Wiping the Slate Clean : President Bush clears the way for an eventual ban on chemical weapons

President Bush has cleared the way for serious bargaining on a treaty to wipe chemical and biological weapons off the Earth. More important, he has given the United States the moral authority to demand that 39 other countries at the Geneva Committee on Disarmament also work to wipe those weapons out.

For some 20 months, Washington contributed to delaying consensus by reserving the right to keep 2% of its own chemical weapons until all other treaty signatories broke up their weapons and tore down their plants.

Not surprisingly, other countries were offended by Washington’s declaring itself headmaster of the proceedings. Not much real work has been done since.

But last week, Bush formally forswore any use of chemical weapons--even in retaliation for chemical attacks--and promised to clean out the U.S. stockpile within 10 years of the signing of a treaty. That should put both superpowers on the same side of the issue, the Soviet Union having already declared that if Washington would renounce all chemical and biological weapons, Moscow would follow suit.

There is an irony in the turnabout. The only record of restraint anywhere in Saddam Hussein’s reign over Iraq is that his troops did not use chemical weapons, either on the battlefield or in their Scud missiles. That makes it hard to argue for a capacity to threaten chemical retaliation in order to deter chemical attack.

Whatever the reason, Bush has done the world a real service by clearing the way so that negotiators can move on to trying to resolve a number of technical hornet’s nests. The most controversial is enforcement of a ban on producing deadly chemicals that often are only a molecule different from ordinary garden pesticides.

Enforcement of chemical weapons bans implies monitoring production plants, which probably would be easier in the Third World. There, chemical weapons are valued as “poor man’s nuclear weapons,” if only because there are fewer industrial complexes.

But some Third World plants are owned by industries with a global reach, and they are touchy about inspections by chemists who might not find any illegal substances--but might see enough to guess about formulas for products in a highly competitive business.

Bush has asked the Geneva negotiators to work without pause, in hopes of an agreement in principle to ban all chemical weapons by year’s end. A heroic effort surely is indicated, as Bush said, to end an era in which tyrants can “threaten innocent populations with these weapons of terror.”