Chemical delusions.

The testimony of the former secretaries of defense who oppose the Chemical Weapons Convention is persuasive and reminds us of the abiding power of the superstition that disarmament leads to the abandonment of force as an instrument of political advancement. The projected treaty is especially vexing in the light of our experience of what can be done by treaty-exegetes who work their own language into a treaty, turning it to purposes inimical to the principal keeper of the peace in this epoch, which is the United States of America.

To give a one-sentence summary of the array of forces: The prime mover behind the treaty was George Bush, while he served as Vice President. The initiative caught the imagination of Mr. Clinton, who went hog-wild over the idea of being the father of a gasless world. The treaty was got up, and April 29 was designated as the day of its promulgation, whether or not the United States had come aboard. The Administration kept urging action before April 29 on the grounds that unless we are then a signatory, we forfeit the power to investigate infractions. The handiest response to this point is, So what? The only nations we'd wish to investigate will not have signed the treaty--e.g., Russia, North Korea, Libya, Iraq, Iran. We are not worried whether Switzerland has reserves of poison gas.

The historical one-sentence summary takes us back to the First World War, when gas as a weapon did its horrible things, leading to such choice memories as the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, which sought to end war for all time by very simply outlawing it (did K-B get the Nobel Peace Prize?). More serious, because more modest, was the Geneva Protocol which forbade the use of chemical weapons but not their manufacture. This distinction was important because it tacitly approved an inventory of chemical weapons to be used against any aggressor who initiated the use of them. It is everywhere accepted that the reason gas was not used in the Second World War was that the Allies had a stock of it, ready to use if the Nazis began the argument. The Australians came into the picture in 1984 with their proposal to outlaw the transfer of chemical-weapons-related technologies to the Third World. We (and 28 other countries) went along with the Australian group, but not so comprehensively as to accomplish our goal.

We got through the Second World War without chemical weapons but not through the subsequent decades. They were used in the Eighties by Vietnam and Iraq. Not against the United States, but against the Hmong and the Kurds. Countries that use chemical weapons, like countries inclined to use atomic weapons, do not pick on other countries their own size.

A paper by the Heritage Foundation's Baker Spring reminds us that the convention does not require the destruction of toxic chemicals, "their precursors (chemicals that can be combined to form toxic chemicals), or facilities that are used for peaceful purposes." To oversee the manufacture of anything so common would require a vast bureaucracy. The Phillips Petroleum Company subsidiary in Belgium delivered the chemical thiodiglycol (used in manufacturing mustard gas) to Iraq, and Britain is reported to have sold thiodiglycol and thionyl chloride to Iraq in 1988 and 1989. All of which suggests the difficulty in effective control of exports.

We come now to the question of sanctions. What kind of inspections can be done? Suppose that a country refuses to admit the chemical-convention investigator. Next step? We petition for a vote (we must get three-quarters) of the Executive Council of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. But any sanctions thereafter proposed are subject to the veto of any one of the permanent seatholders in the United Nations Security Council. It is worth recalling that the right to inspect does not automatically lead to the right to suppress. The UN has exercised for years the right to inspect for nuclear and chemical/biological weapons in Iraq. The only thing we have absolutely ascertained is that we can't find them. The ABM treaty continues to prevent us from fruitful explorations of space-based anti-missile technology. Even so toughminded a Chief Executive as Ronald Reagan shrank from rescinding it, though he might have done so with six months' notice. The proposed chemical-weapons treaty would probably have the same effect in robbing us of future flexibility. Above all, the treaty tends to ignore axiomatic reality, which is that the only way you deal with nations that present threats of the kind we are discussing is to keep your powder dry but keep your powder.