Chemical Weapon Free Zones?

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SIPRI Chemical&Biological Warfare Studies

7. Chemical Weapon Free Zones? Edited by Ralf Trapp

• • Sipri Stockholm International Peace Research Institute

SIPRI Chemical & Biological Warfare Studies is a series of occasional papers intended primarily for specialists in the field of CBW arms control or for people engaged in other areas of international relations or security affairs whose work could benefit from a deeper understanding of particular CBW matters. The papers originate in studies commissioned by SIPRI as input for subsequent non-specialist SIPRI publications. Julian Perry Robinson, the Series Editor, is a SIPRI Consultant based in England. A chemist and lawyer by training, he was a member of the SIPRI research staff during 1968-71 and has held research appointments at the Harvard University Center for International Affairs, the Free University of Berlin, and the University of Sussex, UK, where he is currently a Senior Fellow of the Science Policy Research Unit. He has served as a consultant to the World Health Organization, the United Nations Secretariat, the International Committee of the Red Cross and the UN Environment Programme. Ralf Trapp, the editor of SIPRI Chemical & Biological Warfare Studies No. 7, is a chemist by training. He is a researcher in the field of chemical toxicology with the GDR Academy of Sciences, Institute of Chemical Toxicology, Leipzig. He has published on chemical weapons disarmament for several years, and served as a governmental consultant on this matter. Currently he is a member of the SIPRI research staff.

SIPRI Chemical & Biological Warfare Studies No. 1 Effects of Chemical Warfare: A selective review and bibliography of British state papers, by Andy Thomas No. 2 Chemical warfare arms control: a framework for considering policy alternatives, by Julian Perry Robinson No. 3 The detoxification and natural degradation of chemical warfare agents, by Ralf Trapp No. 4 The Chemical Industry and the Projected Chemical Weapons Convention. Proceedings of a SIPRI/Pugwash Conference, volume I No. 5 The Chemical Industry and the Projected Chemical Weapons Convention, Proceedings of a SIPRI!Pugwash Conference, volume II No. 6 Chemical and Biological Warfare Developments: 1985, by Julian Perry Robinson No. 7 Chemical Weapon Free Zones?, edited by Ralf Trapp

ISBN 0-19-829113-2

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OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

i Stockholm International Peace Research Institute SIPRI is an independent institute for research into problems of peace and conflict, especially those of disarmament and arms regulation. It was established in 1966 to commemorate Sweden's 150 years of unbroken peace. The Institute is financed by the Swedish Parliament. The staff, the Governing Board and the Scientific Council are international. The Board and Scientific Council are not responsible for the views expressed in the publications of the Institute. Governing Board Ernst Michanek, Chairman (Sweden) Egon Bahr (Federal Republic of Germany) Professor Francesco Calogero (Italy) Dr MaxJakobson (Finland) Professor Dr Karlheinz Lobs (German Democratic Republic) Professor Emma Rothschild (United Kingdom) Sir Brian Urquhart (United Kingdom) The Director Director Dr Walther Sti.itzlc (Federal Republic of Germany)

Stockholm International Peace Research Institute Pipers vag 28, S-171 73 Solna, Sweden Cable: Peaceresearch, Stockholm Telephone: 08-5 5 97 00

Cover design: The scorpion is an arachnid with a long, slender, jointed tail ending in a curved, poisonous sting. As an animal that is said to even sting and poison itself, it is analogous to mankind's use of chemical and biological weapons, which easily contaminate the users themselves.

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• f81 Stockholm International Peace Research Institute

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Oxford University Press, Walton Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford New York Toronto Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi Petaling Jaya Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo Nairobi Dares Salaam Cape Town Melboume Auckland and associated companies in Berlin lbadan Oxford is a trade mark of Oxford University Press Published in the United States by Oxford University Press, New York

© SIPRI1987 First published 1987 Reprinted 1988 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Chemica/weapon free zones?-(Chemica/ and biological warfare series; no. 7) 1. Chemica/warfare 2. Arms Control I. Trapp, Ralf 11. Series 327.1'74 UG447 ISBN 0-19--829113-2 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Chemica/weapon free zones? Bibliography: p. 1. Chemical-weapon-free zones. I. Trapp, Ralf. JX5133.C5C441987 341.7'35'094 86-33150 ISBN 0-19--829113-2 (pbk.) Printed in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham

Abstract Trapp, R., Chemical Weapon Free Zones? SIPRI Chemical & Biological Wariare Studies, no. 7, Oxford University Press, 1987, 211 pp. (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute). ISBN 0 19 829113 2. This study presents 11 essays by experts on the implications of the chemical-weapon-free zone (CWFZ) concept for European security, its implications for the Geneva endeavours to ban chemical wariare world-wide, and compliance assurance. Strongly contrasting evaluations are presented together with background information with the intent of putting the future debate onto a firmer foundation. A chronology of events, extensive bibliographies and an annex of relevant documents are included.

PREFACE The menace of chemical warfare to common security is global. Chemical-weapon technology is led by the rich countries of the industrialized North, both eastern and western, but is becoming increasingly accessible to countries of the South as well. Use of the weapons might happen virtually anywhere in the world, though its probability has great regional variation. The fact that the pace of the current chemical arms control talks is being set by the USA and the USSR might be taken to suggest that the probabi 1i ty is highest in East-West conflict. Yet the historical record of actual instances of use clearly indicates that the military utility of chemical warfare is at its advanced technologically conflicts between greatest, not in belligerents, but in conflicts in developing regions of the world, either indigenous conflicts or ones having a strong North-South dimension. Because the problem is so fundamentally global, the basis on which chemical-warfare disarmament has been sought has also been global. Bilateral or regional negotiations have not been seen as the best approach. However, right from the start of the present chemical-warfare disarmament talks, back in the 1960s, it was recognized that there were some topics which might best be dealt with on a bilateral or regional basis, though within an overarching multilateral framework.. It was also recognized that progress on certain of these narrower topics might well be rate-determining for the enterprise as a whole. The global Chemical Weapons Convention now within sight in Geneva would almost certainly never have taken shape without the bilateral US-Soviet talks of the latter 1970s. A similar situation has now arisen. There are certain regions of the world in which pol i ti ca 1 and military pressures for chemical-warfare armament have grown to the point where they may soon overwhelm the countervailing pressures for chemical-warfare disarmament. This may mean that global agreemen~ has now become dependent upon the prosecution of subsidiary regional endeavours, especially ones that focus on the modalities of disengagement of deployed chemical-warfare forces. The practicalities of disengagement used to be regarded as a matter for the terminal stages of negotiation on the projected Chemical Weapons Convention. There would need to be a final sorting-out of detdils on v

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the order and rate with which stocks of chemical-warfare weapons were to

military balance:

be withdrawn and verification would might therefore be if, under the more

substantial steps.

destroyed. Such details and their associated be bound to have region-specific implications and most effectively negotiated in regional fora. But mistrustful circumstances of today, the negotiating

partners in Geneva are to gain confidence that the terminal stages are in fact attainable--confidence sufficient for them to negotiate with the zeal and spirit of compromise without which they cannot possibily succeed--it may now be necessary to advance such regional considerations further up the negotiating agenda.

a trial run or confidence-building exercise for more It was from this standpoint that the Independent

Commission for Disarmament and Security Issues, under its late chairman Olof Palme, the Prime Minister of Sweden, included a European chemical-weapon-free zone proposal April 1982.

in the report which it adopted in

With the publication of that report, in June 1985,5 the

idea of such zones acquired widespread political visibility. Despite that visibility, there has as yet been rather little balanced critical

commentary on

the

writing on it is strongly partisan,

idea.6

Much of the available

one way or the other.

SI PRI

Within the small international community of chemical arms control specialists, the merits seen for regional approaches to chemical disarmament have fluctuated over the past decade. They have done so in

therefore judged it useful to provide a study of the idea as one part of

inverse relationship to the progress being made in Geneva on the global approach. Thus it was that, in March 1979, at a time when the bilateral US-Soviet chemical talks were still usurping the negotiating role of the

research staff. The present volume is the result.

Geneva Committee on Disarmament, the Canadian delegati on there raised the subject of regional agreements on chemical weapons.1 Thus it was, too, that the Pugwash Chemical Warfare Study Group,2 in the report from its June 1979 workshop, 3 floated the idea of intergovernmental agreement

its continuing programme on chemical and biological arms control.

This

task was entrusted to Dr Ral f Trapp, currently a member of the SIPRI It presents a structured set of

essays on different aspects of the idea commissioned from specialists who have studied it more closely than most. As will be seen, several of the authors offer strongly contrasting evaluations. Taken side by side, and with the background information that is also included, these essays will, we hope, put future debate onto a firmer foundation.

on the ~early withdrawal or destruction of chemical weapons emplaced on foreign territories~.

At its March 1982 workshop, by which time the

bilateral US-Soviet talks had collapsed and the Reagan Administration had yet to disclose its thinking on chemica 1 arms control, the Pugwash

Notes and references

Study Group advanced a set of more specific chemica 1-weapon- free zone proposals. 4

1committee on Disarmament, final record of the 23rd meeting, 29 ~1arch 1979, CD/PV. 23, p. 5.

The Canadian intervention at the Committee on Disarmament was not keyed to any specific region. It did not stimulate discussion; had it

2A study group on chemical warfare was established in 1973 by the Pugwash Conferences on Science and \~orld Affairs in order to provide opportunity for expert but unofficial East-West contacts on chemical arms control that would complement the formal intergovernmental channels. Members of the group comprise scientists, military people and governmental officials having expertise in one or another aspect of chemical-warfare preparedness. The group meets on average about once a year, typically with a 2-4 day prepared agenda structured according to matters of current topicality. By invitation, experts from 27 countries have now participated in these mee.tings: Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Egypt, Finland, France, the two German states, Hungary, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the USA, the USSR and Yugoslavia.

done so, the Canadian delegation would most likely have spoken of the Tlatelolco Treaty area.

The focus in the Pugwash proposals was on

Europe. Although the likelihood of future chemical warfare is perhaps at its lowest in that continent, the motors of chemical-warfare armament were seen to be at their strongest there, especially in that central region where the forces of the North Atlantic and Warsaw Treaty Organizations are most heavily concentrated. Military disengagement in Europe was very much on the political agenda by the early 1980s. Some of those who were exploring the possibilities saw in the particular issue of chemical armament one potentially feasible means for putting ideas

into

practice without

significant disturbance

to the overall

3The report of the 7th Pugwash Workshop on Chemical Warfare, Stockholm, 13-17 June 1979, is printed in Pugwash Newsletter, vol. 17, no. 1 & 2 (July/Oct. 1979), pp. 40-48.

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4Lohs, Kh. and Robinson, J. P. P., ~Impressions of the Ninth Workshop on Chemical Warfa:e ~, Pugwash Newsletter vol 19, no. 4 (Apnl 1982), pp. 152-55. ' · 5

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The Report of the Independent Commission on Disarmament and Securit Issues under ~he Chairmanship of Olof Palme, Common Security: Programme for D1sarmament (Pan Books: London, 1982>l.-.::_:_:_--=...::.::.:::_~_:__-~ 6But see Centro di Studi Strategici (Director, E. Jacchia), Chemical Weapons . and Arms Control: Views from Europe (Libera Un1versita Internaz1onale degli Studi Sociali: Rome, 1983). Julian Perry Robinson Series Editor

CONTENTS Preface

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I. Introduction An historical context for European chemical-weapon-free zone concepts, with an account of current European chemical-warfare 1

Julian P. Perry Robinson, Senior Research FellovJ, University of Sussex, UK A European zone free of chemical weapons: a regional precursor for the world-wide ban on chemical weapons ....................... . Ralf Trapp, SIPRI

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A chronology of events............................................. Kristina Martensson, SIPRI

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zone concept

II. European security and the chemical-weapon-

A chemical-weapon-free zone in Europe: pilot project for a second phase of d~tente............................................ Karsten D. Voigt, Member of Parliament, FRG

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A chemical-free zone in Central Europe: significance, conditions and implications........................................ Pierre-Henri Renard, Ambassador, France

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Towards a chemical-weapon-free zone in Central Europe ....••....•.•. Ji~i Matou~ek, Professor. Academy of Sciences, CSSR

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III. The regional approach and the prospects for a world-wide ban on chemical weapons Pros and cons of a chemical-weapon-free zone in Europe .....••...... Karlheinz Lohs, Academician, Academy of Sciences, GDR The relationship between the proposal for a chemical-weapon-free zone in Europe and the negotiations at the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva on a world-wide ban ...........••..•.•...•...• Frank Elbe, Counsellor, Foreign Office, FRG A chemical-weapon-free zone in Cent-ral Europe: to a \'lOr 1 d- wide ban. " ..... ~ ~

e •••• o •••••••••••••••

Charles Flowerree, Ambassador, USA

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its relationship II



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o •• o " • •



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IV. Compliance and compliance assurance for the regional step Verifying a Trojan horse: a chemical-weapon-free zone ...•......... Manfred Hamm, Heritage Foundation, USA

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I. Introduction

Creating a zone free of chemical weapons: an essential step towards arms limitation and disarmament ..........................•. Ralf Stohr, Professor, Academy of Sciences, GDR

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An historical context for European chemical-weapon-free zone concepts, with an account of current European chemical-warfare forces Julian P. Perry Robinson, Senior Research Fellow, University of Sussex, UK

V• Ann ex . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . • • . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

19 5 A European zone free of chemical weapons: a regional precursor for the world-wide ban on chemical weapons Ralf Trapp, SIPRI A chronology of events Kristina Martensson, SIPRI

AN HISTORICAL CONTEXT fOR EUROPEAN CHEMICAL~WEAPON~FREE ZONE CONCEPTS~ WITH AN ACCOUNT OF CURRENT EUROPEAN CHEMICAL-WARFARE FORCES

J. P. Perry Robinson. Senior Research Fellow, University of Sussex, U.K.

It seems to have been in the South America of the 1930s. during the aftermath of the Chaco wars, that the idea first emerged of a region to be kept free of chemi cal='llarfare ( CW) weapons •1 That episode has 1eft little published record; and it finds no reference in the present growth of interest in CW weapon-free zone (CWFZ) concepts. CWFZs have now been proposed for several regions of the world: most prominently for central Europe and the Balkans. but also for Scandinavia, the Tlatelolco Treaty 4 3 area, 2 Latin America generally, the Mediterranean and Africa, and the South Asian Regional Cooperation. 5 Perhaps the South American experience, regarded as historical antecedent, teaches nothing of any particular relevance for the proposals of today. Yet its neglect is in keeping with a similar disregard for history in the perspective within which CWFZ concepts are currently being viewed and debated. At least in Western countries, that perspective is set, first and foremost, by the political exigencies and expediences of the moment. So it risks excluding from attention patterns of past events that may actually be trends impelled by a still-running momentum of their own. The theme of the present paper is that the merits and demerits of CWFZ proposals are, in consequence, being assessed in an unduly short-sighted fashion, and without enough appreciation of underlying dynamics. Opportunities for progress may be being squandered. One particular pattern in the history of CW weapons is chosen for special attention. It is to be found in the history of other weapons too. and may be seen as steps in that process whereby technical novelties come to be assimilated into the broader technologies and practices to which they can contribute. The outline of a theory of how this assimilation process works in the case of CW weapons 6 is taken as

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the point of departure. Then, on the implicit assumption that the real value of the present intergovernmental CW arms talks lies in their potential for blocking further assimilation and ultimately reversing it, the prospects for those talks are considered against the actual dynamics of the assimilation process as they are currently being displayed. It is suggested that, because the talks themselves are now acting as a positive stimulus to assimilation, they risk becoming counterproductive unless collateral steps are taken as well. It is suggested, further, that if such steps are not taken very soon, current events in the field of CW armament are liable to destroy all prospects of success. Projects for the establishment of a CWFZ in central Europe offer one such collateral measure. Their potential in this regard is considered against what is known about the actual dispositions of CW forces across Europe and against the impacts which such a CWFZ might have on the assimilation process. The impacts might be both positive and negative. No particular conclusions are drawn about the feasibility of actually establishing a central European CWFZ, for that would depend on factors lying beyond the scope of the essay. But the point is made that, if such a zone were established, the task of reaching international agreement on an effective global CW disarmament treaty would be greatly eased.

Assimilation of Prior to 1914, concepts for novel CW weapons were under study in several countt'ies, among them Britain, Germany and Japan. This early research appears to have been a low-key affair, driven more by the general growth of chemical technology than by perceptions of military need; and such weapons as were designed aroused little military interest. Chemical warfare was still where it had been for centuries: a technique of fighting far too demanding in its requirements for special supplies and special skills to be useful for anything other than special purposes. Yet within five years, under the st irnul us of the Great War· and its attendant mobilization of the scientific community in support of the military, CW had moved rapidly away from the outer margins of military theory and practice, closer to the mainstream. By the end of that war a

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million people had become casualties of chemical warfare, and there were artillery units on both sides of the Western Front that were firing as much poison-gas shell as high explosive. The process of assimilation, recognizable from the history of many other technologies, ~ivil as well as military, was under way: CW weapons were becoming integrated into prevailing doctrine, procedures and organization. They were becoming convention a1 • From Greek Fire, the crossbow or gunpowder through to nuclear explos·ives, all radical innovations in weaponry have gone through a more or less protracted process of assimilation from an initial state typified by special-interest advocacy, military disfavour and moral obloquy. Some have attained integration, others not, and all are liable to be supplanted by newer technologies, in which event their assimilation is reversed. Despite that surge during vJorld War I. CW weapons do not appear to have advanced very far from the initial state. They seem to stand no higher in general military esteem than they did half a century ago, and they continue to be condemned as implements of war somehow more barbarous and more immoral than other weapons. During the mechanization of warfare after World War I, CW technology simply got left behind; it was only against static or unprotected targets that the CW weapons of the 1920s and 1930s--slow acting, poorly controllable and logistically demanding--remained competitive with conventional weapons. But with the advent of the nerve gases at the time of World War II, and with the marriage of poison gas to strike aircraft and to rocket and guided-missile weapons, this set-back was potentially overcome; the momE~ntum of ass imi 1at ion was restored. Where is that momentum now taking CW technology? Developments in tactical doctrine applicable in Europe, and developments in other areas of technology, seem to be creating a combat environment which, in certain particulars, may be rather more conducive to CW than that of, say, 20 years ago. In Soviet and East European writings we read that Western CW weapons are an important part of NATO war planning. In Western writings about WTO war planning, we read that Soviet CW weapons will probably be used whenever it would be tactically opportune to do so: that NATO should not dare not to assume this J Either way, the portray a1 is one of a potentia 1 adversary to whom poi son gas is now a virtually conventional weapon. Patently, that is not the case, at least

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not yet; but the very fact that the portrayals are made at all is evidence that, on both sides. the motors of ass imi 1at ion have by no means stopped. And Iraq•s use of CW weapons in the Gulf War shows that this is not exclusively a rich-country phenomenon. The assimilation of novel weaponry is the process whereby armed forces adapt their ways of organization and operation so as to a 11 ovJ maximal exploitation of the new military capabilities on offer. But adaptation to one form of weaponry may reduce adaptation or adaptability to another form, in which case integration of the latter may be reversed or retarded. So there are opportunity costs to the assimilation of Ct-J weapons, and where there are opportunity costs there will be opposition from disaffected institutions. Assimilation may thus be conceived as a political process, for, just as it is impeded by institutional and other interests vested in the status quo, so too is it driven forward by such new interests as have become associated with the technology. This is not to say that, in the push-pull dynamics of weapons acquisition, it is the push of supply that is invariably rate-determining. Rather, it says that, if the supply-side institutions can somehow inflate perceptions of need for their technology, the pull of demand may very rapidly accelerate its assimilation. Just such an inflation now appears to be happening in the West, as indicated by the events surrounding NAT0 1 s adoption, in May 1986, of a force goal on CW weapons. 8 As for the WTO, its CW armament is far too heavily obscured by the prevai 1i ng secrecy for outsiders to form any clear impression of counterpart happenings. No doubt there are differences in the extent to which the two alliances have assimilated CW weapons. Whether they are si ificant differences is not a question that can be answered here. What can be said with some confidence, however, is that NATO would not have adopted that force goal if people at policy-making levels had remained unpersuaded of a Soviet CW threat; Western CW rearmament would not now be on the verge of commencing if those people had not chosen to believe that CW armament had become significantly integrated into WTO force structure. Whether that perception of threat was in fact a correct one, or whether it was actually no more than an artefact of Western supply-side lobbies, or whether it was the usual fudge to which both contributed, is now immaterial. A classical action-reaction I

arms-race dynamic may, once again, be accelerating the assimilation process. Outside NATO and the WTO, interest in acquisition of CW weapons is evidently growing. World-wide, the number of countries that have been said to be arming themselves with CW weapons has now reached 36, 9 though one may doubt whether, on the available evidence, more than a small fraction of these countries are in fact doing so. Some, maybe half a dozen or so, clearly are; but, even in the case of Iraq, the level of CW armament is still at a trivial level compared with that of the two main blocs. It is the East-West confrontation, especially in Europe, that will set the future course of CW-weapons assimilation.

lation and arms control Since the mid-1970s arms control has become an increasingly influential factor in the politics of CW-weapons assimilation. In any field of armament, the prospects for successful arms control are of course conditioned by the degree to which the military have integrated the weapons. Treaties on antiballistic missiles. sea-bed weapons. germ weapons and geophysical weapons were possible during the 1970s, but not treaties for the elimination of napalm or nuclear weapons. The fact that the CW negotiations have remained unsuccessful for so long but are nevertheless still being pursued in earnest is further testimony, one may think, to the partly assimilated character of CW weapons in all of the participating countries. The question which now needs to be asked, above all by those people who advocate the elimination of CW weapons world-wide, is whether the CW negotiations may not actually be more likely to promote assimilation than to retard or reverse it. It is this question which gives particular salience to CWFZ concepts today. On the face of it, it may seem absurd to imagine that negotiations aimed at constraining CW weapons might end up promoting them. Yet this is precisely what has been happenin_g, at least since the days of SALT, in several other areas of arms control. It would be an optimist indeed who supposed that CW armament was somehow different. Of the various contributory mechanisms that may be postulated, there are ones that become especially plausible during periods of deepening international mistrust, such as the early 1980s.

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The agreed objective in the Geneva CW talks is comprehensive, global and effective CW disarmament. But the longer this ambitious goal remains unattained, and the longer the negotiations drag on, the stronger may belief become that CW weapons are actually more important than their poorly assimilated status suggests, and that the armed forces of one's own country have been at fault in neglecting them. 10 Institutional interests associated with CW weapons--the motors of assimilation--will find it increasingly easy in political fora both inside and outside goverrvnent to persuade people of the following: why else would the other side be dragging its heels in the negotiations (it is always the other side which does this, never one's own) if it did not perceive some advantage to itself in retaining the weapons or inhibiting the antagonist's programmes? In fact there might well be all sorts of factors militating against such-and-such a negotiating compromise at such-and-such a time; but this particular explanation of events--the imputation of nefarious intent to the other side--provides common ground for coalitions with other interests opposed to arms control. It is then only a short step to entrenching the belief that more of the weapons are needed in order to strengthen one's own negotiating position--in order not to be trapped into a disadvantageous or dangerously precedentsetting treaty by reason of weakness. Thus it is that a new form of demand, that of 'bargaining chip', comes to be created for the weapons; and it is a demand that may be felt by other major parties to the negotiations, for one side's strength inevitably comes to be seen as the other side's weakness. Assimilation is boosted. A countermeasure against such feedback mechanisms might be a lowering of the sights of the CW negotiations: seeking a treaty that does not go as far as requiring comprehensive CW disarmament. That might then diminish the range of issues over which CW-weapons interests could find common cause with otherwise unrelated interests. Besides CWFZ proposals, several such lesser objectives have been mooted over the years, among them the incorporation of verification provisions into the 1925 Geneva Protocol and the establishment of some sort of CW nonproliferation regime, to say nothing of the traditional arms-control panacea of non-zero quantitative limitations. It may indeed be that the less ambitious the goal in the CW negotiations, the more likely is assimilation to be constrained. But to

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accept this idea as the way forward might incur two major penalties. First, it could have the effect of providing legitimation for activities lying beyond the diminished objective; assimilation might then be retarded in the short term only at cost of its acceleration in the longer term. Second, the approach could risk sacrificing what has thus far been the principal gain in the CW negotiations: the public expressions of commitment from all the participating governments to the belief that CW weapons should be eradicated completely, universally and permanently. These expressions of commitment have been deve 1oped into what is actually. from the experience of Geneva, an effective -if slow-moving -machinery for negotiating on the very complicated questions involved in CW disarmament. To divert this machinery along some lesser path could thus be to destroy a real and valuable asset. The question to consider, therefore, is whether there is any sort of lesser objective to which priority might now be given but without in any way reducing commitment to the larger objective. Fragmenting the goal in this fashion would still entail some penalty from diversion, for the diplomatic community is not so rich in people versed in CW matters for negotiations to be opened on a second front without cost to efforts on the first. Yet the way things now seem to be going, some such diversion may be the only means for preserving the whole enterprise from collapse. To recapitulate: under present-day conditions, the prospects are essentially zero for international disarmament agreement on any category of weapon that is fully assimilated. Si nee CW weapons are not yet in such a category, CW disarmament may still be negotiable. But the process of negotiation may itself be promoting assimilation. The pace of the CW negotiations is set by the resources that governments are prepared to allocate and the risks they are willing to take in the quest for compromise. The pace is also set by the peculiar techni ca 1 and political intricacies of verifying CW disarmament. If it is outstripped by the pace of assimilation, as is now looking increasingly likely, the negotiations will inevitably fail. May it not be a tenable conclusion, then, that the negotiations should actually be interrupted forthwith ' until such time as the participants are able to adopt positive measures having the effect of impeding assimilation? Diversion of effort towards a lesser objective will carry a price; but if it can provide such positive measures, it may be a price that has to be paid.

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Assimilation and CWFZ concepts Assimilation theory offers some guidance on the form which supplementary measures might take. The process of assimilation is the process whereby, for a novel technology, supply and demand become reconciled with one another. The process is the 1inkage between push and pull in the dynamics of technology- acquisition. For as long as a particular category of weapon has not yet become fully ass imi 1ated. its status is determined by supply-side factors, and its still-precarious future will depend on such demand as may grow for it in the form of stated military requirements. So the supplementary measures needed must be ones whose effect is to inhibit or suppress demand. Because, for CW weapons, that demand is still in a formative stage, such an effect will be maximal if the measures go to its roots. On the foregoing analysis, most of those roots are located within the peculiar and largely hidden political domain where demand becomes stimulated by supply. That murky domain is one where the outcome of events is determined less by mora 1 precepts or attention to the greater good and more by bargaining, bureaucratic weight or other forms of patronage and influence. Decisive are the practical realities and opportunities of the moment, not as pi rations for the future. But the 1anguage of its debate, at least in public, is the language of military strategy and defence analysis; matters at issue are couched in terms of national security, deterrence and similar abstractions. That language has now become extremely supple, but it nonetheless imposes some constraint on the freedom of decision. Outcomes are not, therefore, exclusively determined by the relative strengths of the competing interests. For CW weapons today, this constraint is perhaps stronger than for any other category of weapon. There is international law of exceptional explicitness and public visibility which states that the weapons may not be used; and it is 1aw which has been reaffirmed many times by the governments of all the leading military powers, including public reaffirmations by heads of state. Such declarations might not count for much during the extreme of war itself. But in peacetime their effect can only be to strengthen the position of those that find themselves competing with CW-weapons interests, whether that competition be for budgetary allocations, access to manufacturing capacity, influence upon

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military doctrine, cooperative arrangements with allies, space in training curricula or any of the other prerequisites of assimilation. In struggling for advancement, CW-weapons interests are obliged to make their case exclusively within the restrictive language of CW deterrence. Whilst national policy and international law on CW-weapons employment remain the same, advocates of CW armament can claim no utility for it other than capability for reprisal against enemy use and whatever dissuasive effect that may provide. The only demand which is open to their stimulation is demand for a retaliatory-use-only weapon--at least, that is to say, until such time as there are clear signs of a discontent more general than their own with the prevailing no-first-use policy. It is this political context which lends attractions to CWFZ proposals as possible supplementary measures. If there were no CW weapons in a region. there would be no CW threat to justify the maintenance there of an in-kind retaliatory cum deterrent capability. The admissible utility of CW armament would then be reduced still further to that of retaliation outside the region. If the region included central Europe, the consequent effect on assimilation might be especially pronounced, since--certainly for the United States and possibly for the Soviet Union too--it is in relation to war in central Europe that most of the military requirements for CW weapons are being expressed. The value of CWFZs in other parts of the world would be of a different kind. That, at any rate, is the rima facie value of European-CWFZ proposals. Clearly much would depend on the degree of assurance which the zonal states and their allies could derive that the zone was indeed being kept free of CW weapons: a function of whatever verification arrangements were to be made. The weaker those arrangements, the lower would be the assurance and therefore the more persuasive would the justification be for retaining CW weapons poised for reintroduction into the zone as safeguard against the possibility of adversary violation. Value would then be lost. Closer scrutiny discloses other factors that would also need to be taken into account. They include certain possible mechanisms that might even, as regards constraining assimilation, render the proposals counterproductive. Some stem from the nature of the assimilation process; others from the existing dispositions of CW forces in Europe. It is convenient to consider the latter first.

11

10

CW forces in Europe today At the time of Horld War II, the European countries that possessed militarily significant supplies of CW weapons included the following: Czechoslovakia, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland, the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom. Greece and Yugoslavia apparently also possessed stocks, and a mustard-gas factory existed in the Netherlands East Indies. The post-war peace settlements 11 placed strictures on any future possession of CW weapons by Bulgaria, Finland, Hungary, Italy and Romania; the strictures amounted, in practice, to CW disarmament. Austria was entirely debarred from possessing CW weapons. As for Germany, provisions for the eradication of CW armament were contained in These laws promulgated by the Allied Control Council in 1946. provisions were the antecedent of the renunciation of CW weapons by the Federal Republic, as formalized (until 2005) in the revised Brussels Treaty of 1954. They \>Jere also the antecedent of the stipulations contained in the constitution and penal code of the German Democratic Republic to the effect that •any misuse of science directed against peace, mutual understanding among peoples, against the life and dignity of man is prohibited, and that the use of bacteriological and chemical 12 weapons is subject to punishment• • Today, only France among the European member-states of NATO still possesses stocks; 13 France is not, however, still producing the weapons, although it is said to have recently completed a development programme which would allow it to begin manufacturing binary nerve-gas munitions at short notice, if its government so decided. Certain other member states possess sma 11 stocks 1eft over from 1ong-defunct development programmes or from World War II; these stocks are all awaiting disposal, and in no sense constitute significant military capacity. Even th.e current French stocks--which probably total no more than a few hundred tons of CW agents, of which at least a portion is weaponized--are now apparently also considered by their possessors to be in this obsolete category: in its Armaments Control does not deploy reliable public Union possesses

recent annua 1 returns to the Western European Union Agency, the French government has been stating that it a militarily significant supply. As for the WTO, information is sparse: most likely, only the Soviet significant stocks. According to an unofficial

commentary published in mid-1985, one that probably reflected at least some of the US intelligence assessments of the time, •none of the East European countries deploys a stockpile of chemical munitions under national contro1•. 14 More recently, however, it has been said in FR Germany that Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the GDR, Hungary, Poland and Romania are all producing CW-weapons; 15 and purported locations have been published for particular production facilities in the GDR 16 • 17 • 18 • 19 and in Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romani a 16 Soviet control of production is asserted in some of these accounts; 16 • 17 • 19 • 20 and some speak of purely indigenous production as well, referring to Czechoslovakia 16 and Romania. 16 • 21 These are, however, reports of the most dubious rel i abi 1 i ty, at any rate in the form in which they have thus far been published. Within the US intelligence community, there is a controversy over whether any WTO member states other than the Soviet Union in fact has production facilities. 22 Public statements of executive policy which several European governments have made or reaffirmed over the past year have expressly rejected acquisition of CW weapons. On the NATO side, the governments that have declared such CW nonarmament policies include those of Denmark, FR Germany, Greece, Iceland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain and the United Kingdom. In Belgium the legislature has stipulated a nonarmament policy, but the administration has rejected its right to do so and has. for the moment, kept open the poss i bi 1i ty of 23 Belgian CW armament. The situation in Portugal and Turkey is obscure. On the WTO side, it appears (from a search of the literature that may, however, be incomplete) that none of the East European governments has ever made public reference to its policies regarding acquisition or possession of its own CW weapons. Occasions for such statements have existed recently during the events, including international press conferences, surrounding the SED-SPD party-level initiative from the two German states in June 1985 regarding a central European CWFZ, the joint Czechosl ovak-GDR proposal of September 1985 to the Federal German government that talks be opened on such a CWFZ, and the joint BulgarianRomanian declaration-appeal of December 1985 regarding a Balkan CWFZ. All WTO member states have, however, declared their adherence to the principles underlying CWFZ and global CW disarmament endeavours.

13

12

Of course, if European countries--East or West--did now decide to press forward with CW armament, a very substantial manufacturing base f or CW agent s wo u1d be a va i l a b1e i n t he i r ci vil c hem i ca1 i ndust r i e s • Rough measures of the size of the relevant sectors are provided by figures on output of ethylene and of pharmaceuticals--as shown in table 1, which summarizes data on 1980 outputs in both western and eastern Europe, together with data for other parts of the world. In relation to CWFZ proposals, and particularly their verification provisions, this industrial capacity could present a difficult problem, the more so for as long as possession of CW weapons outside a European CWFZ--and hence potential export markets--remained unobstructed. In summary, then, it does not, for the present, appear as though indigenous central European CW forces in being have much, if any, military significance. Accordingly, the practical matter of most immediate relevance is the deployment of nJ weapons within that region by states lying outside it.

Table 1 ..

World distribution of chemical

output~

1980

(indexed on US output)

Region

Ethylene

Western Europe Eastern Europe United States Japan Developing countries

0.79 0.29 1.00* 0.27 0.21

*

**

1980 output of: Pharmaceuticals

1.39 0.61 1.00** 0.67 0.56

1980 output was about 14 million tons 1980 output was about $18,000 million

Source: Adapted from Burstall, M. L., 1 The industrial context of chemical warfare•, SIPRI Chemical & Biological Warfare Studies, no. 4 (1986) pp. 35-54, at p. 49.

For NATO this means for'fJard-based US stocks, all French weapons being held, so far as is know, inside France. At the time of World War II, the United States deployed substantial quantities of blister-, blood- and choking-gas weapons to Europe (chiefly to Britain. France and Italy), some of which presumably remained there well into the post-war period. Nowadays, according to Congressional testimony by the US Defense Department. the only US stocks in Europe are held in FR Germany at one location, and comprise GB and VX nerve gases loaded into 155-mm and 203-mm ho'fJitzer ammunition. The figure of 435 agent tons has been published for these holdings 24 That would correspond to about 6500 tons of nerve-gas ammunition--around 100 000 rounds--or about 25 percent It of the world-wide US supply of these particular nerve-gas munitions would also correspond to less than 2 percent of the total US holdings of lethal CW agents (some 30 500 short tons) or to about one-eighth of the portion of that total which the US Defense Department currently regards as militarily useful. This European stockpile is said to be situated in the Palatinate, perhaps in the US Army depot at Fischbach (though alternative locations have been mentioned in the press). There has been no shortage of press reports about further supplies of US CW weapons elsewhere in Europe, both in the Federal Republic and in other countries; but these can, almost certainly, be discounted. As to forward-based Soviet CW weapons, there is very little information that can be recorded here with any confidence. NATO authorities appear to believe that Soviet holdings world-wide are large. How large is not known with any precision. The best available Western estimates put the holdings in the region of 50 000 to 100 000 agent tons, give or take a factor of up to 5: estimates ranging, in other words, from somewhat smaller than the total US agent tonnage to an order of magnitude 1arger A substantia 1 portion is thought to be stockpiled close to China. Western knowledge of how much, if any, is stored outside the Soviet Union seems to be largely conjectural. In August 1985, a West German journalist who had just been briefed at the Federal Defence Ministry reported that the USSR had 7 forward depots for CW weapons in Czechoslovakia, 10 in th~ GDR and 5 in Hungary. 19 Briefings given from inside the FRG intelligence community itself paint a less assured picture, however. A report by the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) released later in 1985 spoke of 32 locations in WTO

14

countries other than the USSR where 'chemical munitions are reportedly •••• stored in forward areas': 1 in Bulgaria. 9 in Czechoslovakia, 9 in the GDR, 5 in Hungary, 4 in Poland and 4 in Romania; the report said that, in forward areas, Soviet CW weapons were • . h conven t.1ona l weapons I • 25 But on th e1r . bel1eved to be I collocate d w1t respective assessments of Soviet CW capabilities, the DIA and the US 26 Central Intelligence Agency are reportedly in disagreement, and there is no consensus on this particular DIA assessment within the US intelligence community as a whole. According to a competing assessment, there is good evidence of Soviet CW weapons depots inside the USSR only; extra-territori a 1 stock pi 1 i ng is unconfirmed, and, if it occurs at all. is most likely at one particular airbase in the GDR. However, an article in a 1984 issue of a GDR m·ilitary journal conveys the strong impression that, in the opinion of its authors (both of them colonels), 27 there are no Soviet nJ v1eapons in the GDR. General Secretary Gorbachev, in his statement of 15 January 1986, expressly denied the existence of Soviet CW weapons outside Soviet borders. Given the high degree of uncertainty about forward-based Soviet CW weapons, it is di ffi cult to form even a broad picture of the existing dispositions of CW forces across Europe. On the available information, the reality of the situation might be represented equally well by either of two very different portrayals. One corresponds to the vi ev1 that is currently being propagated in western Europe by the advocates of CYJ force modernization and expansion. It sees a huge disparity between the forward- deployed CW forces of NATO and the WTO, this being perceived as a consequence of the importance thought to be attached by the Soviet Union to its CW armament as a means for exploiting certain supposed NATO vulnerabilities, particularly vulnerabilities in those rear areas critical to NATO command and control, reinforcement and air operations. Implicit in this view is an assessment of the military utility of CW weapons which places a high value on their cost-effectiveness compared with conventional weapons. The other portrayal, one that is rarely discussed, is a portrayal of mirror-imaging. It rejects, implicitly, the view that CW weapons have much to offer militarily nowadays when compared with conventional weapons. The accumulation of CW weapons on either side of the US-Soviet divide is seen as a consequence of past i nst itut ion a 1 pressures and of

15

reaction to what the other side had been believed to be doing: a product of history more than of currently perceived military needs. The CW-agent stockpiles are seen to be elderly, much of them unweaponi zed, and dating back to the era when theatre nuclear weapons were still in their infancy or had not even been conceived. Such forward deployments as have been made, so this portrayal continues, are maintained chiefly for symbolical and political reasons: token stockpiles in Germany--US v1eapons in the FRG, and Soviet weapons perhaps in the GDR. The constraints associated with the Geneva Protocol inhibit either side from integrating their CW forces more closely and, by extension, from investing in such new CW-weapons technology as recent science may have opened up. The Protocol also allows either side to depict, and perhaps even to value, its CW annament as a deterrent of the other's. Proposals for the establishment of a CWFZ in central Europe would clearly have very different implications when considered against these alternative portrayals. On the mirror-image view, such a CWFZ could not but be beneficia 1 to the security of both NATO and the WTO, provided there were verification arrangements which generated mutual confidence in compliance. It would obviate the inherent instability of l i ke-with-1 ike deterrence: the propensity of retaliatory capabilities for inducing, sustaining or enhancing the very thr·eat which they were supposed to be deterring (a matter which is taken up again later in this essay). On the huge-disparity view, the implications would be more complicated, not 1east because the supposed disparity waul d engender disbelief in the Soviet Union in fact intending to forgo its putative advantage. Adequacy of the verification arrangements would thus be highly problematic, and the net result might well be a deterioration, not an improvement, in mutual confidence. Whichever of these portrayals is the closer to reality, the security implications would be dictated in some measure by the nature of the particular CW weapons currently held by either side. This would determine the ease with which significant offensive CW capability could be reintroduced into the zone. It would also determine the relative ability of either side to target CW weapons into the zone from outside it. The nature of existing US CW weapons is pub 1i c knowledge, 28 but that of existing Soviet weapons is not, so no firm conclusions on these points can be reached here. For what it may be worth, table 2 bel ow

16

Table 2.

17 Soviet and US CW-capible weapons

US weapons for which CW are stockpiled

Soviet weapons for wllich Western sources say CW munitions are held

~n1tions

Estimated capab111ty for CW-agent delivery (kg per weapon)

5-25km maximum range 122-mm mortar [M1943] 240-mm SP mortar SM-240 122-mm how 0-30 and SP how S0-122 152-m~ how 0-20 and SP how S0-152 M109 203-mm SP hoH [Ml975] 122-mm/12 MRL [Ml975] 122-mm/36 MRL [M1976] 122-mm/40 SP MRL BM-21

150/5 min

4.2-in mortar M30

40/5 min

50/5 min

105-rri11 how M102 155-mm hows Mll4 & Ml98 and SP how

40/5 min

8-in SP how MilO

[220]

[Abandoned: 115-mm/45 HRL M91]

[50/5 min]

[Abandoned: 155-mm gun M59]

500 220

In development: 227-mm/12 SP ~IRL Abandoned: 762-mm FFR Honest John In development: SSM ATACMS

upto 1000

V/STOL aircraft AV-8 Harrier II

upto 1600

upto 1400

In development: SSM* JTACMS CAS aircraft A-10 Thunderbolt

upto 2000 upto 1500 320

upto 1400

FGA aircraft F-4 Phantom 11

upto 1000

Carrierborne FGA A-6 Intruder

upto 1800

Bomber aircraft F-111

100/5 min 80/5 min

40/5 min 50/5 min

..

40 110

130

25-150km maximum range 130-mm gun M46 50/5 min 152-mm gun [Ml976] and SP gun 2S5 180-mm gun S-23 30/5 min 203-mm SP gun S0-203 220-mm/16 SP MRL BM-27 550-mm FFR R-75 Luna [FROG-7] SSM [SS-21 Scarab]

50/5 min

..

700 180

150-SOOkm maximum range Assault helicopter Mi-8 [Hip] Assault helicopter Mi-24 [Hind] SSM [SS-lc Scud-B) Carrierborne FGA Yak-36 [Forger] FGA aircraft MiG-21 [Fishbed] Naval SSM* [SS-N-3 Shaddock] SSM [SS-23 Spider] CAS aircraft Su-25 [Frogfoot]

upto upto 360 upto upto 450

650 650 350 350

..

500 - 1000 km maximum range FGA aircraft Su-17 [Fitter] FGA aircraft MiG-27 [Flogger] SSM [SS-12/12M/22 Scaleboard] 1000 - 5500 km maximum range Bomber aircraft Su-24 [Fencer] SSM [SS-20]

upto 1500 250

Maximum range greater than 5500 km SSM [SS-11 Sego Mod 4] SSM RS-18 [SS-19 Mod]

500 1500

Conventions: SP for self propelled; how for howitzer; MRL for multiple rocket launcher; FFR for free-flight rocket; SSM for surface-to-surface guided missile-\* a cruise missTTe); FGA for fighter/ground-attacr;-CAS for close air support. Source: Western open-source publications, official and unofficial; particulars are to be found in a forthcoming SIPRI publication, CBW Data Book. The sources for some of the Soviet weapons listed are less reliable than thOse for others; and some of tne information purveyed seems barely credible.

lists those Soviet weapons that have been said by Western commentators, offici a 1 and unoffi cia 1 • to be CvJ capab 1e--i n the sense both of being technically suited to CW-agent delivery and of having CW ammunitions avai 1able in Soviet supply channels. No statement can be made here about the reliability of the tabulated information; and some of it, one may think, is of low credibility. The table also includes information on current US CW-capable weapons. As has a 1 ready been noted. more than 98 percent of the total US CW-agent stockpile is he 1d far away from Europe. That includes a 11 of the US CW weapons that have a range greater than that of art i 11 ery. Such longer range weapons, which is to say the aircraft that are armable from the existing US stocks of nerve-gas bombs or spraytanks, could in principle be deployed within range of central-European targets. But in practice that would be largely excluded owing to the current US Air Force policy of not storing these munitions at its tactical airbases and the US Navy policy of not carrying them on its aircraft carriers; these policies would not, however, extend to binary munitions, should they ever be acquired. The creation of a central-European CWFZ would therefore have the effect of denying NATO virtually all possibility of conducting offensive CW operations anywhere in Europe--unless either CW surface-to-surface missiles of theatre range or binary munitions for aircraft were procured, or the US Navy or Air Force changed their policies regarding non-binary CW munitions. or there was redeployment of short-range CW weapons into the zone. The 1ast of these would not, presumably, be an especially complicated logistical task, and could be conducted through the existing much-exercised reinforcement channels. The amount of logistical capacity that would need to be dedicated to such a task would not. however. be small; and if the CW stores were competing for priority with other reinforcements, there might in fact be major practical constraints on reintroduction. Even a supply as modest in size as that currently held in the Federal Republic would require 260-odd sorties of C-1418 airlift; 29 the C-1418 is what the US Military Airlift Command uses for interconti,nental transport of ammunition, 234 of these aircraft being available for the Cornmand•s operations. Ground-launched CW weapons of greater than artillery range have not been in the US operational inventory since 1973 when, for domestic political reasons. the entire supply of Honest John nerve-gas warheads

19

18

was declared surplus, even though, alongside the Weteye aircraft bombs, they were the newest weapon in the inventory. Warheads for the Sergeant guided missile had been standardized but never procured. Designs existed in various stages of development for Pershing and Lance nerve-gas warheads. The current binary-munitions programme inc 1udes development work on warheads for the ca 40-km range Multiple Launch Rocket System, a weapon that is now entering service with several NATO armies, and for the~ 150-km range Lance follow-on, ATACMS. And, besides binary \'larheads for various air-to-ground guided-missile and glide-bomb concepts, some attention is apparently also being given to providing the Pershin II and the Ground Launched Cruise Missile with CW capability. One can readily imagine, then, that an effect of a central-European CWFZ might be to stimulate and accelerate these US development programmes, especially those which promised to match the perceived CW capabilities of such Soviet deep-strike weapons as the FROG/Scarab, Scud/Spider and Scaleboard missiles. That could in turn stimulate Soviet deep-strike CW programmes or accelerate those which may already be running. In these possibilities one may identify one of the mechanisms referred to earlier whereby the CWFZ idea might actually hasten assimilation of CW weapons. Yet there is another major set of factors to be taken into account: the possible consequences of the political events surrounding the NATO decision, in May 1986, to incorporate the US binary-munitions programme into its force goals for 1987-92. One of these events was the agreement reached between President Reagan and Chancellor Kohl to the effect that, if the Federal Government supported the force goal (which it did), the US nerve-gas stockpile in the Feder a 1 Repub 1i c would be withdrawn by 1992 without replacement, provided US production of binary munitions had commenced by the time then anticipated, the end of 1987. 30 This appears to mean that western Europe is now set to become a de facto CWFZ. So the opening of negotiations for a de jure one would seem unlikely to have much effect on the incentives acting upon the United States to accelerate its deep-strike binary weapon programmes: the in~entives would already be operating. That agreement by the United States to \'lithdraw its only CW-weapons stockpile in Europe may, however, introduce a new element into the

picture. At the time of writing there is a bill before Congress which would prohibit such withdrawal, and there is substantial domestic pressure within the United States, if not to keep the stockpi 1e in the Federal Republic, then at least to find some alternative forward-basing mode. This pressure may ultimately translate itself into either or both of two outcomes. One would be the use of the US Navy•s maritime prepositioning ships to maintain a stockpile of binary munitions just 31 ouside European territorial waters The other would be the formalization of an agreement within NATO whereby. in defined contingencies, the United States \'Jould be permitted to equip certain of its forces in Europe with binary munitions under arrangements that minimized delay and visibility; such an agreement might involve the potential host countries in the preparation of contingency storage facilities for binary munitions. For the time being, it has to be said, there are substantial political obstacles in the path of this second possible outcome. In view of the Kohl-Reagan agreement, it may be asked whether the impetus behind the WTO proposal for a European CWFZ remains as strong as it appeared to be before the agreement. Further pursuit of the proposal might be thought to risk disharmony within the Warsaw alliance. But there is, as just noted, considerable doubt as to whether the US stocks will indeed by withdrawn from the FRG prior to 1992, and whether the more important of the European NATO member states will maintain their opposition to the forward deployment in peacetime of US binary munitions.

Assimilation and CW deterrence in Just as deterrence is the context within which decision makers are obliged to evaluate CW armament today, so too is it the context within which they will assess the merits of European CWFZ proposals. The attractions of such proposals are t~us heavily conditioned by attitudes towards deterrence theory in general and the concept of like-with-like CW deterrence in particular. The present essay is not the place to enter into an extended 32 discussion of that concept; and its author has elsewhere set out his

20

reasons for believing that policies which seek security in like-with-like deterrence are especially unreliable in the peculiar field of CW. Many other people believe differently. of course. and some do so for clearly stated reasons. It is a matter on which there can be no certainty, short of the test of war itself. Perhaps the only worthwhile guidance is to be obtained from the historical record of when, under what circumstances and why states have actually considered it worth their using CW weapons. No less relevant is the historical record of instances (more numerous than is commonly supposed) when proposals for use during specific conflicts were developed within the military commands but then turned down at higher levels; or. indeed, the other way about, as when. in July 1944, his military staff dissuaded Winston Churchill from ordering CW attacks on German missile sites, citing purely military inexpediences. The Korean war and the Arab-Israeli wars in particular are instructive but, as yet. little studied in this connection. Even as regards World War II, no clear evidence has yet been adduced from the historical record that, at the tactical level. CW weapons are capable of deterring CW. Several different mechanisms have been proposed for the way in which such CW deterrence might work. Two of them were alluded to in the rationale given to the US Congress in March 1982 by the Defense Department: •our objective [in the binary munitions programme] is not to develop a capability to create large numbers of casualties. Rather, it is to avoid chemical use by having the ability to force an enemy to use his protective systems; thus, negating [because of the degradation of combat efficiency that would ensue] any advantage he hopes to gain from chemical use•. The aim was •to bring the chemical conflict to an end as quickly as possible and at the lowest level possible•. 33 This is the logic that had directed the composition and size of the current US stockpile in the Federal Republic; the criterion against which the US European Command specified its requirements for that stockpile was that first-echelon WTO forces attacking across the US sector of the NATO front were to be compelled tQ fight encumbered in full anti-CW protective posture. should they initiate CW. The stocks are still judged capable of supporting that mission. But there are i ndi cations that this minimalist approach to CW deterrence is now being supplanted in US defence circles by one that places value on the other conceivable

21

mechanisms as well: those that operate, not by offsetting tactical by inflicting punishment, especially upon disadvantage. but 34 CW-vulnerable targets within reach of deep-strike weapon systems. A differentiation of putative CW deterrence mechanisms exists in the concept of •defensive • versus • offensive • deterrence that is now being expressed in some West European CW policy-making circles. This is an off-shoot of a wider policy debate having to do with the relationship between deterrence and war-fighting capability in general, a debate fuelled by the deployment of new theatre nuclear forces to NATO Europe. This wider debate is itself one of the reasons why NATO attitudes towards CW weapons are in their present state of flux. It turns on the part thought to be played by the nuclear threshold in deterring WTO attacks upon NATO: raising the thr-eshold by, for example, building up conventional forces might diminish the likelihood of nuclear war-fare in Europe, but it might a 1so suggest a di mini shed reso 1ve on the part of NATO to execute its 'flexible response• nuclear options and therefore--on the prevailing logic--increase the likelihood of WTO attack. For-fending nuclear war may incite conventional war, which may itself, through escalation, br-ing nuclear war closer. There can of course be no certainties in this debate, only beliefs, and CW weapons represent yet another uncertainty. For the specific objective of discouraging WTO resort to CW, current NATO policy expressly places primary reliance on the flexible-response options, i.e. NATO 35 conventional and nuclear forces. Would a greater emphasis on that subsidiary option which current NATO policy also prescribes. namely in-kind retaliatory capability, increase or diminish the likelihood of nuclear warfare, given the inherently escalatory character of the more likely forms of in-kind retaliation, and given that that likelihood may as well bear an inverse as a direct relationship to the likelihood of WTO attack? It is not a simple matter. In contrast to Washington. Moscow has made no public statement in recent decades about the policies that underlie its CW armament. Yet there is, even so. some belief in t~e West that the Soviet Union judges its CW armament to have like-with-like deterrent value. This assessment is largely obscured from view by the assertions of those who see initiatory use, not retaliatory use, as the primary function of that armament: those who favour the huge-disparity over the mirror-image

23

22

portrayal of the current dispositions of CW forces across Europe. The huge-disparity portrayal has also inhibited debate in the West about the mechanism which the USSR may see for that deterrence and about the nature of the CW threat which it considers worth seeking to deter. Many Westerners have become conditioned--by their own defence ministries, not least--to believing that Western CW capabilities are now in so parlous a state that the Soviet Union could not possibly believe itself threatened by them. But the contrary is indicated by, for example, a statement made at a recent press conference ih Moscow by a senior Foreign Ministry official. Speaking of the US binary programme. he said that components of binary weapons could be secretly produced on territories of various states, and that they could also be camouflaged as various substances, 36 taken to tertitori es of other states. and stored there. This press confer-ence was held immediately before NATO defence ministers met to consider the US binary-munition force goal, and it was no secret that the foward-deployment question was proving contentious within NATO. It seems from other sources, however, that that Foreign Ministry official was uttering more than a political statement: he was voicing genuine Soviet defence concerns as well. Thus, a commentary published in 1985 by an authoritative British analyst of Soviet military affairs has this to say: 37 Soviet military planners are of the op1n1on that, in the event of a crisis, NATO might well produce large stocks of lethal chemica 1 weapons in secret, which would give NATO forces an effective retaliatory capacity. It would, in Soviet eyes, be in NATO's best military interest to employ weapons of mass destruction at a very early stage of the conflict, because this would so disrupt the Soviet advance that its viability might be lost very quickly. Consequently, the present Soviet policy can be summed up in the following way: ## It is accepted that weapons of mass destruction might be used at any time on the battlefield, and that tactics, training and equipment must take this into account.

It is considered essential to prevent escalation to the use of nuclear or chemical weapons, and NATO must consequently be deterred from considering this option. ##

It is necessary to achieve effective deterrence by possessing an adequate defensive capacity and an effective retaliatory capacity.

##

When a Russian looks at NATo•s forces, he tends to 11 mirror-image 11 and assumes that this policy is one which NATO would also adopt under- the cir-cumstances, but that the temptations for NATO to use weapons of mass destruction will become greater as its conventional defence fails. This makes deterrence ever more important, and a de~strat i ve Soviet capability in this field ever more desirable. Other commentators have referred to a NATO perception of genuine belief by the Soviet leadership that the West is deceiving it about NATO CW capabilities and intentions. 38 The inherent instability of like-with-like CW deterrence has already been noted. It stems from the fact that for some and possibly all of the postulated mechanisms, there is no practical difference between first-use and retaliatory-use CW-weapons capabi 1ity, other--perhaps--than scale. First-use intentions may be dissembled behind a declaratory policy that speaks only of retaliatory capability; and, behind such a policy, retaliatory capability may be nurtured to the point where it could support any f·i rst -use intentions that might 1ater develop. It was argued earlier in this essay that the requirement which has been forced upon the advocates of CW armament that they should state their case solely in terms of deterrence acts as a constraint upon the assimilation of CW weapons. But the instability of in-kind CW deterrence means that the constraint may neither be strong nor long-lasting. In the West, there are plenty of people who believe that the constraint has had a negl i gi bl e effect on Soviet CW armament, and who may therefore come to deplore its influence, if they do not do so already. on Western programmes. In the Soviet Union, a 1ike view of Western CW armament may or may not have taken hold; but, if it has not, the recent adoption by NATO of its binary-munition force goal will have given pause for thought. The force goal refers to, and thereby reaffirms, the NATO policy noted above: the agreement arrived at within the alliance in 1967 as part of the flexible-response strategy that the NATO should maintain CW retaliatory capability as one means, albeit subsidiary to conventional and nuclear forces, for deterring WTO CW attack. 35 That reaffirmation has inserted the question of a 1 NATO chemical deterrent• into the current political agenda of the North Atlantic alliance as well as the agenda of its mi 1i tary authorities, a status which it has not had for many years. In view of the strong interest of the Reagan Administration

24

in moving ahead with modernization and expansion of US CW retaliatory forces, it is not at all inconceivable that this elevation of status will, through political-level action on such matters as forward deployment, chemical release procedures and the development of joint NATO CW-weapons employment doctrine, bring into existence a real 1 NATO chemical deterrent 1 , not just one that exists only on paper or under the sole control of one or two member states. The effect of this would be to entrench CW deterrence ideas more deeply in the West, and therefore to increase the influence of Various CW-weapons interests within the councils of state. eventualities may be projected from such a development. A relatively short-term one might be a modi fi cation of that 1967 NATO CW policy consensus whereby CW retaliatory capability was expressly upgraded from subsidiary to pri nc i pal deterrent of WTO CW. But for the CW no-firstuse policy, that would then place CW forces on the same footing as nuclear and conventional forces within NAT0 1 s overall flexible-response strategy; it would verge, in other words, on the addition of a fourth leg to the NATO 1 triad 1 (alongside conventional, non-strategy nuclear, and strategic nuclear forces). Under the influence of the currently emergent US air-land battle doctrines, which contemplate an integrated nuclear, chemical and conventional battlefield, the no-first-use policy might increasingly be called into question. For the time being, such developments appear most improbable (though not necessarily to Soviet eyes). They are constrained not least by those NATO member states, among them the Federa 1 Repub 1i c, whose CW policies exclude CW retaliatory capability and which would therefore be unable to join an alliance consensus on an upgraded status for such capability--unless their governments were prepared to endure the domestic political turmoil of changing the policies. A further constraint exists in those national policies which expressly exclude any basing of US CW weapons even in time of crisis or war: policies that have been adopted by the present governments of Denmark, Greece, Iceland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Norway, and by the parliament of Belgium. These are policies which amount to a virtual repudiation of even the 1967 NATO concept of CW deterrence. Upgrading the status of NATO CW retaliatory capability would, as a purely practical matter, require some integration of CW forces into the

25

Considered from this standpoint, the overall NATO military posture. issue may be detached from its immediate political environment and stated in more fundamental terms, ones that are as applicable to the WTO as they are to NATO. Any armed service must have less expectation of using CW weapons than it does of using other weapons not constrained by Its incentive to integrate CW weapons into no-first-use policies. posture and doctrine--to allocate resources to procurement and to training and other preparations for use of the weapons--is correspondingly weakened. Yet if those armed services that possess the weapons have not integrated them, their display of preparedness and resolve for the retaliation in kind whereby they are avowedly discouraging adversaries from resorting to CW may be unconvincing, in which case they can have no real confidence in their expectation of non-use. No-first-use policies thereby create a deep contradiction within national CW armament programmes: unintegrated, the weapons may not deter, in which case the expectation of non-use that impedes the·i r integration may prove fa 1se; but, integrated, they may deter, thereby validating the expectation. It is the actual mechanisms available for in-kind CW deterrence in a European war which makes this contradiction especially obtrusive. Given the anti-CW protective systems that are now available on both sides, it would seem that such deterrence can obtain only if the threat of retaliation in kind can be executed against targets whose importance and whose maximal vulnerability to CW attack may be transient; a requirement, in short, for full assimilation of the retaliatory capabilities into deployed forces. The practical effect of the contradiction is, inevitably, to generate conflicting pressures on national CW policy. Because the contradiction impedes the development of a CW preparedness in which confidence can be placed--because it perpetuates a mismatch between policy and posture, as, for example, in NATO's failure to implement fully its 1967 CW deterrence policy--there is pressure to resolve it one way or another. There are basic~lly two ways of doing so: either abandon the no-first-use policy which sustains the contradiction or abandon the armament: actively assimilate or actively de-assimilate CW weapons. It is the starkness of this choice which has made negotiated multilateral disarmament seem, in the field of CW, a policy objective more generally acceptable than it is in other fields of armament.

27

26

This analysis displays once again the danger of counterproductiveness in the present CW disarmament negotiations. For if the negotiations fail, one of the two routes out of the contradiction will then have been closed. Only the other will be left; in which case the Geneva Protocol regime may be doomed. Increasingly the CW disarmament negotiations are being seen in the outside world for what in fact they have always been: a search for ways of reducing the various costs, penalties and risks of CW disarmament to the point where it makes sense to trade away the security benefits of CW deterrence against those of co-operation in a new international regime. The virtue of a European CWFZ would be the dramatic effect it could have, if properly constituted, on the trading value of CW deterrence. By removing so much of the rationale for existing CW deterrents, it could make the CW disarmament regime seem an eminently attractive bargain--something which it would make much more sense for a country, even a superpower, to join than to spurn. Herein would lie that synergy between the CW disarmament negotiations and supplementary measures which it may be imperative to achieve if the motors of assimilation are not to destroy the negotiations altogether. It must be observed, however, that this conclusion begs an important question: could a European CWFZ that struck so deeply at the heart of CW deterrence in fact be negotiable, whether within or between governments? For example, if the Soviet Union does indeed value its CW

3

Statement by the Prime Minister of Peru at the 14th General Assembly of the Organization of American States, November 1984. See also the statement by the Peruvian representative to the Conference on Disarmament in plenary session on 25 June 1985 (CD/PV.315, p. 12).

4

Speech by General Secretary M. Gorbachev at a dinner in Moscow for M Gaddafi of Libya on 11 October 1985. Text in Soviet News (London), 16 Oct. 1985, p. 373.

5

Khan, K. A., 'Chemical warfare: the Asian testing grounds', Impact International (London), vol. 15, no. 19 (11 Oct 1985), pp. 1 14. -

6 See the present author's 'The special case of chemical and bio-logical weapons', Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, vol 31, no. 5 (May 1975), pp. 17-23; 1 Chemical arms control and the assimilation of chemical weapons', International Journal (Toronto), vol. 36, no. 3 (Summer 1981). pp. 515-34; 1 Chemical, biological and radiological warfare: futures from the past'. submission to the Palme Commission, September 1981; and 'Chemical weapons: the technical and military aspect', text of a lecture given at the University of Florence, 30 November 1985. 7

See, for example, the lecture given by Brigadier J. Hemsley at the Royal United Services Institute in London on 13 February 1986: 'The influence of technology upon Soviet operational doctrine', RUSI Journal, vol. 131 no. 2 (June 1986), pp. 21-28. --

8

For a discussion of the possible mechanisms of this inflation, see the present author's 'NATO chemical weapons policy and posture', ADIU Occasional Pa er (University of Sussex: Armament & Disarmament Information Unit no. 4, Sept. 1986, at pp. 13-16 and 31-32.

9

armament as safeguard against NATO deciding in secret to exploit, via binary-munition technology, its great civilian chemical industries, would not measures of nonproduction veri fi cation--reciprocal ones--have to be incorporated into the zone arrangements?

10 See the present author's 'The negotiations on chemical-warfare arms control', Arms Control (London), vol. 1, no. 1 (May 1980}, pp. 30-52. 11

Notes and references 12 1

2

The idea is implicit in para. 4 of Resolution XXXIV, Humanization of War, adopted on 21 December 1936 at the Inter-American Conference for the Maintenance of Peace held in Buenos Aires. Excerpts are to be found in SIPRI, The Problem of Chemical and Biological Warfare, vol. 2, p. 236~. Vachon, G. K., 'Chemical disarmament--a regional initiative?', Millennium: Journal of International Studies, vol. 8, no. 2 (Autumn 1979), pp. 145-54.

For a documented 1 i sting of these a 11 eged CW-possessor states, see the present author's 'Alternatives for Western policy on chemicalwarfare annament•, a paper presented at the August 1986 international conference of the Council on Christian Approaches to Defence and Disarmament •

13

See the present author's 'The CB weapons stipulations of the European post-World War II peace settlements' in SIPRI, The Problem of Chemical and Biological Warfare, vol. 5, pp 214-19. Statement of the Government of the German Democratic Republic to the Conference of the Committee on Disarmament, in document CCD/326 of 6 Apr. 1971. The French government says almost as little about French CW weapons as the Soviet government does about the Soviet ones. Indeed, French officials have several times, and with apparent honesty, made statements i ndi cati ng that France possesses no CW weapons at a 11 ; a consequence, on may think, of the low degree to which CW weapons have been assimilated into French posture and doctrine. For confirmation of the existence of French CW weapons, one must turn to official

29

28

statements by France's military allies. A recent one was contained in testimony given by the chief of staff of the US Army to the Congress on 25 February 1986: see Department of Defense Appropriations for 1987, hearings before a subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, House of Representatives, part 1, p 114. 14 Hamm, M. R., 'Deterrence, chemical warfare and arms control', Orbis, vol. 29, no. 1 (Spring 1985), pp. 119-63. 15 Todenhofer, J •• as quoted in a DPA wire-story from Bonn, 12 Aug. 1985, 1208 hrs GMT. 16 Bild (Hamburg), 10 June 1985,. p 4, '[Where the East Bloc produces po son gas]' (in German). 17 Bensch, G., '[C-weapons production in the GDR]'. Deutscher Ostdienst, 3 October 1985 (in German). 18 Journal of Defense & Diplomacy, voL 4, no. 6 (June 1986), p. 57. 19 Feldmeyer, K., '[The Warsaw Pact trains with live chemical munitions]', Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 19 Aug. 1985, pp. 1-2 ( i n Ge t'ma n ) • 20 Vielain, H., '[The GDR produces poison gas]', Die Welt am Son (Hamburg), 2 Mar. 1986, p. 1 (in German). 21 Toth, R. C., 'Germ, chemical arms reported proliferating',~ Angeles Times, 27 May 1986, p. 1. 22 Oberdorfer, D•• 'Chemical arms curbs are sought', Washington Post, 9 Sept. 1985, p. 1. 23 For a documented review of recent statements on CW-weapons policy by governments of NATO member states, see the publication by the present author cited in note 8 above. 24 See the present author's 'Chemical and biological warfare: developments in 1984', World Armaments and Disarmament: SIPRI Yearbook 1985, pp. 159-21 , p.

25 USA, Department of Defense, Defense Intelligence Agency, Directorate of Scientific and Technical Intelligence, report no DST-1620F-051-85, Soviet Chemical Weapons Threat 1985, released 28 October 1985. 26 Pincus, w., '2 agencies at odds on a Soviet threat'. Washington Post, 23 Jan. 1986, p. 19. 27 Stohr, R. and Woit, E., 'Die psychologische UnterstUtzung der chemi schen HochrUstung der USA' • l:!ll_Harwesen, 1984 no. 10, pp. 70-75. 28 See, for example, the June 1985 report of Pres·ident Reagan's Chemical Warfare Review Commission. 29 From what is known (via open US Defense Department sources) about the current worldwide stockpile mix of CW howitzer' munitions, one may estimate that the 435 tons of GB and VX nerve gases stored in the FRG are held in about 100,000 155-mm t'ounds and 15,000 8-in rounds. A written response from the Office of the Secretary of ~efense to a question submitted after a hearing by the Warner Subcomm1ttee of the Senate Armed Services Committee on 7 April 1983 stated that 40 C-141B sorties would be required to airlift 20,000 155-mm unitary nerve-gas rounds and 82 such sorties for the same number of 8-in rounds. Hence the figure of 260-odd Starlifter sorties given here. 30

31

32

33

What little is publicly known about the details the Kohl-Reagan agreement is reviewed in the publication cited in note 8 above at pages 39, 55, 69 and 77-81. See, for example, the US Navy testimony before the House Armed Services Committee on 21 March 1985: Hearings, Department of Defense Authorization of Appropriations for~Fiscal Year 1986, part 2, pp. 1105-6. . 'Chemical warfare arms control: a framework for considering pol icy alternatives', SIPRI Chemical & Biological Warfare Studies, no. 2 (1985), at pp. 109-16. USA, Department of Defense, Report to Congress on the United States Chemical Warfare Deterrence Program, ~arch 1982.

34 See pp. 49-52 of the publication cited in note 8 above. 35 See pp. 6-9 of the publication cited in note 8 above. 36

37

38

Statement of G. Stashevskiy (Deputy Chief of International Organizations, USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs) at a press conference in Moscow on 20 May 1986, as reported, via a TASS release of that date, in Arms Control Reporter, no. 6-86, p. 704.8.181. Donnelly, C. N., 'Heirs of Clausewitz: change and continuity in t~e Soviet war machine'. Institute for European Defence & Strateg1c Studies (London) Occasional Paper no. 16 (1985). See, for example, the editorial by F. Bonnart, 'Summit sacrifices', in NATO's Sixteen Nations, vol. 31, no. 4 (July 1986), p. 9.

OF CHEMICAL WEAPONS: CHEMICAL WEAPONS

R.

A REGIONAL

PRECURSOR FOR

Trapp, SIPRI

on This discussion wi 11 concentrate on the issue of a European chemical-weapon-free zone {CWFZ). There have been other regions proposed there are several factors as chemical-weapon-free zones. However, particular to Europe which require a specific treatment and which, simultaneously, make it legitimate to focus on this region rather than to discuss all of the thus far proposed regional arrangements. 1. Whereas for other regions the problem to be solved is mainly one of preventing proliferation of chemical weapons into the region, in Europe it is indeed one of eliminating chemical weapons. 2. In the European framework the two major military alliances are concerned. 3. The concept of a CWFZ has been elaborated in the greatest detail, for exactly this region of the world, in the Socialist Unity Party of Germany {SED) and the Social Democratic Party of Germany {SPD) outline of a treaty for a Central European CWFZ. 4. This outline was indeed an agreement between negotiating parties from the WTO and NATO {with both of them clearly remaining committed to their respective military alliances), albeit not on a governmental level. One can reasonably assume that both parties took full regard of the implications for the security of their countries and of their military alliances.

Chemical weapons and their implications for Europe The first question is not if the concept of a CWFZ is a good one, but rather if there is a need for it. Because, after all, negotiations to ban chemical weapons world-wide have been going on in the Geneva Conference on Disarmament {CD) for almost one and a half decades. This

31

32

convention would have the same effect for Europe as a CWFZ, only with more reliability. Proposing a CWFZ in Europe as a forerunner of the world-wide ban makes sense only if the comprehensive approach is assessed to be insufficient currently. The authors of all recent proposals for a CWFZ in Europe (i.e., the Palme Commission report, the proposal of the WTO to NATO of 1984 and the SED/SPD initiative of 1985) proceed from a clear link between the regional arrangement and current trends in the field of chemical-warfare preparations, the US binary programme in particular.1 The argument is made that there is an accelerating trend to assimilate chemical warfare into military options for the European region while the resuHs achieved in the Geneva Disarmament Conference tend to lag behind, and might well become obsolete. Indicators other than the decision to start the production of new (binary) chemical weapons became visible, for example, in the area of military doctrine.2 Analysis of the CWFZ concept would thus require looking at the following two questions: - Is there indeed an increasing assimilation of chemical-warfare options recognizable in Europe, together with a CD that falls short of being able to cope with this trend? - Would the regional approach be an appropriate answer? To answer these questions one has first to take a closer look at the present situation in Europe. This has been done in the previous chapter. What needs to be mentioned here is the following: 1. All states which have troops in the geographical area under consideration are parties to the 1925 Geneva Protocol.3 Some of the nations concerned reserve the right of retaliation. From a legal point of view, however, no party would be able to claim any legitimacy for initiating chemical warfare. Nevertheless, both alliances have been recorded as regarding Europe as the major area of concern when assessing the potential threat of future chemical warfare. 2. For the Warsaw Treaty Organization, there is a deep contradiction between Western assessments4 on the one side and Soviet declarations 5 on the other. Whereas Western analysis tends to assess the Soviet and WTO capabilities and intentions of waging chemical warfare as increasing more and more, the Soviet Union has, consistently over recent years, declared that it has never used any chemical or biological weapons, never transferred any of them to any other party and aims for the earliest possible ban on all chemical weapons. This

33

declaration does not address the possession of chemical weapons or the actual size of potential stocks which are regarded a military secret;6 it does not deny the capability for offensive chemical warfare either. However, it stands in sharp contrast to current standard Western assessments \>Jhich allege both Soviet forward deployment and use of chemical weapons. There are two aspects to take into account here, namely: that the Soviet policy statement was indeed given, not merely by a high official from either the Foreign Ministry or the Ministry of Defence, but by the very highest representative of the nation; and - that US and NATO assessments regarding the WTO or Soviet chemical-weapon capabilities are, when challenged, typically accompanied by acknowledgements of their relative unreliability. 3. With respect to NATO, the USA and France (see previous chapter for the latter) have stockpiles of chemical weapons in Europe.? Thus far, the US chemical weapons have not been formally declared to NATO and are not under the command of the Commander-in-Chief of US troops in Europe who, incidentally, is also NATO&s Supreme Allied Commander, Europe (SACEUR). With the recent (1986) decisions taken by NATO regarding a ~chemical deterrent& based upon the US binary programme, 8 NATO has taken a significant step in the process of assimilating chemical weapons. The possible consequences of applying deterrence theory to chemical weapons are discussed elsewhere in this volume.9 What is important here is the deployment question, perhaps the most crucial part of the NATO decision and highly controversial. Several NATO countries have rejected ~deployment of new chemical weapons on their soi1. 10 The only West European country where US chemical \'leapons are stored today, on the other hand, has not formally rejected this. The Government of the FRG stated after the Tokyo summit of Western heads of state that it had reached an agreement with the USA to the effect that:ll the currently stockpiled US chemical weapons in the FRG are to be withdrawn by 1992; and - the Government of the FRG would, in case of deployment of the new chemical weapons by the USA in time of crisis, be asked for formal adoption. This regime was established by the means of an exchange of notes between the foreign ministers and the heads of state of the two countries.12

35

34

It was also made public that the FRG would not be the only country in Western Europe to receive US chemical weapons in the event of crisis-deployment. The opposition party SPD has claimed, however, that the Pentagon regards these obligations rather vaguely, a situation which might be handled through the joint elaboration and adoption of a contigency plan for deployment in times of crisis.l3 This picture also seems to emerge from a recent White House statement to the US Congress after the But in any case the contingency plan had been adopted by NATo.l4 Government of the FRG (or, in fact, that of any other NATO country potentially asked to permit deployment} would find itself in a very sensitive situation should the US government ever ask for deployment of chemical weapons on its soil in the event of a crisis. It is hard to see how it could reject such a demand without taking the risk of appearing to undermine the solidarity of the Western military alliance. In any case, US chemica"l weapons would remain in the FRG until 1992, i.e., another 6 years. There is no assurance that, with the production of the new binary chemical weapons proceeding, the deployment issue might not be reconsidered. In effect, then, the track chosen by the USA and endorsed by its European allies produces a mechanism whereby in time of crisis chemical Western Europe. Chemical weapons might indeed be introduced into weapons would certainly be brought to Europe at the very outset of hostilities, because later on there would be a lot more material of higher priority to be transported via increasingly constrained logistic channels. There is no information yet about the contingency plan for binary \'Jeapon deployment, but it seems quite clear that the reasoning so far applied in the Pentagon consequently would require an early transfer. 15 4. Whatever the interpretations of the situation after the resumption of chemical-weapon production and of the arrangements to provide for deployment may be, however, one assertion is certain: The new chemical weapons are indeed planned for deployment in Europe. The history of the binary programme itself underlines this as one part of it was originally started to provide safer means of transportation of chemical weapons into the European theatre by the US Navy. (Remember the experience of chemical-weapon stocked warships during World War

II.16) Deployment would, according to SACEUR, be performed under operational considerations, i.e., close to the location of planned use, once the required political decision were taken.17 5. The practical consequences then would be an increase in practical preparations by NATO for offensive use of chemical weapons (the argument would be ~credibility~ of the deterrent). The Soviet Union and the WTO could hardly rely upon oral declarations that the Western alliance would only use these weapons in retaliation and would certainly answer with countermeasures, whatever those might in fact be

achieved thus far in Negotiations to eliminate the threat of chemical warfare have taken place since the end of the 1960s. The CD chemical-weapon committee currently has a full mandate to negotiate a draft treaty text. If these efforts could bring about an agreement soon this would certainly solve the problem characterized above. What is the current situation with this treaty?18 The typical assessment is that the negotiations in the chemical-weapon committee are the only part of the Conference on Disarmament which might be characterized as genuine negotiations. The magnificent work during recent chemical committee has indeed done years. Still, a lot of text in its annual reports continues to stand in brackets, thereby indicating disagreement. Is it, then, mainly a problem of enhancing the efforts in the negotiations so that an agreement may eventually be achieved? In other words, would ~businesslike~ negotiations produce a treaty? While room may still be left for improvments, there is one particular element which can be identified as completely controversial: the demand for inspections under an ~open invitation~ provision in the US draft convention CD/500. This element of the US draft convention is considered by its authors to be an essential requirement of the draft in its entirety .19 There have been _changes in the 1a nguage whereby the USA responded to the argument that this procedure would, in effect, set discriminatory procedures upon the chemical industries of those countries which have a nationalized economy.20 But the concept per se has been retained.

37 36

The

open

invitation21

is,

in

effect,

a provision which would

delegate a powerful capacity for interference in the internal affairs of a State Party to individual representatives of some parties, including both the USA and the USSR. The area of potential interference would comprise literally

all military and civilian chemical-industry

facilities of a country. Thus, this provision has given rise to suspicions about potential misuse for ~purposes not connected with the treaty~. i.e., esp"ionage. After all, a Chemical Weapons Convention would not make military secrecy illegitimate. It is also necessary here to recall the results of the Soviet-US 22 bilateral talks on chemical weapons in the late 1970s vJhich were highly regarded by both parties. At that time, however, the US delegation made it known that there were several mandatory on-site international procedures upon which it would insist. Another demand was the mandatory nature, in principle, of the challenge procedure. With the exception of the latter, all the demanded concessions were assented to by the USSR in a step-by-step process. 23 From the Soviet point of view, this means that the status quo originally reached in the bilateral talks was thus improved through Soviet steps, by taking into account the positions originally held by the USA. However, from the same perspective, the demand for an open-invitation procedure must be assessed as a departure from this status quo. Logically, the Soviet delegation vehemently rejected this discriminatory and unnecessary. This

demand as unacceptable, position has been reiterated

several times since.24 This, in effect, presents a dilemma:

Either the US Administration

will have to abandon the concept of the open invitation (which is not achieved by alterations of language), or the Soviet Union will have to accept a principle which obviously contradicts one of her very fundamental ways of approaching international relations. As long as the present situation continues, there is If the production of US (binary) chemical situation can only worsen. It has been that, contrary to the often-repeated impact of the eventual negotiations would

no compromise within reach. weapons is indeed begun, this publicly stated several times bargaining-chip concept, the

start of production on the

indeed be negative.25

climate

in

the

The concept of a regional approach to constrain chemical

warfare, by

establishing a chemical-weapon-free zone, has been presented as an attempt to overcome this dilemma. Such a zone would have to meet certain requirements if it were indeed to be a cure for the disease: -It would have to be simple to establish and able to cope with rapid developments in the military area. - It vJOul d have to produce suffi ci entl y significant effects to indeed enhance trust and make chemical warfare in Europe more unlikely. That a CWFZ can be regarded as meeting the first requirement has been indicated by the Palme Commission~s inclusion of this step as one of the short-term measures to be realized within 2 years. Why, and how, this might be possible has been explained in some more detail in the WTO proposal to NATO of 1984 and in statements by participants in the SED/SPD expert discussions. The following arguments have been presented: 1. The CWFZ would involve fewer states than are involved in the CD negotiations on a world-wide ban. 2. It could be made operational in a step-by-step process. 3. Negotiations to establish a CWFZ could make use of the achievements gained so far in the CD negotiations. 4. However, many of the rather complicated technical

problems not

the CWFZ negotiations, solved so far might be excluded from because of its rather limited scope. 5. It was indicated that, although a treaty-like character of a CWFZ agreement would be the best possible outcome, establishing the zone via (multilateral or several unilateral) declarations would make it possible to bypass some of the intricate issues of a technical character. 6. A regional step would be easier to verify. Some of these arguments have be~n challenged seriously which makes detailed discussion of them necessary ..

39

38

Easier to establish? As an attempt with forerunner character, the CWFZ approach could and, indeed, would have to make use of minimum requirements. This would be in regard both to geographical coverage and to the scope of the agreement. Both limitations would have an impact on the ease with which an agreement could be concluded. 1. Geographical coverage The SED/SPD agreement foresaw two different pos s i bil i ties for geographical coverage, one identical to the reduction area agreed under the Vienna Mutual and Balanced Force Reductions (MBFR) talks, the other one, which was seen to be the essential minimum, to be comprised of the two German states and Czechoslovakia. It has been argued that a European CWFZ should best cover the whole of Europe. 26 Although this would indeed be a highly regarded achievement, certain arguments must be considered. a. The agreement would be, by its very nature, an urgent forerunner of a world-wide regime. The fundamental approach would be to identify the minimum requirements and to use them as a guide for defining scope and coverage. b. A number of the reasons which underlie the agreement between the WTO and NATO regarding the regional extension of measures in Vienna would also be valid for the CWFZ approach. But there are also additional reasons: Going beyond the proposed area would mean including France and the Soviet Union within the zone. This could create a complicated situation for the zone. Many of the issues VJhich a Central European zone could legitimately bypass, and leave to the ultimate world-wide regime, would have to be solved in the case of a zone comprising the whole of Europe. c. For defining the minimum requirements it has to be appreciated that chemical weapons are, by their very nature, tactical weapons. This makes it indeed possible to construct a rather limited zone as a first step and still achieve a measurable impact upon the security of the states in the zone.

Negotiations on a European CWFZ would thus soon boil down to talks between countries from the two alliances alone. In the context of an extended CWFZ, certain non-aligned nations might become involved, but the major problems would indeed arise from the WTO-NATO perspective. It has been argued then, that the experience of the Vienna MBFR negotiations would indicate rather complicated and lengthy negotiations. There is, however, a significant difference to be taken into account: Whereas a CWFZ would be a limited undertaking when compared to a vJOrld-wide chemical-weapon ban, it would be a rather comprehensive step when compared to other confidence-building measures or reductions--it would indeed mean the complete eliminat·ion of a whole weapon category from a certain area. Many of the controversial problems such as the ~numbers question~ and verification are considerably simpler in case of reductions to zero, where simple yes-no questions appear. Also recently begun consultations at the margin of the Geneva CD negotiations between delegations from the GDR, FRG and Czechoslovakia illustrate possible ways of setting up such discussions, in an environment which could additionally make use of the presence of chemica 1-weapon experts with the necessary background regarding the world-wide regime.27 2. Limitation in scope Coming to an agreement on a European CWFZ would allow the exclusion of a good many problems which exist outside the zone context: the destruction of chemical weapons vs. their withdrawal; the implications of a chemical-weapon treaty and its verification for countries such as, for example, Japan (highly developed countries outside the proposed zone with a sophisticated chemical or pharmaceutical industry) and for the chemical industries of developing countries; or the problem of multinational chemical companies p,roducing in countries which do not become States Parties of the convention. The SED/SPD document used the same approach of defining minimum requirements. This leads to regulations:

40

41

- to withdraw the chemical weapons deployed in the zone {to be done in such a way that the weapons are not transferred to non-possessor states attached to the zone--in other words, the vJeapons would have to be moved back far enough, namely to US or Soviet territory); - to keep the zone free of chemical weapons permanently thereafter {prohibition of redeployment and transfer); and

A third phase may also be identified--that of providing an opportunity for other states to join the agreement, thereby letting the zone gradually grow. What is important in the course of our discussion here is a

- to not produce chemical weapons by the zone states.

consideration: L The area which would be placed under surveillance is rather limited. At the same time, this is an area which is routinely and closely monitored by both alliances.30 In particular, the tv10 German states are under constant aerial and ground surveillance, facilitated by the peculiar situation which originated after the

within the zone, or to acquire them

The SED/SPD document provides for a combination of obligations to be assumed by the zone states and provides for guarantees to be given them by the possessors of chemical weapons, namely by those states which deploy mi 1i tary forces in the area. Opponents have quickly identified one particular problem which, in their consideration, challenges this approach: that of non-production.28 This might be a crucial argument, for verification of non-production of chemical weapons is typically assessed as one of the most complicated single items on the CD table, and although progress has been made in the last two years, no final agreement has been reached.29 Further, this verification task is included in the ~open invitation~ demand. The question of non-production was treated as of rather secondary priority by the two political parties. This would, however, only remain legitimate if there were reasons which would allow consideration of the non-production issue in a slightly different way within the zone context, as compared to the world-wide regime. This would indeed be the case because chemical weapons would continue to exist in the arsenals of both alliances, outside the zone. This would, in effect, act as a safeguard against illegal chemical-weapon production in the zone.

Easier to verify? The joint document identifies two phases for the zonal arrangement: withdrawal and the continued absence of chemical weapons. Obviously, this was because both phases would require different approaches for, e.g., verification. The major task in the first phase would be to declare and identify chemical-weapon depots and to clear them of chemical weapons; the second phase would have to concentrate on transfer and non-production problems.

comparison of the verification requirements of the world-wide treaty and of the regional regime. There are two limitations to be taken into

Second World War. 2. The scope of a regional step would be rather limited as compared with a world-wide ban. The compliance-assurance mechanism proposed in the joint outline begins with the individual nation which would have to provide for implementation and; in cases of suspicion, an international commission If would be called upon. A complaint would have to substantiated. after a defined period of time the reason for complaint were not removed, the international commission would start an on-site investigation. The joint document did not specify the details of this procedure but indicated that these would have to be subject to {governmental) negotiations. This concept has been very much influenced by the experience of the SALT Standing Consultative Committee.31 In the first phase, the potentially most crucial issue would be the declaration of chemical-weapon depots. These are of limited number in the region and reveal certain peculiarities which might facilitate verification by national-technical means. Some ambiguous cases might remain, but in those instances the on-challenge procedure could be applied. However, in the case of the central tri-state zone only, the publicly available estimates about the number of depots for chemical weapons are not at all consistent, and in some cases deeply contradictory official statements have been given by these states.32 This could potentially produce considerable pressure on a verification sys tern {in the event of any agreement, be it zona 1 or wor 1d-wi de). States Parties waul d have to take crucial decisions as to how far

43

42

requests for on-site inspections should be exploited without becoming provocative in nature for the adversary, while keeping in mind the rather poor reliability of most information on the chemical-warfare capabilities of other nations. This part of the discussion leads in effect to a rather general mandatory on-site A remark on the issue of on-site inspections: inspection would, in practice, not eliminate the capability of a nation to exclude international procedures from its soil. Whatever the

information and advice. 34 An international-inspection team, however well qualified its members might be, would, vJithout this co-operation and

advice, simply be lost in a modern, complex facility. There is only one way out: co-operative behaviour on all

sides.

Demands on the verification system would have to be reasonable and not exploited for ~purposes not non-provocative in nature (i.e., connected with the agreement~). Reactions would have to be co-operative, but could only be

so if all sides were convinced that the

conclusion of other countries might be in such a case, there would be no possibility to force this procedure upon the state. If a state were inspection, the international to refuse an international on-site personnel would simply not be able to enter the country.

verification apparatus were not being misused. peculiarities Given the above-mentioned

This highlights an inherent contradiction in the demand for mandatory i nterna ti onal on-site procedures: That concept proceeds from the assumption that a country might indeed attempt to violate a treaty obligation while simultaneously assuming that the same country would

area of the proposed zone (mainly on the territories of the two German states), the proposed on-challenge procedure seems highly adequate. The second phase requires different considerations. There would be two distinct obligations to be verified, namely the non-production and

then stick to the verification obligation under that party were indeed to violate the Convention (and substantial obligation), it is hard to see how it would verification provision of the same treaty. .8. variation

treaty. If a by breaking a later respect a of the concept

the non-acquisition of chemical weapons by the zone states and the non-reintroduction of chemical weapons into the zone. Non-production verification is indeed a rather complex task and involves a good many problems. These were analysed in an earlier

acknovJledges this and assumes that a rejection of an on-site visit would prove, or at least make highly probable, that the challenged state had indeed violated its treaty commitments. However, other possible scenarios exist. There can be no guarantee that all requests

volume of this series in the context of a world-wide treaty. The on-challenge procedure foreseen in the treaty outline may be seen, as recorded in certain assessments in the CD, 35 to be an i nsuffi ci ent solution. But even if this were really true in the context of the

for on-site inspections would be honest requests. In other words, an international on-site regime, on challenge, would have to balance between 2 opposing suspicions: one of potential treaty violations and

final comprehensive ban, a CHFZ could handle it in a somewhat less perfect way. The major concern of certain CD delegations seems to be

one

of

potential gathering. 33

misuse

of

treaty

procedures

for

intelligence

A demand for an on-challenge, on-site inspection constitutes, after all, by its very nature a confrontation between the two parties involved because it records an allegation of a treaty violation. Such an instrument would have to be handled rather cautiously. On the other hand, the efficiency of an on-site inspection for verification purposes is often overestimated. A deeper analysis would reveal that any reasonable international on-site procedure could only be effective in cases where the personnel of the inspected facility were wi 11 i ng to co-operate and provide the inspection team with essential

special-ammunition depots, and given routine-surveillance activities, which are

of

chemical-weapon

the peculiarities of carried out anyv1ay in the

their desire to create a monitoring framework that would make potential treaty violations more complicated (~to create obstacles'), In this would not be very credible because both the regi ona 1 context military alliances would still possess their original chemical-~'leapon stocks. The real problem to consider would not be the initiation of chemical-weapon production in the zone itself but redeployment into the region. To keep to the above m~taphor, putting the emphasis on the non-production issue would mean creating an obstacle upon a road which would rarely be travelled. Furthermore, the most critical issue in verification of non-production is typically asserted to be that concerning facilities on Soviet and US territories, which would be excluded from any

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consideration within the zone context. In other words, even if the controversy about the legitimacy of the open-invitation demand were to

- the chances of reaching agreement in the CD; and - the impact of developments in the field of chemical

persist, a CWFZ could be established in Europe. Transfer, then, seems the crucial problem. This is also what 36 But as 1ong as emerges from some comments made by NATO offici a 1s. chemical weapons remain in the category of special ammunition,37 a

Sharing the point of view of the first assessment means assuming that the CD negotiations are not deadlocked and that mutually acceptable

challenge procedure, perhaps combined with earlier proposals regarding the establishment of permanently staffed monitoring posts at the

armaments (i.e., that the start of production of binary chemical weapons in the USA will promote serious negotiations and ultimately shorten the time needed to reach this agreement).42

margins of the region, should indeed suffice. Because, first, the transports (if there were the hypothetical case of reintroduction on any militarily significant scale) v1ould reveal certain peculiar conditions and procedures not typical for other military transportation; and second, the final destinations of these hypothetical transports would be indicative of the nature of the material being transported. It would indeed be highly visible if chemical weapons were to be redeployed in any militarily significant quantity, and in such periods of time as to allow for surprise (which would be essential for achieving any meaningful advantage).38 This situation would, in effect, ease considerably the need for surveillance by national means. The above concern would, on the other hand, also have to be appreciated in the case of a world-wide regime, insofar as it is commonly acknowledged today that stockpiles of chemical weapons v/ould still remain in military arsenals for a after the Convention went into force.39

considerable period of time Thus the transfer problem is

nothing unique for the regional approach alone. As commonly accepted, 100 per cent assurance will

neither be

possible nor necessary through verification measures, and ~adequacy~ would depend, among other concerns, on the probability to detect militarily significant violations as well as the of an undetected violation.40 Implications of a CWFZ for

potential consequences

the prospects of a

world-wide ban on

chemical weapons

There are two opposite assessments as to how the establishment of a CWFZ would affect the conclusion of the world-wide ban on chemical weapons, namely that it would either delay this treaty by diversion of efforts41 or promote its materialization by the building up of trust. The assessments rest on different assumptions on:

armaments.

formulas can be achieved by concentrated negotiations. It further means that one accepts the bargaining-chip concept as applied to chemical

Sharing the view of the second assessment means sharing the assumption that the negotiations in Geneva are, although progressing, effectively deadlocked at the moment (in other words, would require some principal alteration in the position of one side). (That is indeed what this analysis has concluded.) This view also requires appreciating that a resumption of chemical vJeapon production would worsen the political climate sufficien~y to produce a strong negative impact on the negotiations in the CD If recent experience is of any relevance here, this is exactly what has been the case, and the Soviet Union is repeatedly on record as saying that a new race for chemical weapons would seriously damage the climate which is essential to the creation of the world-wide ban.43 This points to the conclusion that a regional arrangement would, from a political perspective, facilitate rather than delay the ultimate accomplishment in Geneva. The establishment of the regional regime could also be regarded as a field test for the world-wide treaty.44 It could, under limited conditions with respect to area coverage, number of countries and obligations to be taken and verified, help to clarify some of the still controversial issues which the CD delegations face. One would have to take the character of a zonal approach into account, but with all its inherent limitations, it would indeed produce some practical experience. There would be still another effect on the CD talks, and one is keen to assert that this might well be the most significant. That effect would be one of building confidence, not in the sense of a CBM in its military meaning (an aspect which will be considered later) but in the political sense. What is meant here is best illustrated by looking at the approach currently chosen by NATO. An argument has been made that, by the decision to withdraw the US chemical-weapon

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stocks from the FRG by 1992 and to avoid peacetime deployment in Western Europe of the new chemical weapons to be produced under the initiated binary programme, NATO would establish unilaterally a de facto chemical-weapon-free zone in Western Europe. However, NATO will do so

enhancement of their security by their own attempts to ban chemical weapons on a regional scale. Thus, the emergence of non-European CWFZ proposals might be no surprise. The creation of a European CWFZ might, in a political sense, indeed

while simultaneously establishing mechanisms, capabilities and plans, on the political as well as the military level, for a routine deployment of these weapons under operation a 1 cons i dera ti ons, in the event of a crisis. And it vJill certainly be these practical measures which will attract the attention of the WTO and the Soviet Union when analysing the implications of the change in NATO~s posture. In other words, it is

constitute

an

example

for

constraining

offensive

chemical-warfare

options, thereby contributing to a climate which would tend to inhibit chemical-weapon proliferation. Another concern regards the fear that the major powers and their allies, by getting chemical weapons into a more controllable regime, might actually attempt to keep an offensive chemical option open for potential use in a conflict in the Third World. This argument derives its merits from the fact that chemical weapons have, indeed, been used

almost cErtain that suspicions regarding the intention to indeed use these weapons in Europe will increase. The establishment of a genuine (i.e., mutually agreed and verified) Central European CWFZ would have the opposite effect. If established in a verifiable fashion, a CWFZ

in these regions and were most successful (some would argue only) in conflicts betweeen parties with unequal technical sophistication.

would tend to increase confidence that the opposing side is indeed willing to forgo an offensive chemical-warfare option.

To present a true picture of the situation, such a potential danger should not be neglected, though this analysis does not attempt to assess

The implications of a CWFZ for chemical-weapon proliferation Another argument which has frequently been aimed against the

the probability of such an occurrence. It is, however, highly appropriate for the countries of the Third World to claim a strong interest in the swift establishment of a world-wide regime against chemical weapons, and they would have to be re-assured about the

regions. Proliferation is indeed a crucial problem, as the use of

seriousness of attempts to proceed from the European precursor to the world-wide regime. They could, in the event they should decide to keep their geographical region free of chemical weapons, claim a legitimate right to be given international guarantees that chemical weapons would not be used against them.

regional approach is that the zone might contribute to CW proliferation.4 5 There are, indeed, two different concerns to be taken into account, that of chemical proliferation to countries outside the WTO-NATO context, and that of the danger of chemicals being used against these chemical

weapons in the conflict between Iran and Iraq has demonstrated. The argument boils down to an assessment of the effect a European CWFZ would have on the world-wide treaty, namely would it delay (or even substitute for) or promote its ultimc.te conclusion. In this analysis, it is viewed as a tentative precursor. Though it is acknowledged that a zone approach might require considerable efforts to be negotiated and set into life, this does not necessarily mean a delay for the world-wide regime. This analysis has come to the opposite conclusion. But even if this conclusion is not shared, one must appreciate that waiting for the world-~'lide treaty means waiting until an agreement emerges between the USSR and the USA, a process outside the control of the nations concerned with proliferation into their own geographic regions.

Perhaps an appropriate approach

for

them would

be

the

Validity of a step-by-step approach to the banning of chemical weapons A recent example shows that, provided the determination is sufficiently strong on both sides, a step-by-step approach to the eventual banning of chemical weapons can be considered an appropriate accompaniment to the CD negotiations. Based upon the, same type of assessment as the one illustrated above, namely that lack of progress in Geneva has tended to result in military consequences, both the Soviet Union and the USA have come to regard the stop of the proliferation of chemical weapons Although both countries had originally as urgent and crucial. approached the problem in different ways (the USSR by proposing an equivalent to the NPT, 46 and the USA by favouring the approach of export

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48

controls of chemicals47), it was possible to reach a common understanding rather quickly and to proceed with discussions on what might be interpreted as a mutual attempt to immediately solve one of the problems in constraining chemical weapons on a limited level. The lesson for the CWFZ issue is that a step-by-step approach is indeed regarded as appropriate, provided that: - there is a common understanding that the problem is urgent; - it would serve the security interests of the parties concerned; - waiting for the CW Convention to come about would create the risk of losing control over the process; and - proceeding with the step-by-step approach would indeed result in a tentative solution. There is yet another relevant precedent. That is the example of the Biological Weapons (BW) Convention of 1972 which received, to some extent. the same criticism (namely that it would delay a ban on chemical weapons indefinitely). Some might point to history arguing that this concern had, perhaps, some validity. However, that the CW Convention has not been realized cannot be blamed on the establishment of the BW Convention.48 The alternative would have been a situation without~ constraints at all, and it can hardly be seen how, in this alternative scenario, a ban on chemical (and biological) weapons would have been achieved

more quickly.

security There is a widely held view in the West as to what the result of the establishment of such a zone would be. For example, NATO~s Supreme Allied Commander, Europe (SACEUR), General Rogers, has stated that a CWFZ would, in his opinion, create an ~illusion of security~. 49 The argument rests on two assumptions: -that chemical weapons would, in the event of hostilities, indeed quickly be reintroduced (and, additionally, that the WTO would enjoy a geostrategic advantage); and - that chemical weapons could still be used against targets after its establishment.

in the zone

The problem of reintroduction Redeployment in times of crisis or conflict would be prohibited. One must admit, however, that the capability for doing so could not be excluded by such an agreement and neither could the use of chemical weapons against the zone. But for a number of reasons both seem quite improbable. The legal constraint against doing so would be one significant reason, as the experience with the 1925 Geneva Protocol and the non-use of chemical weapons during World t•Jar II strongly suggest. The same experience, as detailed from newly available historical material in an earlier publication in this series, 50 also underlines that there were (at least in one particular country) other reasons. including critical military considerations which tended to reinforce this reluctance.51 In light of the improvements in chemical defensive equipment and the current level of chemical protection for troops, and modern because of the severe consequences any chemical war with chemical-warfare (CW) agents would have in the densely populated European area, there would be no convincing military rationale for unilateral reintroduction of chemical weapons ·into the zone. But even if one side should gather information which would, righ~y or wrongly, suggest that the other side planned to introduce and use chemical need not necessarily be the assumption of an weapons, the reaction offensive chemical-weapon counter-posture. 52 As far as the geostrategic advantage for the Warsaw Treaty Organization is concerned, one would have to measure this argument against current capabilities to transport material and troops, in a short period of time, from the USA to Europe. Such an appraisal demonstrates that the advantage would be rather marginal. If this were not the case, the USA could hardly consider seriously options such as production without peacetime deployment for binary ammunition. There is, however, another important factor to be considered, namely the possibility of deploying chemical weapons on naval vessels designated to the European theatre~53 This possibility was ignored by the SED/SPD initiative, probably because it raises a lot of problems which are hardly solvable within the zone context.54 Verification would be only one, perhaps not even the most crucial. difficulty. Maritime deployment would indeed be an option which is not ruled out by the regional arrangement. This study does not attempt to assess the probability of this occurrence but even if it were to take place,

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50

it would still mean a withdrawal of chemical weapons from the densely populated Central European region. This would not exclude the potential use of these weapons against the zone, which leads to the next argument which is often used to challenge the zone approach. The problem of chemical-weapon use against the zone is at the core of The problem of chemical-weapon use against the zone the Roger~s argument about an %illusion of security~ and has often been repeated by NATO officials.55 As with much of the discussion on %chemical deterrence~, this argument is borrowed from nuclear-deterrence theory. It tends, however, to ignore the nature of chemical weapons and of their delivery systems, and/or the overall military capabilities and options available to the two alliances. In the nuclear age, a categorization of chemical weapons as strategic is simply unrealistic. They are by their very nature tactical weapons. The current US binary programme is comprised of artillery, rocket artillery (multiple-launch rocket system--MLRS) and tactical bombers. And though recent US intelligence reports56 bomber systems are concluded that Soviet medium-range missile and capable of delivering chemical warheads, this does not mean they would indeed be relevant military options in terms of weapons utility and effect. As tactical weapons, then, their removal from a sufficiently large area dividing the two alliances would indeed, as claimed, reduce the probability of these weapons being used against the zone states. Their reintroduction, on the other hand, would be highly visib1e if it were to happen in any militarily sifgnificant dimension. In effect, then, a CWFZ would be a pragmatic approach with limited but not negligable military significance. Its nature would be that of a confidence-building measure. In terms of military effect and significance, there are distinct differences between establishing a zone free of chemical or ·nuclear weapons (although, of course, both are weapons of mass destruction). First, the establishment of a zone free of nuclear weapons would raise the threshold for their use by diminishing the chance of their becoming involved in uncontrollable circumstances during hostilities. But the option to use them in a European conflict would not be eliminated, due

to the strategic character of these weapons. Second, one alliance regards nuclear weapons as the major deterrent against the outbreak of war and rejects a no-first-use policy. The establishment of a nuclear-weapon-free corridor or zone would then require certain simultaneous steps in the conventional field. This would not apply in the case of chemical weapons, which have no decisive function in the overall balance of force in Europe and for \'Jhich a no-first-use policy has been adopted by all nations concerned. zone

If the states concerned were all determined to agree on such a zone, it could be established rather quickly. However, several NATO countries, and specifically the USA and the FRG, are on record as either rejecting the zone approach altogether or as regarding it to be an unnecessary step which would divert efforts from the CD negotiations. It is, however, "interesting to note that although this reluctance exists, trilateral GDR-CSSR-FRG consultat"ions have been started the two socialist parallel to the CD. The declared intention of countries was to discuss a regional measure, whereas the FRG proposed consultations on certain unresolved questions related to a ban on chemical weapons (which would have to be resolved in any regime, be it regional or world-wide).57 And even though the FRG thereby escaped any commitment to negotiate the zone proposal, it has also thus far escaped a formal rejection. The mere fact that consultations are taking place between just those countries which are regarded as forming the focal point for the European CWFZ is a political signal in itself. This is not to say that such was indeed the intention of the Government of the FRG (according to public record it was not), it is only to indicate that the concept has sufficient support so as not to be ignored or rejected out of hand. Another factor to consider is the remarkable impact the SED/SPD initiative has had upon the politic~l debate in Western Europe. Together with the prompt reactions to the US decision to resume production of chemical weapons, it illustrated a growing awareness of the dangers of future chemical war and an increasing reluctance in some NATO countries to support the trend of further assimilation of chemical weapons. The military situation in Europe is sufficiently complicated even without chemical weapons, and besides (rather academic) deterrence arguments, no

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one has thus far produced any convincing mi 1 ita ry reason for them. Establishing a European CWFZ would certainly not be the ultimate

were not yet begun, a Chemical Weapons Convention could be finalized rather quickly, say in one or two years. The situation regarding the

solution but would result in a much more comfortable situation for Europe as compared to the one which currently appears to be emerging.

future of chemical warfare is in flux today, and though it is impossible to predict what will emerge, a changed scenario cannot be ignored

The question to answer is which approach would be more beneficial

either. Would this, then, mean that efforts for a European initiative would

for the security of the states concerned.

It is often

claimed that the If this were

become a waste of energy? One should keep in mind that under the projected Chemical Weapons Convention, chemical-weapon arsenals would

However, if recent

continue to exist for a considerable period of time, and ultimately

experience is

any guide, the choice might well be between a chemical ~double track~ approach (with great uncertainity as to when, if ever,

would be destroyed some 10 years after the entry into force of the

the arms control component would achieve results but

with a high chance

Convention. In other words, chemical weapons would not immediately be destroyed, and the Convention 1t1ould be implemented in a step-by-step

that the new chemical weapons would ultimately be deployed in Western Europe) and a step which would create a more controllable situation

process. One of the most appropriate such initial steps would be the removal of chemical weapons from the vicinity of tile d