Corking the Chemical Bottle

For the last four years 40 nations have been talking in Geneva about an American idea to ban the production and possession of chemical weapons. The talks so far have made little progress, but the problem that they are meant to address has meanwhile grown apace. The Iran-Iraq War has seen battlefield chemical weapons used to a larger extent than at any time since World War I. Iraq was the first to break the taboo, and Iran was not slow in retaliating. Occasionally these actions drew murmurs of international disapproval. But even when Iraq killed 4,000 of its own citizens with a chemical attack on a Kurdish village last March, the world response was remarkably muted.

Some thoughtful people in Washington and elsewhere find great cause for worry in this seeming international indifference. Their concern is that chemical agents may now have become at least a semi-legitimated weapon of war. The Persian Gulf war has provided clear proof that chemical weapons can be made cheaply and used effectively, with virtually risk-free political consequences. That could well increase their appeal to many countries, particularly the poorer ones of the Third World.

The threat of chemical-weapons proliferation thus grows, even as the chances of effective international cooperation to contain their spread seems to shrink. Chemical weapons are especially attractive because they can often be made at modest cost from products easily obtained on the open market. The same products and the same facilities that are used to make chemical fertilizers, for example, can be turned to weapons production. Delivery on the battlefield--through artillery shells, bombs or tactical rockets--requires no unusual skills or equipment.

Iraq, which started the gulf war and was nearly done in by its misjudgment, argues that it was justified in using chemical weapons because its survival was at stake. That claim has potent appeal. Yet as it evokes the recognized right of self-defense it also serves to blur the moral distinctions that have long been made between the use of chemical agents, which can diffuse over a wide area and kill indiscriminately, and somewhat more precise if no less deadly weapons of mass destruction.

The horrifying toll that was produced by the wide-scale use of poison gas in World War I led to a 1925 international agreement to ban chemical weapons. Now, in the absence of an effective mechanism to enforce that ban, the production and stockpiling of such weapons threaten to spread throughout the world, while the temptation to use them in future conflicts is inevitably strengthened. “The genie,” one State Department official warns, “is now out of the bottle.” So it would seem, just as it seems that the political will to recap the bottle is nowhere in sight.