Jesse Helms' Poison Gas
Since Jesse Helms became
chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1995, many of his
missteps have been harmless, even amusing. Who among us didn't chuckle when he
introduced the prime minister of Pakistan to the Senate as "the distinguished
prime minister of India"? But now comes the horrifying prospect that Helms
could actually play an important role in world history. The Chemical Weapons
Convention, signed by roughly the entire civilized world, awaits Senate
ratification and is bottled up in Helms' committee.
According
to Helms, the CWC has two large defects. First, the treaty's verification rules
would violate U.S. sovereignty, allowing foreign inspectors to swoop down on a
factory "without probable cause, without a search warrant," and "interrogate
employees," "remove documents," and so on. Second, the treaty isn't tough
enough to reliably sniff out chemical weapons. Hard man to please.
Let's leave aside Helms' factual errors (he's about the
search warrants) and look at his basic paradox: that the treaty is too tough,
yet not tough enough. This is not logically impossible. Chemical weapons could,
in theory, be so elusive that even a sovereignty-crushing inspection regime
couldn't find them. But if that's Helms' view, then he is opposed not just to
this CWC, but to the very idea of such a convention. Why doesn't he just
admit it?
In any
event, the second half of Helms' paradox is the claim now being emphasized by
his allies in their crusade against the CWC. Via radio, TV, and op-ed pages,
we're being told that the treaty is "not verifiable." In a sense, this is true.
The convention will definitely not succeed in sniffing out all chemical weapons
everywhere. But it will definitely do a better job than is being done--or not
done--now. Given this upside, the question becomes: What's the downside? Helms
and his allies offer five downsides, all of which vaporize under
inspection.
1 Huge regulatory burden. Opponents of
the treaty initially exercised the basic Republican reflex of complaining about
the cost to U.S. business. It's true that U.S. chemical manufacturers will have
to fill out some forms. But if the United States doesn't join the
treaty, these same manufacturers lose sales to nations that do join. That's one
reason the Chemical Manufacturers Association heartily supports the treaty.
2. Medium-sized
regulatory burden. Faced with the big chemical companies' support of the
treaty, opponents tried arguing that America's small businesses would
bear an unwarranted burden. Helms resoundingly declared on the Senate floor
that the National Federation of Independent Business opposes the treaty.
Unfortunately, an NFIB spokesman then pointed out that this isn't true. It is
"our belief," the spokesman told the Wall Street Journal , that "our
members are not going to be impacted" by the treaty.
3. Our men in
uniform. Some treaty opponents argue that if the United States destroys its
chemical weapons, it will have surrendered a vital deterrent to chemical
attacks. But you don't need chemical weapons to deter chemical weapons. As
Leonard Cole, author of The Eleventh Plague , has observed, Saddam
Hussein refrained from using his vast chemical stockpile during the Persian
Gulf War not because he feared retaliation in kind , but because he
feared retaliation of comparable, or greater, magnitude . (Gen. Norman
Schwarzkopf, who has retired and thus needn't toe the administration's line,
supports the CWC.) Even before the treaty, the United States had decided to
destroy its chemical arsenal, deeming it a needless headache. No one had even
bothered to complain about this until the treaty linked it to the dreaded New
World Order.
4. Surrender of
sovereignty, Part 2. In a USA Today op-ed piece, Helms asserted that
the treaty would "require that the U.S. assist Cuba and Iran in modernizing
their chemical-weapons facilities." That would be strange, wouldn't it? A
treaty expressly devoted to eliminating chemical weapons obliges members to
help build them? This claim is based on of a somewhat opaque section of the
treaty, and is widely considered ridiculous.
5.
Triumph of the rogues. Helms: "North Korea, Libya, Iraq, and Syria--all
principal sponsors of terrorism and repositories of chemical weapons--are not
signatories and won't be affected." Well, it's true that these nations aren't
signatories (though most suspected chemical-weapons possessors, including China
and Iran, are). But it's quite false to say that they "won't be affected." In
fact, they will be shut out of the market for many chemicals, including "dual
use" chemicals that are ingredients of both nerve gas and things like ink. This
is part of the innovative genius of the CWC: permanent economic sanctions
against nonmembers.
Right now about two dozen countries are suspected of
pursuing chemical-weapons programs, and they do so with impunity. After the
treaty, they will fall into one of two camps: 1) those that suffer economic
sanctions and a clear-cut stigma, and 2) those that have agreed to allow
short-notice inspections of any suspicious site in their territory. That's not
progress?
It's true
that once an inspection is demanded, Iran (for example) can stall. Though the
national government must escort inspectors to the perimeter of the suspected
site, it can then argue that the search violates its constitution, or whatever.
(If this national prerogative weren't preserved, Helms and company would be the
first to object.) Such a standoff, when it occurs, will trigger a global media
event, with CNN broadcasting satellite shots of the suspected facility every 30
minutes, and so on. If this drags on for too long, and Iran (say) seems
inexcusably obstinate, it can be judged noncompliant by a vote of convention
members, and sanctioned accordingly.
All told, the treaty is so much tougher than
anything in the history of global arms control that to call it an important
evolutionary step borders on understatement. And it comes just in time, because
technology for making biological weapons is spreading. What, you may ask, is
the key difference between chemical and biological weapons? Oh, about a million
corpses. Industrious CW-armed terrorists could kill thousands of New York
subway riders in a day. Industrious BW-armed terrorists could more or less do
Manhattan in the same time. Right now there is nothing approaching an
international regime for keeping biological weapons out of the hands of
terrorists. If there is ever to be one, it will have to resemble this treaty at
least broadly: surprise inspections of suspicious sites, the economic and moral
ostracism of nations that don't cooperate, etc.
Will this approach work? We
don't know. It depends on such questions as 1) how effectively the
industrialized nations can monitor the average rogue state once they start
synergistically pooling their intelligence, and 2) how tough economic sanctions
have to be before even the Syrias of the world fall into line. It's much better
to answer these questions now, with chemical weapons, than 10 years from now,
with biological weapons.
The basic flow of world
history, as I'm not the first to note, is toward interdependence. Increasingly,
the world's nations face common problems soluble only through concerted effort.
This often involves some marginal sacrifice of sovereignty: an agreement by
each nation to constrain its future behavior so long as others do, and
systematic deference to international judgment. You see this logic at work in
environmental issues (the Rio accords, now being toughened), economic issues
(the World Trade Organization, growing in importance), and other areas. The
proliferation of chemical and biological weapons is a paradigmatic problem of
the future, and the CWC is a paradigmatic, if imperfect, solution. Jesse Helms
is a paradigmatic relic.
