Essay: THE DILEMMA OF CHEMICAL WARFARE

THE dark side of progress is man’s spectacular skill at devising better and better ways to kill other men. The nuclear bomb, unfortunately, is not the end of it. There is also chemical and biological warfare, known as CBW, a fount of doomsday weapons that the U.S. and Russia have been rapidly developing. Until recently, the docility of Congress toward Pentagon planning forestalled any real review of the hush-hush CBW program with its secret appropriations. Now, prompted by press reports and rumors, emboldened by the general concern over U.S. military policy, congressional investigators are demanding answers from the Pentagon. Why, in the nuclear age, does the U.S. also need chemical and biological weapons? How much is enough?

In part, the issue was forced into the open by the Army’s plans to send approximately 809 carloads of obsolete poison gas cross-country for disposal in the Atlantic Ocean. After a public outcry, congressional critics succeeded in halting the shipment, pending a study of alternative means of destroying or detoxifying the agent. While the immediate concern is the danger of transporting a deadly commodity by rail at a time when freight derailings are on the increase, the incident served to dramatize far more basic doubts about chemical and biological weapons. Last week President Nixon ordered a thorough review of the program by the State Department, Defense Department and Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.

Chemical and biological warfare has had a long and lethal history in the U.S. In 1763, General Jeffrey Amherst, the British troop commander in the colonies, sent smallpox-infected blankets to the Indians. During the Civil War, both sides poisoned wells, a tactic almost as old as war itself. American doughboys were sprayed with poison gas by the Germans in World War I—and sprayed them right back. Since then, even during the mass killings in World War II, the U.S. has never used deadly CBW weapons except for incendiaries. Even so, experimentation and stockpiling have continued apace. The U.S. is spending at least $350 million this year on the CBW program, seven times its budget of the 1950s.

Anthrax on the Shelf

In recent months, the nature of the arcane arsenal’s components has gradually been revealed. In the chemical-warfare category, one of the most lethal gases is Sarin (GB), which in heavy vapor doses attacks the victim’s nervous system and reduces him to a convulsive mass before death occurs. Fifteen years ago, the commanding officer of the Army’s Rocky Mountain Arsenal estimated that a single drop of the nerve gas in liquid form on the back of a man’s hand could kill him in 30 seconds. Sarin has been improved since then. The Army also stocks mustard gas, a blistering agent that burns the skin and was widely used in World War I, plus such familiar riot-control agents as vomit gases, tear gas and its stronger version, CS. Also kept on hand for experimentation are small quantities of incapacitating gases designed to interfere temporarily with mental processes but not to kill.

In its major biological-warfare center at Fort Detrick, Md., the Army is experimenting with diseases that include undulant fever, coccidioidomycosis (a fungus infection), Rocky Mountain spotted fever and various strains of encephalitis, botulism, cholera, glanders and pneumonic plague. The major biological agents that the Army “keeps on the shelf” ready for use are anthrax, Q-fever, tularemia (rabbit fever) and psittacosis (parrot fever). Stored in sod-covered, concrete “igloos” at the Army’s Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas, they are kept in constant cy cles of development, production, storage, elimination and replacement. The quantities now on hand are said to be modest, but the Army has ample resources for fast mass production whenever the need arises.

Several of the Army’s six major CBW installations have almost pastoral settings where game abounds and Boy Scouts come to camp and hike. The serene surroundings belie the research being conducted at these sites. At Fort Detrick, diseases are developed in laboratories with long stainless-steel and sealed-glass cabinets, many bearing stenciled nicknames like “African Queen” and “Tribulation Row.” Fertilized eggs enter the labs in compartmented trays and move through the cabinets on conveyor belts. As they pass, the eggs are infected by lab technicians working through the cabinet walls with heavy rubber gloves and hypodermic needles. Sample eggs are then candled to determine whether the agent is properly infecting the embryos. After a brief stay in incubators, the eggs are broken, and the toxic product is separated from the embryo and put into a centrifuge to eliminate impurities. Some of the processed material is used for test purposes. The remainder is frozen into pellets and hermetically sealed in containers for shipment. In other areas of Fort Detrick, animals and human volunteers (prison inmates and conscientious objectors) are used to test the efficacy of the plant’s products.

Strangelovian Virtues

From a purely military standpoint, chemical and biological weapons have unique capabilities. They can be dispersed locally by hand grenades and land mines, or over broad areas with artillery shells, mortar rounds, bombs, airborne aerosols or even missiles like the Army’s Sergeant. They constitute great offensive power that can be produced at relatively low cost. They are “search” weapons that seek out the enemy, even in his deepest bunkers, without destroying buildings or installations. In addition to those designed to kill, some agents can be used merely to disable.

Aside from these Strangelovian virtues, the weapons present a major problem of control. A 1968 test of nerve gas at the gigantic Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah went awry when an airborne aerosol device failed to shut off, and winds spread the deadly agent some 30 miles past the target area, killing 6,000 sheep. Germs may be so potent and long-lasting as to threaten indefinite overkill. During World War II, the British infected Gruinard Island in the North Atlantic to test anthrax, an often fatal disease. The anthrax spores remain virulent to this day; experts say that the island is still uninhabitable, and will probably remain so for 100 years. Controlling germs and gases even inside laboratories and plants can prove difficult. Even so, the overall safety records of such facilities far surpass those of civilian industries and highways. In 26 years of biological experimentation at Fort Detrick, there have been 420 accidental infections, resulting in only three deaths.

The Pentagon’s chief rationale for the CBW program is that the Russians are heavily engaged in the same thing—probably more so than the U.S.—and that the U.S. cannot allow a gas and pestilence gap to develop. Says Dr. John S. Foster Jr., the Pentagon’s director of research and engineering: “There are technical uncertainties about the effects of biological weapons, but this does not reduce the vulnerability of the U.S. to them. Until such time as it can be proved that they are of little value to any nation, if that is indeed the case, or until reliable, mutual arms-control agreements are reached, it would be imprudent to dismiss them lightly.”

Defenders of the program maintain that the major U.S. effort in the field is defensive rather than offensive, geared to the development of protections against whatever chemical or biological weapons an enemy might employ. In this sense, they argue, the U.S. must sometimes create the weapons in order to learn how to counter them. A sub-argument (a familiar, often valid Pentagon reflex) is that military R & D can be beneficial as well as baneful. Indeed, research at Fort Detrick and the other laboratories has yielded considerable contributions to medicine and microbiology. Detrick’s scientists, for example, have helped to create disease-resisting rice. Their studies have led them to develop vaccines and toxoids, notably against rinderpest and anthrax.

Unfortunately, the line between defensive and offensive purposes in CBW research is sometimes difficult to determine. The distinction is clear enough when “defensive” means development of a new gas mask or vaccine, or when “offensive” means devising a new nerve gas. But the development of even defensive measures demands basic research that, once performed, makes it relatively easy to produce devastating weapons. The nation’s CBW arsenal is thus less modest than its defenders advertise. Unlike other military hardware, such weapons need not always be stocked in quantity. For the present, in fact, the Pentagon plans no further procurement of lethal agents because it judges that enough of these materials are already on hand to meet the officially limited objective—adequate supplies for a tactical response to enemy CBW. Also, experiments may be on the verge of a technical breakthrough that would render the current stocks obsolete.

Three Roles

The question remains: How and when does the Pentagon plan to use chemical and biological weapons? There are three basic roles that such weapons might play: aggressive, defensive or deterrent. The U.S. has yet to ratify the 1925 Geneva Protocol outlawing the use of chemical-biological weapons, though it did approve a 1966 U.N. resolution to the same effect. In 1943, Franklin Roosevelt pledged that the U.S. would use those weapons only if an enemy used them first. Under State and Defense Department pressure in 1959, however, Congress refused to make formal the “no first strike” rule. Still, the U.S. has in effect forsworn any intention of initiating deadly chemical-biological warfare. The use of herbicides to defoliate Vietnamese jungles, plus tear gas and CS to drive the Viet Cong from their tunnels, has brought some criticism; yet the effects have been exceedingly mild compared with the potential of other available chemical weapons.

Taken as a purely defensive instrument, CBW research might be valuable in teaching the military to detect a chemical or biological attack at the earliest moment—a considerable advantage, because many CBW agents are colorless, odorless and otherwise undetectable before they strike. Even so, it is not yet clear how such knowledge might benefit the civilian population, which could not be rapidly regimented to seek shelter or take antidotes.

As for the possible role of chemical-biological weapons as deterrents, that is one of the principal justifications advanced by the military for their developments. It is possible that an enemy might refrain from attacking out of fear that the U.S. would respond with its own CBW, even though the U.S. nuclear deterrent would seem to be a more effective persuader. Chemical and biological weapons offer an additional combat option—something to occupy the considerable middle ground between conventional weapons and nuclear warheads. Such an option may or may not be an advantage. Defenders of the program contend that certain forms of CBW could make combat relatively humane. Theoretically, chemicals could be perfected to the point where the enemy would not be killed but would be put out of action temporarily until he could be trundled off to a P.O.W. camp. That principle works well enough in riot and crowd control, where the combat is temporary, and there is no danger of escalation. But in battle the humane principle is the first casualty; the temptation to escalate from incapacitating to killing agents would be powerful.

The Burden of Proof

Many military planners operate on the theory that CBW is no better or worse than any other instrument of war; as long as war is a possibility, they say, all instruments must be developed or at least tested. There are differences with CBW, however. While the dispersal of some chemicals can be confined to limited areas, depending on weather conditions and the method of dispersal (from hand-held weapons to aerial sprays), the control of other agents, particularly biologicals, is likely to be so difficult that a vast majority of the victims would be noncombatants. Numerous chemical and biological weapons would probably be even more indiscriminate than nuclear bombs in destroying civilian populations. In addition, the ecological damage that CBW would visit upon the earth for generations might well surpass even the effects of nuclear fallout. Says Microbiologist Martin Kaplan, “Sudden disbalances in numbers or the insertion of new infective elements into evolutionally unprepared animal or plant life could produce for an indefinite period an unrecognizable and perhaps unmanageable world from the standpoint of communicable diseases.”

Chemical and biological weapons are now being tested by at least 13 nations, including Britain, France, and Sweden, as well as the U.S. and Russia. The situation obviously calls for international control agreements. Pending that millennium, the U.S. probably has no choice except to continue investigating potential C-B weapons. But the Pentagon could quiet widespread fears by doing more to prove to the public that its programs are indeed primarily designed for defense and protection. The Army could begin by ending some of the secrecy—and deliberate distortion—that has marred its past record. While full public disclosure is clearly impossible, a good deal of public confidence might be restored, for example, if the White House appointed a citizens’ commission of scientists, doctors and laymen to monitor developments in CBW. An alternative might be a joint congressional committee. Such a body might also report periodically on the levels of lethal agents being stockpiled, as well as the safety of their storage and transportation. It is past time for the Pentagon to acknowledge that there are legitimate doubts about chemical and biological weapons.