Chemical weapons
Chemical weapons War of Nerves: Chemical Warfare from World War I to Al-Qaeda by Jonathan B. Tucker. New York: Pantheon Books, 2006, 479 pp.
The issue of chemical warfare has frayed the nerves of policymakers for the past century. Most recently, the U.S.-led coalition fully expected to find stockpiles of chemical weapons when it invaded Iraq (it did not). The United States and others worry that terrorists may figure out how to make them and then use them.
Yet as Jonathan B. Tucker makes clear in this highly readable and authoritative history, the current situation regarding chemical warfare is far brighter than many thought possible two or three decades ago. Back then, the United States and the Soviet Union were building up their chemical weapons stocks, and their use was considered likely if the Cold War turned hot. In the 1980s, Saddam Hussein unleashed chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq War, as well as against the Kurds in northern Iraq. Today, by contrast, in the wake of the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) and its strict enforcement provisions, there is a clear international taboo against the use, production, development, and stockpiling of such weapons.
Despite this analysis, however, Tucker makes it clear that it would be dangerous to believe that the chemical warfare problem has been solved. Few analysts would disagree with his conclusion that the international norm against chemical warfare remains fragile.
The book charts chronologically the development of chemical weapons and their use from World War I to the mid1990s, when the group Aum Shinrikyo released Sarin (a nerve agent) in the Tokyo subway system. Although AlQaeda is identified in the book’s subtitle, that terrorist group is featured only in the last 20 pages as one of several emerging threats. But this is not a policy book; it is a history, and in that regard, it should be the first pick off the shelf for anyone who seeks an indepth account of the history of chemical warfare.
The first 100 pages chart the development of chemical weapons and chemical warfare during World War I, the interwar period (1919-1939), and World War II. Widespread use of chemical weapons in World War I and more limited use during the interwar period (for example, Italy against Abyssinia) occurred despite the moral taboo, normative codes, and legal agreements against them. During World War 1,39 different toxic agents were used, causing nearly 1 million casualties and an estimated 90,000 deaths. More than half those fatalities were suffered by Russia (56,000), and chemical warfare casualties are estimated to have accounted for about a quarter of the estimated 272,000 U.S. injuries.
The disproportionate numbers of deaths in Russia and casualties in the United States may have had an impact on later U.S. and Russian/Soviet thinking about chemical weapons and their utility. Certainly, the continued use of chemical weapons was expected, and General Amos A. Fries (later chief of the U.S. Chemical Warfare Service) believed not only that chemical warfare was something every state would have to reckon with, but also a form of warfare “civilized nations should not hesitate to use,” Tucker writes.
Despite the 1925 Geneva Protocol, which prohibited the use but not the development, production, or stockpiling of chemical weapons, the weapons retained their appeal. Thus, although the U.S. government supported the protocol, Fries was instrumental in the coalition of veterans’ groups, chemical manufacturers, and the American Chemical Society that lobbied against the treaty, ensuring that it did not come to a vote in the Senate. Support for the maintenance of a chemical weapons option in warfare remained strong in the military. The chemical genie was out of the bottle, and few believed it would be easy to prevent future use and proliferation. The United States finally ratified the Geneva Protocol in 1975. (Industry attitudes about chemical weapons have changed drastically since the 1920s. By the late 1980s, the U.S. government’s effort to develop chemical weapons was hindered by an inability to secure the necessary chemicals. Tucker quotes one industry spokesman as saying: “In this day and age, who wants to be involved in providing chemicals that go into chemical weapons?”)
In the next 150 pages of the book, Tucker examine events through the 1980s, including the development of the extensive U.S. and Soviet chemical weapons programs as well as the programs of other states, including France and Egypt. Because of the book’s emphasis on chemical warfare, the reader learns more about the programs of states that actually used these weapons than those of states believed to have developed stockpiles. Hence, whereas Iraq’s chemical warfare capability and its use of the weapons are fully documented, Syria’s chemical weapons program receives scant attention. In addition, the ambiguities between defensive activities (protective measures such as respirators) and offensive chemical weapons research in Israel’s program are brought to light only in relation to the investigation into a 1992 accident in Amsterdam involving an El Al cargo plane that was carrying precursor chemicals for nerve agents.