The Search for a Poison Antidote

By Jill Smolowe

If good intentions could stop the proliferation of chemical weapons, the scourge would have been cleaned up long ago. Over the past 63 years, 131 nations have signed the 1925 Geneva Protocol, which outlaws the use of poison gases. Yet at least 17 countries are believed to possess chemical weapons. They were most recently used last March, with hellish results, when Iraq unleashed mustard and cyanide gases on its own Kurdish citizens.

Like other high-minded declarations that followed the horrors of World War I, the Geneva Protocol has no teeth: although it forbids the use of poison gases, it bans neither their production nor their stockpiling. The result is that the issue of chemical weapons has returned time and again to the international agenda, stirring debate at the United Nations, at diplomatic conferences and at each of the four superpower summits since 1985.

This week the talk continues in Paris, where representatives from 142 nations have convened. The chances for a breakthrough anytime soon are slim. Only the U.S., the Soviet Union and Iraq have even acknowledged owning chemical arsenals. Yet in recent years, there have been claims that poison gases have been used by Libya against Chad, by Viet Nam against Kampuchean rebels and by Iran and Iraq against each other in their recently concluded war. It was Iraq's slaughter of the Kurds that prompted President Reagan to call for the Paris conference. The initiative was quickly seconded by President Francois Mitterrand of France, one of the countries that had unwittingly supplied Iraq with equipment that helps in the manufacture of chemical weapons. The results of that exchange, understates a senior French diplomat, "gave one pause."

A declaration of international outrage against chemical weapons and a reaffirmation of the Geneva Protocol may at least slow the trend toward poison gases. "There's a general consensus that use of chemical weapons is wrong," says William Burns, director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. "I think we want to re-establish that." The U.S. hopes that the Paris meeting will pump momentum into the Conference on Disarmament, a 40-nation effort to write a treaty that would ban the gases outright. As an interim step, several participants want to strengthen the U.N. Secretary-General's authority to investigate charges of chemical-weapons use.

Until recently, East-West distrust posed the largest hurdle to an effective ban. But in 1987, two years after Congress voted to end an 18-year moratorium on the American manufacture of chemical weapons, the Soviet Union acceded to U.S. demands for on-site "challenge inspections" to enforce a treaty. Today the larger obstacle is posed by Third World nations that are reluctant to give up what is known as the "poor man's atom bomb." Poison gases, after all, are cheap and easy to manufacture. "All a terrorist needs is a milk bottle of nerve gas," says a British weapons expert, "and that he can get from a quiet lab in a back street of Tripoli." Thus even if a treaty could be hammered out to the satisfaction of Moscow and Washington, says Burns, the U.S. would not sign unless every nation in possession of chemical arsenals agreed to it as well.

But most countries can piously deny their involvement. As last week's verbal cross fire over Libya indicated, it is not easy to distinguish between factories that manufacture fertilizers, pesticides or pharmaceutical products and those that produce chemical weapons. Experts say that with just the turn of some levers or the change of a catalyst, a plant can convert from the production of pest killers to people killers in as little as 24 hours. Small wonder, then, that the U.S. spurned Libya's offer for a one-time inspection of the facility at Rabta.

An effective inspection would require ripping apart a chemical plant to analyze manufactured materials and examine waste products taken from sewers, ventilators and pipes. If chemical weapons were not yet in production (as the U.S. believes to be the case at Rabta), the inspection would turn up no damning residues. Other telltale signs would be the protective equipment used at the plant, including the presence of special ventilation systems and chemical sensors connected to alarms. But that same equipment is employed in pesticide and fertilizer manufacture. Inspectors must also look for military- oriented equipment, such as machinery to produce or fill chemical-weapons shells. The Rabta facility offers one other clue: it is surrounded by surface- to-air missiles that, William Burns dryly notes, must make it the "most heavily defended pharmaceutical plant in the world."

Even if a nation were caught making chemical weapons, who could enforce the rules, short of military action? Would the guilty government dismantle its own facility -- particularly if the plant also produced agricultural and pharmaceutical products? Perhaps more to the point, would other nations agree to halt the lucrative export of the component parts? As the Reagan Administration learned in its dealings with Iran, it is hard enough for nations to abide by an arms embargo, let alone enforce one.

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CREDIT: [TMFONT 1 d #666666 d {Source: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute}]CAPTION: Nations reported to have chemical weapons

With reporting by B. William Mader/New York and Jay Peterzell/Washington