abhorrence and national self-interest in equal parts, have been a common thread through more 2,000 years of the history of the weapons the world loves to hate.
Chemical and biological weapons are as ancient as gunpowder. The Spartans used toxic fumes against their enemies in 429 B.C. The Mongols catapulted plague-infected corpses over the walls of besieged cities in Crimea in the 14th century.
As early as 1675, the French and Germans found it necessary to agree not to shoot poison bullets at each other.
It was during World War I, however, that chemical warfare really came of age. Introduced by German forces in 1915, they quickly became a fixture of trench warfare. At Ypres, France, the Germans used pipes and fans to blow chlorine gas toward enemy trenches. In a single battle, more than 50,000 shells containing mustard gas were fired by both sides.
By the time the war ended, more than 17 deadly or disabling gases had been used, causing more than 1.3 million casualties, including 70,000 Americans.
The toll was so appalling that the Geneva Protocol of 1925 outlawed the use of chemical and biological weapons, although — as with the current bioweapons convention — there was no way of forcing countries to comply.
Chemical weapons were used sparingly in World War II, primarily by Japanese troops against the Chinese. Even Adolf Hitler refrained from using them on the battlefield, a restraint some attribute to his fears of retaliation. Hitler himself had been gassed by British troops in 1918.
Iraq has used chemical weapons on several occasions in recent years — first against Iranian troops, and then on rebellious populations within its own borders.
On March 16, 1988, an estimated 5,000 people in the Kurdish town of Halabja were killed when Iraqi warplanes attacked with mustard gas, the nerve agents sarin, tabun and VX and, perhaps, cyanide.
Ambiguities about just what constitutes a chemical weapon remain. The treaty permits the use of chemical agents for law enforcement and riot control, but some U.S. officials suggest that Russia’s use of the incapacitating gas fentanyl during the recent Chechen hostage crisis in Moscow may have violated the ban on “any chemical which can cause death, temporary incapacitation or permanent harm.”
Potent fear factor
As weapons, gas and bugs are notoriously unpredictable, tough to handle and hard to deliver effectively. The Germans discovered that in 1915, when the wind shifted and they wound up gassing their own troops.
They function best as weapons of the underdog — spreading fear and uncertainty. Against overwhelming military superiority, the mere threat of chemical or biological warfare can be an effective deterrent.
Investigations following the Persian Gulf War, for instance, showed that Iraq had chemical and biological agents loaded in missile warheads and artillery shells ready to be fired — but never used them. Military analysts believe Iraq’s “restraint” was due to veiled threats that the United States might retaliate with nuclear weapons.
But analysts also believe that the United States also was being careful, and that the decision not to take the war into Baghdad was due, in part, to the possibility that Iraq might unleash its chemical arsenal.
Neither the chemical nor the biological weapons treaty addresses the problems posed by such weapons as they spread beyond established armies and research institutions.
As the poor man’s atomic bomb, these deadly weapons of mass destruction, or at least of mass disruption, are now within the budget and technical capabilities of any rebel faction or terrorist cell that decides it wants them.
In 1995, the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo released sarin, a nerve gas, at several locations in the Tokyo subway, killing 11 and injuring more than 5,500.
The anthrax-by-mail attacks last year killed five Americans and infected at least 22 others. The person or group responsible for those attacks has never been found, but the episode disrupted the U.S. economy and left millions afraid to open their mail.
Chemical and biological weapons have the ability to kill, injure or sicken thousands, perhaps millions of people, within reach of a single deranged individual — a trait that, despite all the efforts to banish such uncivilized means of modern mayhem, probably assures that gas and bugs will remain a fixture of human conflict for many years to come.
A HISTORY OF GAS AND BUGS
-- 429 B.C.: The Spartans ignite pitch and sulfur cq to create toxic fumes in the Peloponnesian War.
-- 1346-47: The Mongols catapult corpses contaminated with plague over the walls into Kaffa (Crimea), forcing besieged Genoans to flee.
-- 1710: Russian troops allegedly use plague-infected corpses against the Swedes.
-- 1767: During the French and Indian War, the British give smallpox-contaminated blankets to hostile Indian tribes.
-- 1863: The U.S. War Department issues General Order 100, proclaiming, “The use of poison in any manner, be it to poison wells, or foods, or arms, is wholly excluded from modern warfare.”
-- 1915: The Germans attack the French with chlorine gas at Ypres, France.
-- 1915: The British use chlorine gas against the Germans at the Battle of Loos.
-- 1916-18: German agents use anthrax and the equine disease glanders to infect livestock and feed for export to Allied forces.
-- 1918: Germans attack U.S. troops with phosgene and chloropicrin shells.
-- June 1918: First U.S. use of phosgene and other gases in warfare. -- 1919: The British use adamsite, a toxic vapor, against the Bolsheviks in Russian Civil War.
-- 1922: The Spanish use chemical weapons against rebels in Spanish Morocco.
-- 1925: The Geneva Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare is signed. The agreement proves unenforceable.
-- 1936: Italy uses mustard gas against Ethiopians in its invasion of Abyssinia.
-- 1939: The Japanese poison the Soviet water supply with typhoid bacteria at Mongolian border.
-- 1940: The Japanese drop rice and wheat mixed with plague-carrying fleas over China and Manchuria.
-- 1942: The Germans begin using Zyklon B (hydrocyanic acid) in gas chambers for the mass murder of concentration camp prisoners.
-- 1945: The Germans manufacture and stockpile large amounts of tabun and sarin nerve gases, but do not use them in battle.
-- 1962-70: The United States uses tear gas and four types of defoliant, including Agent Orange, in Vietnam.
-- 1963-67: Egypt uses phosgene and mustard gas against Yemen.
-- 1969: President Nixon announces unilateral dismantlement of the U.S. offensive biowarfare program.
-- April 10, 1972: The Biological and Toxins Weapons Convention is opened for signatures.
-- 1975-83: The Soviets allegedly use “yellow rain” (trichothecene mycotoxins) in Laos and Cambodia.
-- 1979: The U.S. government alleges the Soviets of using chemical weapons and “yellow rain” in Afghanistan.
-- 1979: An accidental release from a Soviet military facility causes an outbreak of anthrax in Sverdlovsk.
-- 1983-84: Iraq begins using mustard gas and the nerve agent tabun in the Iran-Iraq War.
-- 1987-88: Iraq uses chemical weapons (hydrogen cyanide, mustard gas) against the Kurds.
-- 1995: A Japanese cult releases sarin gas on the Toyko subway, killing 11 and injuring 5,500 people.
-- 1997: The Chemical Weapons Convention takes effect.
-- 2001: Finely powdered anthrax spores show up in the U.S. mail, killing five and injuring 22.
-- 2002: Russian special forces use fentanyl, an opiate, to resolve hostage crisis at a Moscow theater, killing the hostage-takers and at least 117 hostages.
Source: Center for Nonproliferation Studies, Monterey Institute of International Studies
Mike Toner writes for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. |
