The surviving Iranian troops, stunned and traumatized, retreated from the western half of the Majnoon Islands. Many of those on the periphery of the cloud had jabbed themselves in the thigh with an atropine autoinjector to counteract the lethal effects of the nerve agent. But because atropine also elevates core body temperature and dries out the skin and mucous membranes, dozens of soldiers who had survived the chemical attack later succumbed to dehydration and heatstroke. The casualties were taken to the chemical emergency unit at a nearby Iranian field hospital. From there, the seriously injured were evacuated to a recovery unit in the city of Ahwaz, a few hours’ drive from the front, where they were given artificial respiration and intravenous infusions of atropine.
On March 5, 1984, the White House issued an official statement to the press that publicly criticized Iraq’s renewed use of chemical weapons. This statement read, “The United States has concluded that the available evidence substantiates Iran’s charges that Iraq has used chemical weapons. The United States strongly condemns the prohibited use of chemical weapons wherever it occurs. There can be no justification for their use by any country.” Although senior Iraqi officials were surprised by the harshness of the U.S. statement, the Reagan administration never followed up its rhetoric with action.
IN RESPONSE TO the Iranian government’s urgent pleas for assistance, U.N. Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar dispatched a small team of international experts to Iran on March 13–19, 1984, to investigate the alleged chemical attacks. This team consisted of four medical and military specialists from Sweden, Spain, Australia, and Switzerland. After flying to Tehran, the U.N. experts traveled to two sites within five kilometers of the Iraqi border, east of the Majnoon Islands combat zone. Although they saw no fighting, they could hear the distant rumble of artillery fire.
Iranian officials showed the U.N. experts fragments of Iraqi chemical bombs and rocket casings recovered from the battlefield, as well as captured Iraqi gas masks and other protective gear that had been manufactured in Eastern Europe and bore Arabic script. The U.N. team also visited a military field hospital where some forty Iranian chemical casualties were being treated and examined six of the injured soldiers. Some of them had pinpoint pupils indicative of nerve agent exposure, while others had reddened and blistered skin caused by mustard agent. Finally, the U.N. experts inspected an unexploded bomb that Iranian officials claimed had been dropped by an Iraqi aircraft. Donning gas masks and rubber gloves, they drilled a hole in the bomb casing and extracted a sample of amber-colored liquid, which was sent for analysis at laboratories in Sweden and Switzerland. On March 26, 1984, the U.N. team reported that the Iraqi bomb had contained Tabun.
In response to the expert-group report, the U.N. Security Council voted unanimously to condemn the use of chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq War, although it declined to mention Iraq by name. The Iranian government then sought to bolster its case in the court of international public opinion by arranging for the treatment of several young soldiers with severe mustard injuries at hospitals in Sweden and Austria. Covered with disfiguring burns and massive, fluid-filled blisters, the Iranian casualties were extensively photographed and interviewed by the European press. Although Tabun had actually inflicted far more deaths than mustard, the nerve agent casualties were not as “photogenic” for propaganda purposes. Iranian soldiers exposed to nerve agents were either dead or comatose or had recovered without visible injuries.
Much to Tehran’s dismay, its propaganda campaign failed to arouse much moral indignation from the international community, let alone a concerted response. Fearing the consequences of an Iranian victory, Western countries declined to back up their criticism of the Iraqi chemical attacks with political or economic sanctions against Baghdad. Although Iran had not possessed a chemical arsenal when the war began, the tepid international response to its repeated pleas for help led the Iranian government to conclude that the only way to halt the Iraqi chemical attacks was to acquire the capability to retaliate in kind. In 1984, Tehran launched a crash chemical weapons development program. Much as Iraq had done earlier, Iranian officials hired Western European firms to build dual-use pesticide plants and purchased precursor chemicals, equipment, and technical expertise from a variety of commercial suppliers.
The United States did make a modest effort to stanch the flow of chemical weapons precursors to both Iraq and Iran. On March 2, 1984, U.S. customs officials learned that a chemical company in Nashville, Tennessee, was about to make a second large shipment to Iraq of potassium fluoride, a key ingredient in the manufacture of Sarin and other nerve agents. Alerted by Customs, FBI agents found and confiscated the shipment in a cargo warehouse owned by the Dutch airline KLM at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport. The seventy-five drums of potassium fluoride were addressed to SEPP in Baghdad. At the end of March, the U.S. government introduced special licensing requirements for the sale to Iraq and Iran of dual-use industrial chemicals that could be diverted to make chemical weapons. West Germany also came under pressure to crack down on illicit exports. In August 1984, after The New York Times published a leaked CIA report describing the shipment by West German companies of entire pesticide plants to Iraq, Chancellor Helmut Kohl intervened to stop any further deliveries.
AS MORE NATIONS joined the “chemical club,” others felt vulnerable to attack, increasing the risk of further proliferation. In June 1984, Kenneth Adelman, the director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, testified before a Senate hearing, “All too often in the past, the nuclear issue has so overshadowed as to drive out concerns on chemical weapons. I personally put the threat of a nuclear war very low, very low. I put the increasing use of chemical weapons around the world very high.”
The Reagan administration’s response to this threat was to seek funding from Congress for production of binary chemical munitions. After two failed attempts, the administration changed tactics in 1984 by linking the binary program to an arms control initiative, a traditional gambit to win congressional support for a controversial weapon system. At an international meeting in Stockholm in January, Secretary of State George Shultz announced a “two-track” policy that combined chemical modernization and disarmament. The United States, he said, would soon present a draft treaty text at the U.N. disarmament forum in Geneva (renamed the Conference on Disarmament), which had created a working group in March 1980 to negotiate a multilateral convention banning chemical weapons. Secretary Shultz stressed the importance of the binary weapons program as a source of negotiating leverage with Moscow. Because the Soviets were tough negotiators who rarely made concessions unless it was in their interest to do so, a U.S. decision to move forward with binary production would create a powerful “bargaining chip” to pressure the Soviets to negotiate in good faith.
President Reagan conveyed the same message at a press conference on April 4, 1984, when he observed, “We must be able to deter a chemical attack against us or our allies. And without a modern and credible deterrent, the prospects for achieving a comprehensive ban would be nil.” The NATO supreme commander, General Bernard Rogers, used a more concise formulation: “Rearm now, so as to be able to disarm later.” But critics of the binary program argued that resuming chemical weapons production after fifteen years would sacrifice an important U.S. propaganda advantage.
On April 18, 1984, Vice President Bush presented a draft of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) to the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva. A striking feature of the U.S. draft was that it provided for “anywhere, anytime” inspections of facilities suspected of the illicit development, production, or storage of chemical arms. In fact, the Reagan administration was not prepared to accept such intrusive inspections on its own territory and made the proposal only because it knew that Moscow was certain to reject it, giving the Soviets a black eye in the struggle for international public opinion. Nevertheless, the U.S. draft became the basis of the “rolling text” of the CWC, which underwent a process of continuous modification o
ver the course of the negotiations. Language that had not been adopted by consensus was placed in square brackets, sometimes with an explanatory footnote. Soon the rolling text was peppered with hundreds of brackets.
Meanwhile, Congress continued to address the binary weapons issue. The 1984 debate was largely a replay of the earlier debates in 1982 and 1983. The House considered a bill, backed by the Armed Services Committee, authorizing $95 million to buy production equipment for the DF plant at Pine Bluff Arsenal. But Representative Bethune of Arkansas introduced an amendment to delete the funding that passed by a vote of 247 to 179. Several factors contributed to the Reagan administration’s large margin of defeat in the House. First, the fact that an archconservative like Bethune opposed the binary program made it easier for rank-and-file Republicans to vote against it. Second, the vote on binaries came one day after the House had endorsed the Reagan administration’s MX nuclear weapons program, leading several congressmen who had supported the MX missile in the face of constituent opposition to cast a pro–arms control vote on nerve gas. Finally, the White House was distracted by the concurrent political battles over the MX missile and antisatellite weapons and did not devote enough time and effort to lobby House members on binaries.
The lopsided rejection of the binary weapons authorization in the House had a major impact on the subsequent legislative process in the Senate. On May 24, 1984, during the markup of the FY 1985 Defense Authorization Bill in the Senate Armed Services Committee, Chairman Tower reluctantly stripped the $95 million line item for binary production equipment from the bill before it went to the Senate floor, sparing his fellow Republicans an unpopular vote in an election year. Senator Tower’s action was a tacit admission that voting for binary weapons had become a political liability.
ON NOVEMBER 26, 1984, the Reagan administration quietly restored diplomatic relations with Baghdad after a hiatus of more than seventeen years, and proceeded to support the Iraqi regime with military intelligence, bank loans, and other forms of assistance. At the same time, Iraq continued to manufacture chemical weapons and employ them on the battlefield. SEPP produced sixty tons of Tabun in 1984, although the agent was about 50 percent pure and tended to deteriorate rapidly. Because impure Tabun was ineffective unless used in combat within four to six weeks of production, the filled munitions were shipped directly from the factory to frontline airfields and artillery units.
By 1985, SEPP, now called the Muthanna State Establishment, was a sprawling industrial complex of more than twenty manufacturing plants for chemical weapons intermediates and final products, along with filling lines for bombs, shells, rockets, and missile warheads. The Sarin production facility was five stories high and incorporated powerful ventilation and air filtration systems. To make aerial targeting more difficult, the research laboratories and production buildings were dispersed over an area of twelve square miles. In addition, the entire complex was surrounded by a double perimeter fence and defended by SA-2 antiaircraft missile batteries. Adjacent to the main production zone, West German companies had built eight large underground storage bunkers of reinforced concrete, with roofs thick enough to resist a direct hit with an aerial bomb.
The fact that Iraq had acquired most of its chemical production equipment and precursors from foreign suppliers made evident the need for stricter controls on the international chemical trade. Several Western countries tightened their export regulations, which required companies to apply for a license to ship dual-use chemicals, production equipment, or know-how to suspected proliferators. Nevertheless, national export controls were often rendered ineffective when other suppliers undercut them. In April 1985, at the suggestion of Australia, fifteen Western industrialized countries founded an informal coordinating body called the Australia Group to “harmonize ” their national chemical export regulations. The founding members of the group met for the first time in June 1985 at the Australian Embassy in Brussels and subsequently developed a common “control list” of dual-use precursor chemicals and production equipment. Members of the Australia Group also shared intelligence about countries suspected of seeking chemical weapons.
AFTER FAILING for three consecutive years to persuade Congress to fund the production of binary weapons, a senior Reagan administration official seemed ready to concede defeat. “Three strikes and you’re out,” he said. “We won’t try again for binary weapons.” Contrary to expectations, however, the White House did try again. In early 1985, the Reagan administration launched a full-court press to obtain $170 million in the FY 1986 defense budget for procurement of the M687 Sarin projectile and the Bigeye VX bomb. Administration officials calculated that because Congress was so closely divided, it would not take many votes to turn the situation around.
A series of Pentagon officials—binary program manager Robert Orton, Undersecretary of the Army James Ambrose, his deputy Amoretta Hoeber, and Chemical Corps chief Major General Gerald Watson—testified before the armed-services committees in support of the binary program. In addition, two more blue-ribbon panels weighed in. General Frederick J. Kroesen, who had recently retired as commander-in-chief of U.S. Army forces in Europe, chaired a classified study by twenty-one retired generals and admirals on the chemical warfare threat to NATO. This panel found that the chemical component of the alliance’s “flexible response” strategy, which had been adopted in 1967 and remained in effect, had eroded to the point that the Soviets would be “militarily foolish” not to initiate the use of nerve agents in a future European war. Moreover, the billions of dollars being spent to upgrade NATO’s conventional and nuclear forces were “hostage to the absence of a companion program modernizing our ability to survive and fight in a chemical environment.” The Pentagon was pleased with the Kroesen committee’s findings and paid an outside contractor $70,000 to prepare a declassified version of the report for distribution to all members of Congress.
The second blue-ribbon panel, the Presidential Chemical Warfare Review Commission, issued its final report on April 1, 1985, after several months of deliberation. Chaired by Walter J. Stoessel, Jr., a former Deputy Secretary of State, this committee found that although the 120,000 U.S. chemical weapons deployed in Europe would remain “serviceable” well into the 1990s, their replacement with binaries was warranted. The commission’s main findings were that “modernization of the U.S. chemical weapon stockpile would not impede and would more likely encourage negotiations for a multilateral, verifiable ban on chemical weapons; that only a small fraction of the current stockpile has deterrent value; that the proposed binary program will provide an adequate capability to meet our present needs and is necessary; and that any expectation that protective measures alone can offset the advantages to the Soviets from a chemical attack is not realistic.”
During a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, critics attacked the credibility of the Stoessel report, noting that the supposedly impartial commission had included no known opponents of binary weapons and several outspoken advocates, such as former Secretary of State Alexander Haig, Jr., and John C. Kester, a senior aide to former Defense Secretary Harold Brown. Because of this apparent bias, Senator Carl Levin said that the Stoessel report was “not going to inspire a lot of confidence.”
To provide some context for the Kroesen and Stoessel reports, Representative John Porter (R.–Illinois) asked the CIA to give classified briefings for House members on the Soviet chemical threat to NATO. Surprisingly, the available intelligence appeared to support the critics’ position. The CIA briefers said that although the Red Army had accumulated large stockpiles of chemical arms, it had reduced its reliance on these weapons after recognizing that little military advantage could be gained by using them against NATO forces equipped with personal protective gear. This assessment differed sharply from that of the Kroesen report, which had found that the threat of Soviet chemical weapons was “serious” and the potential for their use in war “likely.”
Opponents of the binary program also challenged the recommendations
of the two blue-ribbon panels. On June 17, 1985, Representatives Porter and Dante Fascell (D.–Florida) published an opinion piece in The Washington Post titled “New Nerve-Gas Weapons That We Don’t Need.” The article began, “Would you support a new Pentagon program that adds billions of dollars to the $200 billion deficit, that has never been field tested because it has failed 80 percent of its controlled laboratory tests, that has been rejected by our closest allies in NATO, that if put into effect would kill civilians in droves while leaving protected enemy soldiers unharmed, and that makes chemical weapons proliferation and terrorist use more likely and arms control less so? Of course not.”
When the FY 1986 Defense Authorization Bill was debated on the Senate floor, Senator John C. Danforth (R.–Missouri), an ordained Episcopal minister, argued that chemical weapons were immoral because they could not be aimed and would inevitably kill large numbers of innocent civilians. “The whole concept is abhorrent . . . to what Western values have stood for since Thomas Aquinas,” he said.
Prior to the floor vote, Vice President Bush again took his seat as president pro tem of the Senate, prepared to break another tie as he had done twice in 1983. Much to his relief, he was not called upon to do so. By a margin of 50 to 46, the Senate rejected an amendment introduced by Senator Pryor to delete $163 million for production of the M687 projectile and the Bigeye bomb. The Stoessel report, combined with intense lobbying by the politically influential National Guard, had managed to persuade five senators who had previously opposed binary production to change their votes. As Vice President Bush left the Senate chamber, he grinned and said that his mother would “rest easy.”
The action now shifted to the House, where the Reagan administration launched an intense lobbying campaign. On June 19, 1985, Representatives Ike Skelton (D.–Missouri) and John Spratt (D.–South Carolina) introduced an amendment to the Defense Authorization Bill allocating $124 million for binary weapons production. The recent retirement of Representative Bethune had weakened the opposition, and an international incident also influenced the vote. Less than a week earlier, on June 14, 1985, Hizbollah terrorists had hijacked TWA Flight 847 carrying 153 people from Athens to Rome and ordered the pilot to fly to Beirut, where they demanded the release of 766 prisoners held in Israel. Among the 104 American hostages were five U.S. Navy divers. The terrorists severely beat two of the divers and executed one of them, Robert Dean Stethem, with a shot to the head. They then dumped his lifeless body onto the tarmac. On June 18, Stethem’s remains were flown back to the United States.
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