Disarmament and other options for Western policy—making on chemical warfare*

Abstract

The increasing prominence of scenarios of non-nuclear war in NATO's defence planning has made the proper status of chemical warfare weapons increasingly difficult to assess. The perplexities largely stem from the relationship between chemical weapons and the nuclear threshold, and what that may mean for overall deterrence. Alone among the NATO members, France and the United States have retained chemical weapons in their arsenals. Both are now poised to modernize and expand their chemical forces. The American administration wishes to proceed with this at once, and has cited undisclosed evidence of increasing Soviet chemical warfare capabilities in justification. It has also argued that modernization and expansion would strengthen the West's negotiating position in the continuing Geneva talks on chemical warfare disarmament. At the end of 1985, the US Congress made its funding of the administration's programme conditional upon a formal expression of support from NATO. In May 1986 NATO defence ministers duly adopted a 'force goal' to this end, but made it clear that, in doing so, they were not assenting to any deployment of the new weapons to Europe. These developments have brought the issue of planning and preparedness for chemical warfare into unprecedented political visibility in Western Europe. Public opinion has not viewed the issue with equanimity. Like the neutron bomb, this subject has great potential for divisiveness. In political terms it is unsurprising, therefore, that a note of genuine conviction can be heard in the voices of West European leaders extolling the virtues of negotiated chemical warfare (CW) disarmament; and West European delegations to the 40-nation Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, where CW has been under discussion since 1968, are now negotiating with an evident will to succeed. Some of the problems confronting CW disarmament are explored in the pages which follow. The starting point is an analysis of the present CW arms control regime1 and of the CW policies that have so far flowed from it.