Deadlock on Horror

The organizers of this week’s 149-nation Paris conference on chemical weapons were determined to achieve consensus, and their final declaration proved to be a model consensus document. Full of solemn affirmations and expressions of grave concern, its high-minded endorsement of a ban on chemical weapons was crafted so as to give no offense, least of all by proposing mechanisms to help achieve its stated objectives. To deliberate on the horrors of chemical weapons, to endorse their eradication, is undeniably a good thing. It would have been a far better thing if a meeting of most of the world’s nations, among them the more than a score that already possess chemical weapons, had also been able to provide some feasible guidelines on how that could be done.

The inability to propose effective steps to halt the development, production and use of chemical weapons was not due simply to the usual national reluctance to forgo anything of perceived military or political value, although certainly such sovereign considerations continue to loom large. Also reflected was a realistic recognition of how hard it would be to try to make any ban on chemical weapons work. Such weapons are relatively cheap to produce with compounds readily procurable on the open market. They can be put together and stored in undistinctive, and so not easily detected, facilities. They are easily transported and easily launched. All this adds to their appeal in the poorer or less technologically advanced countries. All this in consequence multiplies the chances that these weapons will spread.

Great difficulties in detection and verification procedures, though, shouldn’t be taken to mean that nothing can be done. If making or possessing chemical weapons can’t be effectively outlawed, at least their use could be strongly discouraged or punished by the credible international threat of retaliatory sanctions. The world, including the United States, showed appalling moral weakness and political cravenness when it failed to impose economic and political sanctions on Iraq for its first use of poison gas in the Persian Gulf war--including ultimately an attack on its own Kurdish civilians. The future harm that this show of indifference may have encouraged is incalculable.

Controlling much of the traffic in the raw materials of chemical weaponry clearly is possible; the European reaction that is now emerging to the U.S. concerns about chemical weapons in Libya shows that. Getting agreement on sanctions to deter or punish the actual use of chemical weapons will be far harder, but certainly it is not an impossible task. Here is the major practical problem to be addressed within the framework of the United Nations in the next effort to do something about the growing threat of chemical weapons.