Lethal Weapons

POOR OLD JOHN, my granny would say, killed just three weeks before the end of the Great War. She always urged that someone in the family should visit her brother's grave in France, never having made the trip herself. Sixteen years after she died in 1970, I did just that. John Magee of the Enniskillen Fusiliers is buried in Terlincthun Cemetery near Boulogne. The clean white block of Portland stone bearing his name records that he died of wounds and gas on 15 October 1918. He was, in fact, serving mass in the trenches when poison gas wafted over the congregation. As they coughed and spluttered, enemy soldiers with bayonets finished them off.
John was one of the world's first victims of chemical warfare. But he should have been protected by an international agreement, made at The Hague in 1899, which prohibited the use of projectiles filled with poison gas. Despite it, 1915 saw the first large scale use of chemical agents on the World War I battlefields in Belgium. By 1918, the use of over 100,000 tonnes of toxic chemicals during the war had resulted in the deaths of 90,000 soldiers, and had caused more than a million casualties.

Multilateral agreements

The global community was concerned enough to conclude the Geneva protocol in 1925, banning the use of both bacteriological and chemical weapons in conflict. That Protocol has made a significant contribution to mitigating the horrors of war. However, the focus was solely on use of weapons, and not enough was done to stop countries from producing, using and stockpiling chemical weapons thereafter.
It was only in 1997 that a Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) entered into force. The organisation created to carry out the terms of the Convention, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, has its headquarters in The Hague. The CWC has now grown into an international regime with 152 member countries, covering 90 percent of the world's population, and 98 percent of its chemical industry. The OPCW has overseen the destruction of nearly 10 percent of the stockpiles of chemical weapons declared to it.
As for biological weapons, the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC) entered into force in 1975. The Convention bans the development, production, stockpiling, acquisition and retention of microbial or other biological agents or toxins, in types and in quantities that have no justification for peaceful purposes. It also bans weapons, equipment or means of delivery designed to use such agents or toxins for hostile purposes or in armed conflict. Yet, the BTWC currently has no provisions for monitoring compliance. To address this, a series of review conferences has tried to act on implementing the prohibitions of the Convention, including the enactment of penal legislation. It is hoped that by the end of 2006 relevant measures will be in place such as the strengthening of existing mechanisms for surveillance, and adopting codes of conduct for scientists.

Protective purposes

There has been evidence of biological weapons programs in many countries, even in some that are parties to the Convention. The US, Russia, China, Israel, Iraq, North Korea and Libya are among them. In December 2001, for example, it emerged that the anthrax spores enclosed in envelopes mailed to two leading Senate Democrats two months earlier were biologically identical to bacteria secretly manufactured at a US germ warfare facility during the previous decade. The US army biological and chemical warfare unit at the Dugway Proving Ground, in Utah, confirmed that the facility had produced dry anthrax powder similar to that found in the letters, but claimed that it was well protected and entirely accounted for. The statement was the first admission by the US government that it has produced useable germ warfare material since the program for offensive biological weapons was terminated in 1969 by the Nixon administration. The US is the only country that is known to have produced weapons-grade anthrax in the past 25 years, but a Pentagon spokesmen claimed the development of weapons-grade anthrax was legal under international agreements because the production of small quantities is permitted for peaceful and protective purposes, i.e., to prepare countermeasures to a germ warfare attack.
Most governments, including the US, claim that their biological warfare work is only defensive in nature, and point out that the existing biological weapons treaty allows for defensive research. Yet it is widely acknowledged that it is virtually impossible to distinguish between defensive and offensive research in the field. Ironically, in the light that the Bush administration's deep concern over bioterrorism, just weeks before the 9/11 attacks on America, the White House stunned the world community by rejecting proposals put forward to strengthen the BTWC. The stumbling block came around verification procedures that would allow governments to inspect US biotech company laboratories. The companies made it clear that they would not tolerate monitoring of their facilities for fear of theft of commercial secrets. This lack of support from the world's only superpower has greatly undermined international control of biological weapons of mass destruction.

New technologies

The US - which used massive quantities of tear gas in the Vietnam war - and some of its allies, have also maintained that the 1925 Protocol does not ban the use of 'riot-control' agents, like tear gas. The chemical Agent Orange, again widely used in the Vietnam war with terrible long-term health consequences for both the Vietnamese people and US servicemen, was regarded as a defoliant. Described as a herbicide used to clear away brush and other plants that blocked paths or that could conceal the enemy, it was supposed not to be deliberately targeted at people.
These days, the new genomic information being discovered and used for commercial genetic engineering in the fields of agriculture, animal husbandry and medicine has been recognised as potentially convertible to the development of a wide range of novel pathogens that can attack plant, animal and human populations. Scientists even say they may be able to clone selective toxins to eliminate specific racial or ethnic groups whose genotypic makeup predisposes them to certain disease patterns. Genetic engineering could also be used to destroy specific strains or species of agricultural plants or domestic animals. The new genetic engineering technologies provide a versatile form of weaponry that can be used for a wide variety of military purposes, ranging from terrorism and counterinsurgency operations to large-scale warfare aimed at entire populations.

Evidence of Use

It is known for certain that Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq repeatedly used chemical weapons against Iranian armed forces between 1983 and 1988. Furthermore, it used chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians at Halabja in 1988, killing up to 5,000 people, and on some forty documented occasions that year during an offensive against the Kurds of Northern Iraq. Some Kurdish refugees in Turkey, for example, either witnessed or showed physical symptoms of chemical weapons attacks. For the first time, in 1993, scientists - working for Physicians for Human and Human Rights Watch - were able to prove the use of these chemical weapons through the analysis of environmental residues taken several years after one of the attacks. Soil samples, taken from bomb craters near a Kurdish village in northern Iraq by a team of forensic scientists, were found to contain trace evidence of nerve gas, GB, also known as Sarin, as well as mustard gas. Eyewitnesses had reported that Iraqi warplanes dropped three clusters each of four bombs on the village of Birjinni on 25 August, 1988. Observers recall seeing a plume of black, then yellowish smoke, followed by a not-unpleasant odour similar to fertilizer, and also a smell like rotten garlic. Shortly afterwards, villagers began to have trouble breathing, their eyes watered, their skin blistered, and many vomited - some of whom died. All of these symptoms are consistent with a poison gas attack. The two human rights groups said the results sent a clear signal that chemical weapons attacks could no longer be used in the belief that the natural elements would quickly cover up the evidence.
In the summer of 1995, shortly after the fall of the United Nations 'safe area' of Srebrenica in Bosnia and Hercegovina, survivors emerged from a long trek to safety with tales suggesting that Serb forces had attacked them during their flight with some type of chemical incapacitating agent. In 1996, Human Rights Watch carried out an investigation of the claim. Following interviews with some thirty-five survivors, as well as UN and other international personnel in the former Yugoslavia, and a review of available documentation relating to events at Srebrenica in 1996-97, Human Rights Watch found the evidence inconclusive on whether a chemical agent was used. Hard evidence - in the form, for example, of chemical traces in the clothes of people who died during the march and whose bodies were exhumed subsequently - remained elusive. The allegations may, of course, be false. But a very plausible alternative explanation is that the investigation so far has been insufficient, due to two key factors: the deaths of the key witnesses, and a lack of resources. Most importantly, it is likely that if a chemical agent was used during the trek from Srebrenica to Tuzla, the people most affected by it are no longer alive to tell their story, having been killed by Serb forces following their incapacitation, by BZ or a similar substance.

Impact of 9/11

Although terrorists used little more than penknives to execute a major attack on US targets in September 2001, the possibility of the use of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) became more real. The terrorists demonstrated the kind of mental characteristics and organisational abilities required to use weapons of mass destruction, whether chemical, biological, or nuclear. Their cold-hearted action blew apart the assumption since the Geneva protocol of 1925 that the biggest deterrence to the use of biological and chemical weapons was widespread ethical revulsion.
The unpalatable truth is that the scientific expertise required to create many biological, chemical or nuclear weapons is available in libraries or on the net. Most of them do not require materials that are difficult to obtain or particularly sophisticated laboratories. The exception is nuclear weapons, which depend on getting hold of highly regulated material such as plutonium and the use of appropriate facilities. What is more difficult is to put together the different types of expertise required for a successful attack: first, to acquire the materials, second, to assemble the weapon and third, to develop a means of mass dispersal. The 1995 sarin gas attack in Tokyo showed how the Aum Shinrikyo cult was able to manufacture large quantities of anthrax and sarin undetected, but they did not master methods of dispersal. They gave up on anthrax after attempts to throw it off a building in Tokyo, and the sarin dumped in plastic bags could have killed more if it had been dispersed.
The most useful role for governments in reducing that risk is twofold: first, they must improve national surveillance and detection nationally, and this may mean new state powers to monitor suppliers of dangerous substances, scientists and laboratories; secondly, global cooperation is vital to set up systems of surveillance, inspection and inventories of dangerous substances. This will mean strengthening UN bodies. When the Vatican joined the Chemical Weapons Convention in 2002, it issued a statement suggesting at this particular point in history, instruments of cooperation and prevention constitute one of the most effective safeguards in the face of heinous acts such as the use of biological weapons. It also urged the disposal of all WMD and the establishment of a culture of peace and of life based upon the values of responsibility, solidarity and dialogue.

The Precautionary Principle

Risks of all kinds are now global in scale, open-ended in duration, incalculable in their consequences, and not compensational. In Europe, intellectuals are increasingly debating the question of the great shift from a risk-taking age to a risk-prevention era. The precautionary principle says, in effect, that because the stakes are so high, we have to weigh even the most dramatic benefits against the prospects of even more destructive consequences. These days, the bar for risk has been raised to the threshold of possible extinction itself. When the whole world is at risk because of the scale of human intervention, then a new scientific approach is required that takes the whole world into consideration. This new approach is called the Precautionary Principle.
There are some signs of hope though. After 1991, South Africa - following the transition from white-led rule - disbanded its former secret biological and chemical warfare programs, and has ratified both the Biological Weapons Convention and the Chemical Weapons Convention. It was also the first nation to develop and possess nuclear weapons and then renounce them - all under the presidency of Nelson Mandela.