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LAST WEEK, the US and the Soviet Union agreed on a framework for inspecting
factories suspected of producing chemical weapons. They also agreed, in
their talks in Geneva, on the order in which to destroy their existing stockpiles
of weapons. These agreements will feed into talks aimed at creating a worldwide
ban on the production of chemical weapons. Only when a multilateral convention
is in place, however, will the US and USSR implement last week’s accords.

The agreement on inspection sets an important precedent. The accord
refers to challenge inspection, which, in its broadest sense, would allow
any party to a ban to challenge any other party to open its production facilities
and stockpiles for inspection. Many experts believe that challenge inspection
is the only way to verify a ban on chemical weapons.

The two sides are also close to agreement on exchanging data about production
facilities and stockpiles of chemical weapons. When James Baker, the Secretary
of State, and Eduard Shevardnadze, the Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs,
meet in Wyoming later this month they could provide the political impetus
for the two sides to agree on this question too.

Both the US and the Soviet Union are signatories to the Geneva Protocol
of 1925, which forbids the first use of chemical weapons. A further 108
countries have also signed this treaty, but there have been violations.
Indeed, concern about chemical weapons has grown since the Iran/Iraq war
and because of the widespread conviction that Libya produces chemical weapons
at Rabta, near Tripoli. The US State Department estimates that the Libyan
factory produces between 10 and 40 tonnes a day of mustard gas and nerve
gas. Intelligence sources in the US estimate that more than 20 countries
hold chemical weapons.

Twice a year for the past 21 years, representatives from 40 countries
have sat down in Geneva to discuss chemical warfare. A further 28 countries
send observers. A senior official in the US government says: ‘The meetings
ramble around and all the concepts are laid out in gory detail.’

The only two countries that admit they have chemical weapons, the US
and the Soviet Union, began bilateral talks in 1985, with the aim of providing
guidance for the multilateral talks in three key areas: challenge inspection;
the destruction of stockpiles of chemical weapons and of production facilities;
and the exchange of data between the parties.

The accords that the US and the Soviet Union have drawn up on the first
two issues will form the basis of discussions in the multilateral talks
in Geneva. But the agreement on the exchange of data will initially apply
only to the two countries. So far, they have agreed on the type of information
they should exchange. They have not decided when the exchange should take
place, and are unlikely to do so until the multilateral talks have produced
a comprehensive convention for a worldwide ban on chemical weapons.

Academician Karlheinz Lohs, an East German expert on chemical weapons,
said last month at an international meeting of scientists interested in
arms control: ‘Verification of a ban on chemical weapons is usually said
to be the most difficult.’ The problem is that there is no easy way to establish
whether a nation has declared all of its chemical weapons. The common approach
with nuclear and conventional weapons is to look for the obvious signs of
a country’s nuclear capability, such as launch systems for missiles from
space. This is not practical for chemical weapons.

‘With chemical weapons,’ Lohs says, ‘we are not looking for launch systems,
but chemical bonds.’ Many countries have developed chemicals industries,
making it difficult to know whether a country violates a ban or is setting
up new industrial plant. Lohs concludes: ‘It is high time that provisions
for challenge inspection were settled in Geneva.’

The superpowers did not settle the issue of challenge inspection last
week, but they did establish a framework for procedures. However, difficult
political questions remain. The US’s official policy, for example, is that
inspection should happen at any time and any place. In practice, challenge
inspection will happen in the context of a multilateral agreement. Neither
the US nor the Soviet Union is thrilled at the idea of giving unlimited
access to all countries that sign a chemical weapons convention, which could
include Libya and Iran, for example.

The third key issue that would underpin a convention on chemical weapons
is the order in which countries would destroy their weapons and facilities.
The US and USSR have decided in what order to destroy weapons and how to
reach parity within eight years of a chemical weapons convention. The two
sides will not, however, release the actual numbers they have agreed to.

Both countries have large stocks of ‘unitary’ chemical weapons, in which
a single toxic chemical is stored in some kind of munition. Many of the
US’s weapons are obsolete, in particular the M55 rocket, and the US has
not produced unitary weapons since 1969. The unitary weapons it deploys
in West Germany, however, are ready for use, according to the Pentagon.

Congress has given the US Army until 1997 to destroy its unitary weapons.
The Army is building facilities to destroy chemical weapons at the eight
sites on the continental US at which chemical weapons are stored, and at
another on Johnston Atoll in the Pacific, which should be complete next
year.

The US is developing and producing a new type of weapon, known as binary
chemical weapons, to replace the unitary weapons. In binary weapons, the
armament contains two relatively harmless chemical precursors stored separately
within a weapon. The chemicals are mixed immediately before release, leading
to a reaction that produces toxic chemicals. The idea is that they are safe
to store. Until a multilateral agreement is in place, the US will continue
to produce binary weapons, unless budget cuts curtail the programme.

The only binary chemical weapons currently in production in the US are
155-millimetre artillery shells. The two precursors in the munition combine
to produce sarin (GB). Sarin, along with soman (GD, a constituent of the
Soviet chemical arsenal) and tabun (GA), is a nerve agent. They are all
highly volatile and evaporate quickly and are classified as non-persistent
chemical agents. The nerve agents inhibit the action of the enzyme cholinesterase,
which breaks down acetylcholine. Acetylcholine transmits signals between
nerve cells in the autonomic nervous system which is responsible for involuntary
actions. The nerve poisons lead to a build-up of acetylcholine, causing
increased salivation, urination, diarrhoea, convulsions, respiratory collapse
and death.

The US wants to develop two other kinds of binary weapon; the Bigeye
spray bomb and a warhead for a rocket. The Army and Navy plan to produce
100 spray bombs for test and evaluation. These bombs will contain precursors
that combine to form the nerve gas VX, a straw-coloured, oily liquid with
a high boiling point. It takes weeks for VX to evaporate; it is therefore
a persistent nerve agent. As yet, the Army has not decided between persistent
and non-persistent agents as the lethal agent in its planned rocket.

GB and VX are among the chemical agents in the US’s unitary munitions.
The others are three types of mustard gas of varying degrees of chemical
purity, and a hallucinogenic agent, BZ. Mustard gas is almost insoluble
in water, but is highly soluble in lipids (fats), so it penetrates the skin
rapidly and causes blisters and fluid to collect in the lungs.

The Army has decided to destroy the toxic agent in its unitary munitions
by incinerating them at high temperatures. The US used to dump its chemicals
deep in the ocean. Congress banned the practice in 1972. Since then, the
Army has considered a variety of options for disposal, from blowing them
up in an underground nuclear explosion to burning them with an oxyacetylene
flame inside the munition. High-temperature incineration in furnaces, however,
is a proven technique. The Army destroyed 14.6 million pounds (6600 tonnes)
of chemical weapons agents between 1972 and 1986 in this manner. Once the
Army has destroyed its unitary munitions it will dismantle the furnaces.

A report produced by the US’s National Research Council in 1984 says
that mustard gas, GB, VX and BZ are reasonable fuels and burn readily. The
agents are extracted from the munitions and the burster charge, which ruptures
the munitions case and spreads the chemical, is removed. The chemical agent,
the burster charges, the metal casing and the material that the weapon was
stored on are all burned separately in four furnaces. Scrubbers remove chlorine,
fluorine, phosphorus and sulphur from the exhaust gases.

The Pentagon says that within the next few weeks it will have destroyed
all of its stocks of BZ, the hallucinogen. It will destroy contaminated
metals and storage material by early next year. The first plant for destroying
chemical weapons on the continental US will be at Tooele in Utah, where
42 per cent of the country’s chemical weapons are stored.

The Soviet Union, too, plans to destroy some of its chemical weapons.
Mikhail Gorbachov said in April 1987 that the Soviet Union no longer produces
chemical weapons. In January of this year, Shevardnadze said that the Soviet
Union would begin to destroy chemical weapons before any multilateral convention
banning chemical weapons is signed.

In addition, the Soviet Union has said that it has 50 000 tonnes of
the toxic chemicals that go into unitary munitions. The US has not disclosed
the size of its own stockpile, but says that it has less than 50 000 tonnes
of chemical weapons and says that the USSR has not disclosed all of its
stockpile. Last week’s accords, if they are taken up by the multilateral
talks, should clear up these disagreements.

If multilateral negotiations produce a convention, it is unlikely that
all countries will sign up at once. Ahmad Kamal, Pakistan’s representative
at the multilateral talks in Geneva, wrote in the Chemical Weapons Convention
Bulletin, published by the Federation of American ¿ìè¶ÌÊÓƵs, that developed
countries must pay to protect developing countries against neighbours who
do not immediately adhere to a convention. Kamal says that developing countries
are concerned that the developed nations will foster a nonproliferation
treaty rather than a complete ban on chemical weapons. He believes that
such a treaty could be misused to deny developing countries access to ‘peaceful’
chemicals technology. The difficulty is that some chemical weapons agents
are chemically similar to insecticides. Also the precursors of some chemical
weapons are used legitimately in commercial chemicals plants.

If nonprofliferation does enter the arena, it would not be at the multilateral
talks in Geneva. Rather it could emerge from separate multilateral talks
that started in Paris this January. That meeting reaffirmed the principle
of the Geneva Protocol of 1925. The US also wanted those talks to control
the spread of materials used to produce chemical weapons.

Next week, most of the countries that met in Paris will reassemble in
Canberra, Australia. Their agenda is to persuade the chemicals industry
to condemn chemical weapons and to see what industry can do to prevent their
spread.

Some 19 members of an informal group of Western countries, known as
the Australia group, already ban the export of nine chemicals, and monitor
the export of some 45 others. The list of nine is compiled from intelligence
reports on which chemicals different countries use to produce their chemical
weapons.

Ahmad Kamal writes that most developing countries oppose nonproliferation,
export controls and chemical-free zones. And he warns that the developed
countries must not ‘marginalise the developing countries, which is where
most wars are’. Thus there is a long way to go before last week’s agreements
on chemical weapons between the US and the USSR spread across the world.