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The Poor Man's Bomb
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15139 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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4 / 1989 |
2,972 Words |
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Andrew C. Goldberg and Debra Van Opstal
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January's international conference on chemical and biological (CB) weapons--held against the backdrop of a possible U.S. raid on the Libyan chemical weapons facility at Rabta--left many with the hope that the world community might actually be on the verge of controlling unbridled proliferation in this area. Any such confidence is regrettably misplaced. Even as the West and the Soviet bloc join together to control weapons of mass destruction, Third World states, particularly in the Middle East, are hastening their development of the so-called poor man's bomb. There is every reason to believe that CB weapons proliferation has already outstripped current diplomatic efforts at limitation and that their spread in the Third World will continue.
The emerging CB arsenals in Iraq, Libya, Iran, and Syria have been under way unchecked for at least a decade. Even as Israel launched its bold raid on Iraq's Osirak nuclear weapons reactor in 1981--to the muted delight of the international community--Iraq had already begun construction of a formidable CB capability.
Despite international agreements, such as the 1925 Geneva Protocol and the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention barring the use of CB weapons, strictures against their use are rapidly eroding. Third World states learned one grisly truth from Iraq's employment of CB weapons during the eight-year war in the Gulf: There are few penalties to fear and much to gain from employing weapons of mass destruction.
Anatomy Of A Problem
The use of CB weapons is of ancient lineage. Evidence exists that incendiary chemicals dubbed "Greek fire" were used as early as 1200 B.C. In 429 B.C., during the Peloponnesian War, the Spartans burned pitch and sulphur to release noxious gases under their enemies' city walls, a technique emulated throughout the Middle Ages. A form of Greek fire was used during the American Civil War, causing Confederate Gen. Pierre de Beauregard to exclaim that the Yankees were shooting "the most destructive missile ever used in war."
Nor is biological warfare purely a contemporary phenomenon. In 1347, the Mongols hurled the decaying bodies of plague victims over the walls at Genoese defenders in the Crimea, who then carried the Black Death back with them to Europe. In North America in the eighteenth century, British military leaders offered a gift of smallpox-infected blankets to the Indians, causing thousands of deaths.
The apparent post-World War I consensus against CB weapons was largely illusory. The ink was barely dry on the 1925 protocol when Spain dropped chemical bombs in Morocco. Italy signed the protocol in 1928 and sprayed toxic mustard gas in Ethiopia less than 10 years later. In the thirties, Japan launched more than 800 gas attacks in its conquest of Manchuria. In a horror story that has only recently come to light, the Japanese also subjected World War II POWs to typhoid, anthrax, cholera, and plague organisms to test biological weapons.
The extensive use of chemical agents by Egypt during the Yemeni civil war in the sixties has been followed by a spate of other incidents. Some claims are in dispute, notably in Laos, although the U.S. government steadfastly maintains that yellow rain (a fungal toxin that causes people to bleed to death internally) was not a
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