An International Ban, But on What?

While most of the stories in the US press located the risk of chemical and biological weapons in terms of US borders, the latter half of 1969 brought a new wave of stories that widened the scope of the risk location to the world. However, in widening the scope, these stories actually served to reinforce the problem of domestic risks, especially by undermining military arguments about the value of possessing biological and chemical weapons. In the first week of July, the United Nations issued a report on chemical and biological weapons. On July 3rd, both the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times reported on the study.69 Both articles opened by explaining the reports apparent conclusion: “There is no certain defense for any nation against biological and chemical weapons of war.”70 Said differently, “[c]hemical and biological weapons would endanger the attacker as much as the intended victim.”71 In the Post’s article, the headline after the jump stated bluntly: “U.N. Finds Germ War Suicidal.” In his preface to the report, U Thant, then-Secretary General, called on “all nations to bind themselves legally never to use chemical and biological weapons.”72 Thus, the report maintained the same danger-to-the- user narrative found in the domestic stories about weapons testing accidents but extended that logic into the battlefield. Just as the weapons may have unintended domestic consequences for the users, their presence and use as part of a military arsenal seemed capable of creating an

69 _{Robert H. Estabrook, “No Defense In Germ War, U.N. Reports,” Washington Post-Times Herald, July 3, 1969,}

A1; Earl W. Foell, “No Defense Seen in Biochemical Warfare,” Los Angeles Times, July 3, 1969, A11.

70 _{Foell, “No Defense.”} 71 _{Estabrook, “No Defense.”} 72 _{Foell, “No Defense.”}

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unpredictable pattern of escalation. The Post, quoted the report at length: “Chemical and bacteriological (biological) warfare could open the door to hostilities which could become less controlled, and less controllable, than any war in the past.”73 The report offered a view in which:

…lethal, unpredictable weapons which could damage their users as much as their victims, harm civilians more than soldiers, upset the environment widely and for long periods, be formidable expense even for a great power to defend against, be almost certain to cause escalation whenever used – and spread dangerously to the hands of irresponsible leaders of small nations.74

In this story of escalations, small nations might become attracted to chemical and biological weapons (CBW) because they are both less expensive and less complex than nuclear arms. Thus:

A state having an adequate chemical or pharmaceutical industry could, by concentrating on producing just one CBW system, become a lethal threat to its neighbors… [and] would also create a boomerang threat for its own citizens because of the unpredictability of the weapon and the impossibility of adequate defense.75

CBW, then, breeds more CBW; risks expand across borders, toward enemies and allies, and can do it for a budgetary bargain. Now, the accident-waiting-to-happen invites its duplication and has as its logical conclusion a snowball of accidents which, in their unpredictability, spread like an infection across borders. The conclusion of this story is a world populated by accidents- waiting-to-happen, followed immediately by some combination of victims of attacks and accidents.

While the UN report was understood to be nothing less than a call for “a comprehensive halt in development, production, and stockpiling and such weapons,”76 a comprehensive solution

73

Estabrook, “No Defense.”

74 _{Foell, “No Defense.”} 75 _Ibid.

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seemed immediately problematic because of the unresolved ambiguity between the two halves of so-called CBW. While the domestic stories above talked about a thing called Chemical- Biological Warfare, the report very clearly marked out a difference between Bacteriological (aka Biological) Weapons and Chemical Weapons. Recall that, above, stories about Dugway Proving Ground sometimes conflated the presence of toxic gas (GB, VX, Sarin) with the long-term contamination caused by anthrax spores in and around the base, but in other cases the two types of weapons are treated as distinct.77 Thus, the division was not new, but it had not been emphasized by journalists until after the UN Report, as both scientists and politicians began to more carefully characterize what could and should be banned.

One possible limitation on the success of a comprehensive ban was the differing ease with which regulators could eliminate the raw materials used for making these weapons from laboratories, bases, and commercial markets. Dr. Ivan Bennett, the American member of the UN committee who drafted the report, explained in an interview quoted by the Times said that “in practical terms, the line between chemical and biological weapons [is] extremely important” in conversations about banning and disarmament.78 For Bennett, the distinction was relevant because he thought that “there is no legitimate civilian reason for producing most of the bacteriological warfare agents. But on the chemical side it is hard to sort out civilian production from potential war production.”79 Thus, for Bennett, there was a problem of sheer feasibility – it may not be that we could comprehensively ban chemical agents because the relevant chemicals had common, peaceful uses. Bennett’s brief comments foreshadow two important questions.

77 _{Washington Post ambiguously combines talk of “biological contamination” with “nerve gas” in “Panel is Told}

Germ Test Area Contaminated” (discussed above) while Los Angeles Times makes clearer distinctions in “Permanent Danger Seen in Test Area,” Los Angeles Times, May 28, 1969, A5. The distinction seems at least probably known to journalists, but stories like these often switch back and forth between chemical-talk and biological-talk.

78 _{Foell, “No Defense.”}

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First, what were the relevant distinctions within the field of CBW? Second, what might count as a legitimate reason for possessing a given substance within one of the resulting classes?

Another narrative that drove the relevance of the split of CBW was the swift response of the British to the UN’s call for disarmament. On the same day that the UN delivered its report, the Post paired the “No Defense” article with a shorter piece: “Britain May Propose Germ-War Treaty.”80 “Reliable sources” told the press that the British planned to draft a treaty which dealt specifically with germ weapons.81 Though the British proposal was not yet concrete, the Post claimed that “The Soviet Union has already rejected the British proposal and has said the 1925 Geneva Protocol banning chemical and bacteriological weapons is adequate.”82 Here, we see the first of many stories centering on the Soviet Union, their possible Chemical-Biological capability, and their position on disarmament.

While the drama of biological weapons on the international stage is easily seen in retrospect as yet another Cold War struggle between the US and the Soviet Union, it was not necessarily one in which the Soviets are always portrayed as the ‘evil empire.’ A story published in the last week of July 1969 explained in more detail why the Soviets stand against the British treaty: in their view it would “[postpone] “indefinitely” the problem of prohibiting chemical weapons which…posed a “more real” threat.”83 Further, “the question arises whether the prohibition of biological weapons alone will not accelerate the chemical arms race” and the possible “weakening and undermining” of the Geneva Protocol.84 Importantly, the US representative at the disarmament talks expressed reluctance about whether it “would be

80 _{“Britain May Propose Germ-War Treaty,” Washington Post-Times Herald, July 3, 1969, A12.}

81 _Ibid. 82

Ibid.

83 _{Soviet UN delegate Alexei A Roshchin, quoted in “Soviets, Poles Oppose Draft Germ Treaty,” Washington}

Post-Times Herald, July 23, 1969, A10. 84 _{Roshchin quoted in “Soviets, Poles.”}

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desirable to conclude a separate measure relating only to biological weapons.”85 Thus, the Soviet Union was not the only nation skeptical of the British’s plan. Still, the US’s protest seems hollow given the fact that it had yet to even ratify the 1925 Protocol. The Soviet Union had in 1928. The small, apparent agreement between the Soviet Union and the US on this matter did not clearly demonstrate anything, and the article makes no attempt to interpret the points of agreement and disagreement. Though the press did not know it at the time, the Nixon Administration was privately limiting treaty actions while it sought to craft a new comprehensive domestic policy (see below). Nixon had not yet answered McCarthy’s earlier question – the State Department did not know the US’s biological weapons policy because it was not clear that the US had one. In the summer of 1969 all that seemed clear was that a joint Chemical- Biological treaty between the US and the Soviet Union was just out of reach. Until the US knew what its own policy was, it could not negotiate.

The difficulty in interpreting the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union’s various capabilities and motives was highlighted further in the Post’s “Russian Capability for Chemical, Biological War.”86 Clearly, the Soviet position on CBW was important because “[d]efenders of American preparations for chemical and biological warfare often cite as a rationale the Soviet Union’s CBW programs.”87 But, far from the front page, this story about Soviet weapons was measured and quite complex. The author, former Russian Bureau chief Stephen Rosenfield, suggested that, in the final analysis, the United States really did not know much about the Soviet weapons capability beyond what can be more easily verified about the

85 _{James F. Leonard, quoted in “Soviets, Poles.”} 86

Stephen S. Rosenfield, “Russian Capability for Chemical, Biological War,” Washington Post-Times Herald, July 19, 1969, A22; reprinted with different paragraphing and subtitles as “Russians want Tight Lock on Doors to Gas Warfare,” Los Angeles Times, July 27, 1969, E3.

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state of Soviet biomedical science, but even that evidence is not clearly a good foundation from which to draw conclusions.88 On the one hand, “one qualified source” claimed that some Soviet scientists “have shown the expertise and “feel” consistent with CW work.”89 Further (perhaps as an example), the story noted that “Years ago the Russians developed a “superb” vaccine for tularemia.” On the face of it, this demonstrated the excellence of Soviet medical science, but the story was quick to point out that we may misunderstand the Soviet’s objectives since “[tularemia] is at once a public health problem in the Soviet Union and a BW enterprise in the United States.”90 This ambiguity in the use of biomedical technology is an example of the difficulty in Dr. Ivan Bennett’s suggested, pragmatic distinction between Chemical and Biological weapons – Biological “weapons” research was not easily separable from “legitimate” civilian work anymore than chemical weapons are easily separable from civilian applications of weapon precursors. In sum, though the military clearly hoped to implicate the Soviets as the obvious threat – that is, the real location of danger was in Eastern Europe – there was not sufficient material evidence to make such a case. Dugway Proving Ground remained more obviously dangerous than the Soviet Union so long as we knew more about domestic accidents than we knew about international threats. Note, however, how arbitrary such an attribution of danger is given how ‘obviously dangerous’ US military bases seemed even in the absence of detail about their research programs. At that point in 1969, the public stories about bioweapons portrayed the US military as more suspicious than the Soviets. After Nixon’s policy shift, suspicious shifts as well.

88 _{National Security Council meeting minutes that I cite below would seem to support this interpretation.} 89 _Ibid.

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It might seem dissonant to be so critical and suspicious of the US while being so charitable toward the Soviet Union in the middle of the Cold War, yet this narrative dominates the news cycle leading up to Nixon’s renouncement. This shows how a paranoid dialogue can emerge – a dialogue in which attitudes are shared, but the objects of those attitudes remain in contest. Strange events happened and the military became the object of suspicion. Once that suspicion is confirmed, the US military attempts to point toward a more suspicious object (the Soviets). Critics of the military, in turn, make their own paranoid move and draw attention to the military’s paranoid appeal by calling it self-serving. Since the military’s transparency is already highly questionable, they remain easy targets for paranoia (recall above when military officials admitted as much). Paranoia can be directed toward anything, but taking a single paranoid stance need not require taking a totally paranoid stance. In this case, critics might have even been pushed into a charitable view of the Soviets simply in light of the fact that the US military was suspicious of them. Seen this way, the debate over biological and chemical weapons is a struggle for the authority to name the appropriate object of suspicion. Since the military is already an object of suspicion, it is incapable of winning that struggle.

Whether the bioweapon critics took a charitable position toward the Soviets for authentic or pragmatic reasons, part of the narrative success of the critics seems to rely on not just a charitable view of the Soviets, but a strong identification with them. Rosenfield, in the story discussed above, reported that “American scientists in a position to know have found their Soviet colleagues as passionately opposed to CBW as themselves.”91 Further, the most difficult part of the arms negotiations – a method for inspection and verification of a ban – might have been

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solved by a system of mutual inspection that the Soviet scientists seem to approve of. Thus, Rosenfield concluded that the “Russians are prepared to conduct CW, probably BW too, but they never have done it and presumably they are extremely reluctant to, even in retaliation.”92 Rosenfield said that if we looked for Soviet aggression on the CBW front, we had to go back to WWII to find it. Instead, it was the United States who was in the wrong, having never ratified the Geneva Protocol and having already used non-lethal chemical weapons (herbicides and tear gas) in Vietnam.

Nevertheless, Rosenfield’s narrative does not entirely exculpate the Soviets – his identification with them is incomplete. When asked about the Soviet capability or even the tactical potential of chemical weapons, Rosenfield answered that Soviet experts made soft denials. He recounted an anecdote from a 1968 symposium in Stockholm in which a Soviet expert was asked to speculate about whether or not “CW was usable in mobile as well as static warfare, he said he had to say he was “a dilettante in such matters.”93 This “posture,” Rosenfield said, left Americans feeling like the Soviet Union was intentionally not rebutting their as-of-yet- unused capability. Thus, the problem with trying to ascertain the Soviet capability was a distinction between production and use. Even if the Soviet scientists were reluctant to use chemical and biological weapons, it was not clear that they were reluctant to produce them. As the UN Report suggested, using chemical and biological weapons is dangerous, but much of the problem flows from their mere existence. If any nations possess chemical and biological weapons, then there immediately exists likelihood of an arms race or a series of inadvertent disasters. This distinction between use and production shows some of the problems that flowed from the claim that scientists are unilaterally against CBW. The difficult truth is that large

92 _Ibid. 93 _Ibid.

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numbers of civilian and military scientists in the US and the Soviet Union pioneered the chemical and biological weapons units in those countries, though these scientists remained somewhat silent during the debate over whether or not the US should continue its biological weapons program. Such scientists don’t fit neatly into any given category and their perspective remains largely untold. In chapter 5 I discuss the possible value that reconstructing that perspective might have for understanding the bioweapon drama further.

In a different telling of the British draft, LA Times writer Earl Foell repeated the conclusions of the UN Report and the British’s attempts to “split the Siamese twins” of germ and chemical warfare, but claimed that “International Specialists [in Geneva] generally applaud the proposed divorce.”94 The applause was pragmatic, but not for reasons similar to Bennett’s. Instead, biological weapons could be more easily banned because “military planners of all the major powers have much less vested interest in biological weapons of mass destruction than they do in chemical weapons.”95 Thus, biological weapons should be banned before such interest could grow. In Foell’s story, the British draft was a remarkable, needle-threading operation that avoided the problems that had already “plagued” nuclear disarmament talks. Namely, the British draft conferred to the UN “broad powers to investigate complaints of nations claiming they have been attacked with microbe weapons.”96 Further, the British treaty would have strengthened the 1925 Geneva Protocol by extending the ban on biological weapons to all forms of use, making it a de facto ban on stockpiling. Thus, the treaty could avoid the problem of possession without use.

94 _{Earl W. Foell, “British to Make Germ War 1}st _{‘CBW’ Target,” Los Angeles Times, July 13, 1969, F6.} 95 _Ibid.

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Foell’s telling of the British draft and the international response was in some ways quite different from Rosenfield’s, especially in not mentioning possible American reservations to the treaty. Instead, Foell explained that “Moscow, and to some extent the other great powers, are distrustful of such power in the hands of the U.N. leader.”97 Thus, the Soviet Union was worried about the treaty because of where it located power, not because of the division between the biological and the chemical. In the end, this story plays into Rosenfield’s caricature of Russia as providing a troublesome posture that allowed its enemies to suspect that it has something to hide. These twin retellings of the UN Disarmament Conference demonstrate the flexibility available in the negotiation over the division between biological and chemical weapons. Should they be divided? What would count as a good reason for dividing them? How should we understand those who want to stand against their division? Military arguments about the location of risk attempted to direct attention outward – toward enemy states like the Soviet Union. In the final days of July, 1969, Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird repeated this story, during a Q&A session with summer interns:

“As much as we deplore this kind of weapon, it serves as a deterrent to see that these gases are never used in our time,” he told a group of students. Laird said the United States would never be the first to launch a CBW attack but would retaliate in kind “if any nation should be so foolish” as to use chemicals or germs against this country.98

Here, Laird’s characterization of the US investment fell neatly into the U.N.’s prediction about a world in which chemical and biological weapons existed. In the context of the July stories about CBW, Laird seemed tone deaf to the narratives dominating the news. The story’s subtitle –