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Next up: 'Non-lethal' chemicals that
kill
By David Isenberg
It is
increasingly an Orwellian world. Up is down. White is
black. Invading another country is providing for the
defense of your own. And now, it appears that the use of
lethal chemical weapons will be "non-lethal", if, as
appears possible, so-called "non-lethal weapons" (NLW)
are used by the United States in Iraq.
Military
interest in NLW goes back many years. In 1991, then
defense secretary Dick Cheney (now vice president)
established a Non-Lethal Warfare Study Group chaired by
his undersecretary for policy, Paul Wolfowitz (now
deputy secretary of defense). Even back then, there was
disagreement about how non-lethal such systems would
prove to be. According to an April 1991 memo from
Wolfowitz to then-deputy defense secretary Donald
Atwood, NLW "disable or destroy without causing injury
or damage". But comments written in the margin,
apparently by Atwood, said "This claims too much."
NLW advocates have long tried to build support
for these systems by characterizing them as a means of
making war more humane. But such claims are highly
questionable. A 1994 Defense Science Board study noted
that "Non-lethal incapacitating chemical agents could
lead to greater lethality by making enemies more
vulnerable to lethal weapons. So, the results of
non-lethal weapons are not clear-cut in all cases."
One controversial class of NLW likely to be used
in Iraq is toxic riot-control agents (RCA), such as tear
gas, CS gas and pepper spray. The media have reported
that the US is preparing to use such agents in Iraq,
particularly if the conflict centers on street fighting
in Baghdad itself, as now seems likely.
The use
of riot control agents would, in the view of many legal
and arms control experts, violate the Chemical Weapons
Convention (CWC), which entered into force in 1997. The
CWC bans the use of these agents in battle, not least
because they risk causing an escalation to full chemical
warfare. This applies even though they can be used in
civil disturbances at home.
If US forces were to
use these agents, it would drive a wedge between
themselves and their closest coalition partners, the
British government, which is opposed to their use. On
March 27, British Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon said in a
press conference, "Non-lethal chemical weapons are
permitted for dealing with riot control. The United
Kingdom is - [inaudible] - signed up to the Chemical
Weapons Convention, and they would not be used by the
United Kingdom in any military operation or on any
battlefield."
It is British policy not to allow
troops to take part in operations where riot control
agents are employed. The UK Ministry of Defense has
reportedly warned the US that it will not allow British
troops to be involved in operations where riot control
agents are used, or to transport them to the
battlefield. The International Committee of the Red
Cross has also warned that use of such agents would
violate the CWC.
Nonetheless, the US Marine
Corps confirmed that CS gas and pepper spray had already
been shipped to the Gulf. Rumsfeld testified to Congress
on February 5 that Pentagon officials are fashioning
rules of engagement that could allow the US military to
use non-lethal agents if the US attacked Iraq.
But what Rumsfeld appears to propose would be
illegal and a violation of the CWC, which states that
"any chemical which through its chemical action on life
processes can cause death, temporary incapacitation or
permanent harm to humans or animals" is forbidden as a
method of warfare. The US, along with another 150
countries to date, including the United Kingdom,
ratified this treaty and is pledged to uphold it.
The US ratification included a number of
exemptions which might make permissible - from the US
government's viewpoint - the uses of riot control agents
that the Department of Defense is contemplating, even
though Article I of the CWC clearly states, "Each state
party undertakes not to use riot control agents as a
method of warfare."
The US government has long
wanted to preserve the option of using RCA. For example,
it interpreted the Geneva Protocol of 1925 as not
applying to the use of "non-lethal" toxic chemicals and
attempted to preserve its ability to use "non-lethal"
chemical agents in defined military situations when
ratifying the Protocol in 1975.
Yet a 1975
executive order (EO 11850) issued by then-president
Gerald Ford required prior presidential approval for the
use of RCAs in war and permits such agents to be used
only for defensive purposes to save lives. It prohibited
the use of RCA except in defensive military modes to
save lives such as:
Use of riot control agents in riot control
situations in areas under direct and distinct US
military control, to include controlling rioting
prisoners of war.
Use of riot control agents in situations in which
civilians are used to mask or screen attacks and
civilian casualties can be reduced or avoided.
Use of riot control agents in rescue missions in
remotely isolated areas, of downed aircrews and
passengers, and escaping prisoners.
Use of riot control agents in rear echelon areas
outside the zone of immediate combat to protect convoys
from civil disturbances, terrorists and paramilitary
organizations.
Yet a close reading of the text
and negotiating record of the CWC shows that RCA forms
both a special class under the CWC and also fall under
the category of "toxic chemicals", with all the
restrictions imposed on traditional chemical weapons.
The US interpretation of the CWC regarding RCA is
invalid because it evades the requirement that prohibits
the use of toxic chemicals, except where intended for
purposes not prohibited under this convention.
In recent years, however, the Pentagon has
gradually turned to new and dangerously loose
interpretations of the CWC that would allow the military
use of incapacitating chemicals. The changes in policy
amount to a "very serious assault" on the CWC, warns
microbiology professor Mark Wheelis of the University of
California, who has written extensively on chemical and
biological weapons issues: "And it is being guided by
very narrow, shortsighted tactical concerns. If the
United States is allowed to continue to develop
[calmatives] sooner or later we are going to be
employing artillery shells and aerial bombs [loaded with
calmatives]. And we are going to have troops trained to
use them. If the United States does this, other
countries will follow suit. The long-term implications
are quite profound." According to Wheelis, it amounts to
no less than "preparing for chemical war".
As
British chemical warfare expert Alastair Hay noted,
Rumsfeld, in his testimony, referred to the CWC as a
"straitjacket" limiting US options in war. What the US
should be able to do, Rumsfeld claims, is resort to the
use of non-lethal agents in combat situations when
civilians are present and when there is a need to
preserve life. He gave two examples. The first was "when
transporting dangerous people in a confined space", such
as within an aircraft. The second was when "women and
children" are trapped with enemy troops "in a cave".
Most nations consider that such action is
forbidden by international law. The CWC explicitly
forbids the use of riot-control agents, except for
domestic law enforcement purposes. Under the CWC, these
and other chemicals can also be used for policing
operations if domestic national law permits them. The
exemption applies only to those policing operations and
not to any external armed conflict. It would be
stretching credulity to argue that the current conflict
with Iraq is a simple policing operation. Furthermore,
US armed forces are forbidden by the Posse Comitatus Act
of 1878 and related regulations from domestic law
enforcement.
"Calmative" gases could also be
employed in Iraq. These are commonly referred to as
"incapacitating agents", and have been in the news since
their use in the rescue of hostages held in a Moscow
theater in October 2002. Non-lethal weapons advocates
called it a success as most of the hostages were
rescued. But it should be pointed out that around 16
percent (120) of the hostages died from the effects of
the chemical agent (as well as all of the captors, who
were executed by security forces while they were
comatose).
Such lethal consequences are
inevitable. When any substance is delivered through the
air it is impossible to control individual doses. The
fact that surgery patients periodically die while under
anesthesia, which is a far more controlled situation
than would occur with NLW use on the battlefield,
illustrates the impossibility of using calmatives
without causing fatalities.
In fact, as an
analysis by the Federation of American Scientists (FAS)
points out, a categorical distinction between lethal and
non-lethal agents is not scientifically feasible. Not
only are certain individuals more susceptible to some
agents, but synergy between two different non-lethal
agents may make their combination highly lethal to
everyone. Rational strategies to discover such
synergistic pairs will soon be available. Thus, the
development of multiple non-lethal agents may provide a
lethal chemical warfare capability, illustrating the
importance of their development to the integrity of the
Chemical Weapons Convention. Even without synergism,
stockpiles of non-lethal weapons and munitions would
defeat a fundamental goal of the convention, to exclude
completely the possibility of the use of chemical
weapons by preventing states from entering a war with a
stockpile of chemical weapons whose use is proscribed,
but which might nevertheless be employed under pressure
of military necessity.
This should not come as a
surprise. According to Julian Perry Robinson, director
of the Harvard Sussex Program on chemical and biological
warfare at the University of Sussex in England, Britain
abandoned its program at the Porton Down research
center, active in the 1960s, to seek a usable calmative
agent related to fentanyl. One reason was that
scientists could not find an agent that would come close
to the 2 percent lethality limit it required of
"non-lethal" agents. The US army also destroyed stocks
of the incapacitant it developed, BZ, a hallucinogen,
because of its unreliable effects.
Indeed, even
a report released in November 2002 by the US National
Research Council, that was generally sympathetic to the
idea of NLW use, stated: "Chemical non-lethal weapons
programs that deliver chemical contaminants to a crowd -
other than riot control agents - would likely fail in
meeting the Hague requirement for 'distinction' as the
delivery method is not isolated and/or cannot be
controlled well enough to prevent the chemical
contaminants from affecting people who are not related
to the intended military target. It is unlikely that
calmatives in their current form will be lawful under
international law, when used in warfighting situations."
In the Moscow theater siege, at around 16
percent, the lethality of the chemical calmatives was
comparable to that of conventional lethal technologies,
such as firearms in military combat (typically about 35
percent), artillery (20 percent), or fragmentation
grenades (10 percent). In fact, "lethal" chemical
weapons are comparable; in World War I, the lethality of
gas was about 7 percent. All currently available
chemical incapacitating agents would certainly fall into
this range in normal use, and thus must be considered
lethal technologies, in the same category as traditional
chemical weapons.
FAS developed a mathematical
model to predict fatalities from such agents which found
that when an incapacitating agent that is exceptionally
safe by pharmacological standards (therapeutic index
(TI) =1000) is delivered under ideal conditions to a
uniformly healthy population, 9 percent of victims would
die if the goal were to incapacitate almost everyone (99
percent) in a particular place (often an enclosed
space), as in hostage rescue or urban military
operations.
Pharmaceutical substances are seen
by some as the key to a new generation of anti-personnel
weapons. Although it has denied such research in the
past, a Pentagon program has recently released more
information confirming that it wants to deploy
pharmaceutical weapons.
According to a report by
Dr Steven Wright, director of the Omega Foundation in
the UK, the US military search for calmatives has been
increasing. These include benzodiazepines, alpha2
adrenoreceptor antagonists, dopamine D3 receptor
agonists, serotonin selective reuptake inhibitors,
serotonin 5-Ht receptor agonists, opioid receptors and
mu agonists, neuroleptic anaesthetics,
corticotrophin-releasing factor receptor antagonists and
cholecystokinin B receptor antagonists as well as a
range of convulsants, illegal club drugs and what are
blandly called orphan pharmaceuticals - essentially
drugs too dangerous to get past medical review boards
but with a potential weapons role, assuming civilians
can be regarded as expendable.
The physical
effects of such agents are not the only problem they
present. Other potential adverse impacts include:
Development of chemical incapacitants by one country
will encourage others to follow suit. As a result,
incapacitants would become an available temptation to
the military in many countries for illegal use in armed
conflict.
Further, incapacitants in the hands of
the military were routinely used in Vietnam as adjuncts,
not alternatives, to lethal force. Such use was later
determined to violate the rules of war, as subsequently
codified in the 1977 Additional Protocol I Related to
the Protection of Victims of International Armed
Conflicts and two earlier international treaties.
And once developed, chemical incapacitants are
likely to proliferate to terrorists and other non-state
actors, thereby increasing their lethal reach. According
to the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, tear gas was
used 27 times in 1999 by non-state actors.
A
report to the European Parliament in 2000 warned of such
developments and recommended that all EU countries adopt
the UK standard, known as the Himmsworth Committee
recommendations, namely that all chemicals being
considered for riot control and law enforcement should
be considered as drugs and subject to the same safety
checks, and that this research should be openly
published in scientific journals in advance of any
authorization of usage. In the case of calmatives, such
caveats are vital, as one person's tranquilization is
another person's lethal dose.
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