Nations Line Up to Sign Pact Banning Chemical Weapons

With speaker after speaker evoking the horrors caused by poison gases used in World War I, more than 115 nations Wednesday began to sign a dizzyingly complex treaty intended to forever ban the manufacture, stockpiling and use of chemical weapons.

“We are here to say that we will no longer accept these atrocities,” U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali said, recalling the terror that chemical weapons had “produced for the men in the trenches.”

The treaty is probably the most complex arms control pact ever negotiated because many of the same chemicals that can be used as deadly weapons are also key ingredients of pesticides and other industrial products. For this reason, only a few lethal chemicals are outlawed by the treaty; other compounds are placed under international supervision to prevent their diversion to military uses.

The signing marks the culmination of more than 25 years of negotiations, producing a result once considered hopelessly utopian. But at least two more years of work will be required in a newly created commission to produce final regulations guaranteeing destruction of all chemical weapons and guarding against production of new ones.

Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger said the pact “mandates a worldwide, non-discriminatory ban on an entire class of weapons of mass destruction--the only class of such weapons that has been widely used in combat.”

The signing ceremony was, in its way, as cumbersome as the treaty itself. After an opening session, representatives of each country filed out of the meeting hall into an austere room nearby to individually inscribe their names to the treaty, a three-foot-thick stack of paper. At least 130 countries have said they will sign by the time the process ends Friday.

The 21-nation Arab League voted last week to refuse to sign the treaty until Israel renounces its nuclear weapons program.

But Arab solidarity broke down almost at once when Algeria, Morocco, Mauritania and Tunisia were among the first nations to sign. Egypt and Libya have indicated they will also comply, although both countries are widely believed to possess small quantities of chemical arms.

Iraq, with a recent history of use of chemical arms, did not even show up in Paris. Delegates said that Baghdad’s absence underlined the fragile nature of the agreement.

For its part, Israel signed the treaty and said it is prepared to ban all weapons of mass destruction--nuclear as well as chemical and biological--once a Middle East peace agreement is reached.

The speech by Foreign Minister Shimon Peres marked the first time that Israel has agreed to discuss a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East. Israel is widely believed to possess both nuclear and chemical arms, although it has never formally acknowledged having either.

In his speech, Eagleburger said the Middle East has seen more chemical warfare than any other part of the world since the dark days of World War I. “It is, therefore, particularly disappointing that so many Middle Eastern states are absent from this ceremony today,” he said.

During Eagleburger’s brief speech, however, Algeria, Morocco, Mauritania and Iran all filed into the adjoining room to sign. American officials joked that the secretary of state’s words were so persuasive that they touched off a flood of Middle East signatories.

Although the world community, horrified by the poison gas battles of World War I, outlawed the first use of chemical weapons in 1925, this is the first pact with any sort of enforcement provisions. It is also the first treaty to prohibit the manufacture and storage of chemical weapons, not just their use.

The treaty permits short-notice, challenge inspections of any plant suspected of producing chemical arms in any country that signs the treaty.

But the treaty forbids member countries from cooperating in any way with the chemical industries in holdout nations. Treaty backers predict that all countries eventually will sign the accord because the advantages of being a treaty signatory far outweigh the disadvantages.

Chemical weapons were almost unknown during World War II, but they have made something of a comeback since. Iraq is known to have used poison gas against its own Kurdish population, and U.N. inspections that followed the Gulf War discovered tons of chemical weapons in Iraq’s arsenal.

Although more than a dozen other countries are known to possess at least small stocks of chemical arms, the United States and Russia are the only countries that have acknowledged chemical arsenals.

Under the terms of the treaty, all of the weapons must be destroyed in 10 years. The treaty establishes an intricate bureaucracy to administer its requirements and prevent violations.