“Yellow Rain”: the public evidence

Abstract

The Reagan Administration has embarked on a program of chemical rearmament. The President has formally notified Congress that he has determined that resumption of the production of chemical weapons is “essential to the national interest.” The Pentagon has developed a chemical weapons production program that could cost as much as $6 billion. And the Fiscal Year 1983 budget requests a chemical warfare allocation of $705 million, of which more than $100 million is to go toward the production of a new generation of chemical weapons. If approved by Congress, the Administration's plan will reverse a policy initiated 13 years ago when President Richard Nixon declared a moratorium on the production of chemical and biological weapons.Why has restraint broken down in this area? According to Administration spokesmen, chemical rearmament is necessary to provide NATO with a retaliatory capacity sufficient to deter the Soviet Union from using chemical weapons in a war in Europe. Existing stockpiles are inadequate for this purpose, they argue, because they are obsolete and have been allowed to deteriorate. Moreover, they claim that the Soviet Union has greatly increased its stockpile of chemical weapons during the years of U.S. non-production; and they point to Soviet investment in equipment and training for fighting in a contaminated environment as evidence that the Soviets are preparing to use chemical weapons in the event of a war in Europe. Finally and most disturbingly, the Administration has repeatedly charged that the Soviets not only contemplate using chemical weapons but are presently doing so in Southeast Asia and Afghanistan, and, further, that the weapons they are using include a new type in which the lethal agent is certain biotoxins.In the half-lit world in which the debate over chemical weapons is conducted there are few agreed-upon facts. Each of the above assertions—with the exception of that about Soviet defensive preparations—is sharply contested.The first of the two articles that follow reviews the evidence the Administration has presented thus far in support of one of these assertions: the allegation that the Soviet Union and its allies are using a specific biotoxin in Southeast Asia and Afghanistan. We draw no conclusions as to truth of this allegation; our purpose is rather to map the controversy it has provoked and to raise questions as to the appropriate standard of proof in such situations.The second article—also concerned with the military use of chemicals in Southeast Asia—deals with an episode about which a good deal is now known: the U.S. use of herbicides such as Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. It is a review by E. W. Pfeiffer of a history of the U.S. herbicide program—a history prepared by the Air Force and made public by means of a suit under the Freedom of Information Act. This history discloses, among other things, that the United States, while openly spraying herbicides on South Vietnam, was secretly spraying them on Laos. Above all, it is of interest for its account of the decision-making process behind the herbicide program, and for the glimpses it provides of the calculations—and reservations—of those responsible for the policy. Perhaps the most heartening information it discloses is, in Pfeiffer's words, “the degree to which public pressure forced successive American Administrations gradually to slow down and finally to stop herbicidal warfare.”At a time when the Freedom of Information Act—and the principle it embodies of the citizen's right to know—are under attack, this is an episode worth pondering: a government history of controversial policies, made available to the public under the Freedom of Information Act, discloses among other things the role of informed public opinion in bringing those policies to an end.