So Is There Anything We Can't Abolish?

I don't know what it is about James Carroll's writing that make me just shake my head. Perhaps it's his advocacy of utopian fantasies backed up by a poor grasp of facts. (See my earlier post on his piece in favor of outlawing space weapons.) In his latest op-ed ("If Poison Gas Can Go, Why Not Nukes?" Boston Globe, 23 June 2008), Carroll advocates nuclear abolition--certainly a worthy goal and one that plenty of very reasonable thinkers have advocated. However, Carroll supports his argument with a rambling, incorrect, and largely irrelevant account of efforts to outlaw chemical weapons.

Trying to provide some historical background, Carroll claims that "in 1925, gas was indeed outlawed by the Geneva Convention." This is actually not accurate; the Geneva Convention outlawed "the use in war" of chemical weapons (and even the meaning of that was long debated) but not the development, acquisition, or stockpiling of CW. Therefore, Carroll is wrong when he claims that "assumptions about the inevitability of weaponized gas prompted Britain, in 1939, both to stockpile the banned substance and to distribute gas masks to its citizens." Neither the "substance" nor its stockpiling was banned until the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention.

Carroll claims that after World War Two, chemical weapons had "been made morally acceptable by the relatively even more heinous nukes." I agree that the development of nuclear weapons may have made CW somewhat less repugnant to some observers, but I think that there were also several other factors that reduced revulsion to CW in the middle of the 20th century. These included the long time that had elapsed since the widespread use of CW in World War One, recognition of the increased military requirements of the Cold War, and the development of "non-lethal" CW (such as riot-control agents and herbicides, which, while still objectionable to some, did not seem quite as heinous as agents like Lewisite and sarin). OK, this is a relatively minor point and not so much an objection to Carroll's argument as a comment.

However, Carroll is on pretty shaky ground when trying to apply the lessons of outlawing CW to nuclear abolition efforts. First, he claims that the legitimacy of chemical weapons "has been entirely removed, their permanence rejected. The poison gas realists of 1919 have been proven wrong." Unfortunately, the "poison gas realists of 1919" (who believed that "history shows that in no case has a weapon which has proved successful in war been abandoned") have not been proven entirely wrong. In fact, although many countries have abandoned (or are currently eliminating) their CW stockpiles in accordance with the CWC, several others continue to maintain clandestine programs, including Egypt, Iran, Israel, North Korea, and Syria. Terrorists continue not only to acquire but even to use CW. (Aum Shinrikyo did so in the Tokyo subway system in 1995, and al Qaeda has laced bombs with chlorine in Iraq in recent years, although with relatively little effect.)

It is easy to dismiss such counterexamples as minor exceptions of little consequence. However, the consequences become much more significant when one tries to apply the example of the CWC to nuclear abolition. If one state squirreled away a few nuclear weapons while others complied with a nuclear abolition agreement, the cheater could greatly jeopardize the security of other states and even the stability of the international system.

For this reason, the example of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention might provide a better lesson for nuclear abolitionists than that of the CWC. As with the CWC, although just about every country has joined the BWC, clandestine biological weapons programs continue, and terrorists have conducted several bioattacks since the treaty went into effect, including the 2001 anthrax attacks, in which five Americans died. Fortunately, the United States has decided that it does not need to retain its own offensive biological weapons stockpile, since it can retaliate effectively against any BW attack with conventional weaponry. However, it is not clear that the threat of conventional retaliation would deter a state (or, perhaps, even a terrorist) that held the world's only few nuclear weapons. That is why verification is such a critical component of any nuclear abolition effort.

Although many people have considered this problem, no one has yet proposed a satisfactory verification mechanism. If Carroll demonstrated how states could give up their nuclear weapons and while ensuring that all other states (and non-state actors, as well) remained non-nuclear, too, then I would be the first person to endorse the abolition of nuclear weapons as a practical near-term goal. It is a great idea, but at least for the foreseeable future, Carroll is simply dreaming.