UNITED STATES SENATE, COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN RELATIONS, Hon. MELVIN LAIRD, DEAR MR. SECRETARY: The Committee on Foreign Relations has decided to take up the Geneva Protocol early in this session of Congress. The Secretary of State has been invited to open these hearings, preferably during the last week in February. In addition to his testimony the Committee would like to hear your views on the Protocol and those of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. If you and Admiral Moorer can accept, I am confident that our staffs can work out dates which are acceptable to all concerned. Sincerely yours, J. W. FULBRIGHT, Chairman. Senator SPARKMAN. Before the committee announced its hearings on the protocol the committee staff was informally advised that both Secretary Laird and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were agreeable to appearing, subject only to the fixing of precise dates and at a satisfactory time. Subsequently, the staff was advised that Secretary Laird's schedule would not permit him to appear and that Assistant Secretary Nutter would testify in his place. Thus far there has been no further indication from the Joint Chiefs of Staff with regard to possible testimony from them concerning the protocol. Informally the staff is advised that the Chiefs now do not plan to testify. Senator Nelson, would you take the witness chair. We are very glad to hear from you. Will you proceed at this time. STATEMENT OF HON. GAYLORD NELSON, U.S. SENATOR FROM WISCONSIN Senator NELSON. Mr. Chairman, I would have been happy, and I am sure Mr. McCarthy would have been happy, to have deferred to Mr. Nutter so that he could give his two-page testimony and get to his luncheon. I regret that the Defense Department isn't here this morning because I would like to hear their testimony in juxtaposition to Mr. McCarthy's testimony and my own on the precise question of the use of herbicides as an instrument of warfare. My remarks will be addressed in the main to the understanding I have offered to the protocol, and I would ask so that we might save time I would ask that my statement be printed in full in the record and that I may omit some of it. Senator SPARKMAN. That will be done and you can treat it as you see fit. U.S. USE OF CHEMICAL HERBICIDES IN VIETNAM Senator NELSON. Mr. Chairman, 9 years ago, the United States began a new chapter in the annals of war by adding chemical herbicides to our arsenal of weapons in Vietnam. At first these chemicals were used on a modest scale to destroy vegetation in which the enemy hid, particularly along roads. As U.S. participation in the war mounted, our use of herbicides grew rapidly. Vast forest regions were sprayed from the air to deny cover to the enemy. The program was extended to food crops said to be for use by enemy troops. FINDINGS OF HERBICIDE ASSESSMENT COMMISSION Last December, a special commission sent to Vietnam by the American Association for the Advancement of Science made public a preliminary report on the extent of the program and the damage done. Among other findings at that time of this herbicide assessment commission were these: Over the past 9 years approximately one-seventh of the land area of South Vietnam had been sprayed with chemical herbicides for purposes of defoliation and crop destruction. This is an area the size of the State of Massachusetts. Southwest of Saigon and along much of the coast of the delta lie dense mangrove forests, covering about 3,000 square kilometers. Probably half of these forests were sprayed. In areas checked from the air and on the ground essentially all vegetation was killed and there had been little regrowth of mangrove trees after more than 3 years. Such areas could no longer support most bird and animal life normally found there. Approximately one-fifth of South Vietnam's marketable hardwood forests had been sprayed. A commission summary said: "Aerial inspection of forests in a wide arc north of Saigon extending from the Cambodian frontier in the west to the South China Sea on the east showed more than half of the forest to be very severely damaged. Over large areas, most of the trees appeared dead and bamboo had spread over the ground." The commission warned that this worthless bamboo could be expensive to eradicate and could retard the reestablishment of hardwood trees. The commission said 2,000 square kilometers of land in South Vietnam had been sprayed to destroy food crops. It estimated that this entailed the destruction of enough food to feed about 600,000 persons for a year. "Our observations in Vietnam," the commission said, "lead us to believe that the precautions to avoid destroying the crops of indigenous civilian populations have been a failure and that nearly all of the food destroyed would actually have been consumed by such populations." The group said that though the food destroyed amounted to less than 2 percent of the national crop in any one year, the spraying had been concentrated in the food-scarce Central Highlands, the home of Montagnard tribesmen. "We believe," the commission said, "the anticrop program may have had a profound impact on a large fraction of the total Montagnard population of South Vietnam and we believe this to be a point for urgent consideration." We undertook this unprecedented herbicidal warfare without knowing what the long-range consequences would be. We still know little about the extent of food contamination or the effects on South Vietnamese health. The commission collected samples of shrimp, fish, human milk and various foods to check them for contamination. At last report it was still in the process of developing methods of analysis. It noted an increase in the stillbirth rate at Tay Ninh City Provincial Hospital, located in an area of defoliation. But it said that without further study in both defoliated and nondefoliated areas the significance could not be assessed. CONDUCT AND EXTENT OF HERBICIDE PROGRAM The herbicide program was conducted with utter disregard for the possible long-range effects on the ecology of Southeast Asia-effects such as "laterization," or irreversible hardening of soil no longer protected from sun; the poisoning of aquatic life by runoff into the waterways; the elimination of species of animals; or the replacement of one kind of vegetation by another. We still do not know what the extent of the ecological damage will be. From the beginning of the program up to the latter part of last year, the United States sprayed an incredible amount, more than 100 million pounds of herbicide on Vietnam. Since the population of South Vietnam is about 18 million, our use of herbicides amounted to about 6 pounds for every man, woman, and child in that country. The program reached a peak in 1967, when 1,486,446 acres were sprayed for defoliation and 221,312 acres for crop destruction. In April 1970, after evidence came to light that 2,4,5-T, widely used as a commercial herbicide in the United States, caused birth defects in test animals, the Defense Department halted use in Vietnam of compound Orange, which contained 2,4,5-T. By August 1970, the Vietnam herbicide program had been cut back to a quarter of its peak size. PHASE-OUT OF HERBICIDE OPERATIONS Now the program is being ended. On December 26, 1970, the White House announced plans for "an orderly, yet rapid phase-out of the herbicide operations." During this phase-out it said, the use of herbicides in Vietnam "will be restricted to perimeter of fire bases and U.S. installations or remote, unpopulated areas." Since then the use of herbicides for crop destruction has been ended. No date for ending the remaining program was given. There have been reports that officials planned to terminate it this spring or summer, but this has not been stated formally to my knowledge. POSSIBLE CONSEQUENCES OF U.S. USE OF HERBICIDES Our own use of herbicides in Vietnam appears to be ending. But what have we begun? Will other nations in future wage environmental warfare? And if so, what will be the consequences to the planet on which we live? To begin with, it is possible that the South Vietnamese armed forces will continue at least some military uses of herbicides. On January 26, 1971, as part of replies to a series of questions, the Department of Defense wrote my office that: "We do not know what plans the GVN may have for the future military use of herbicides." Furthermore, if the United States is going to insist on the right to use this weapon, other countries will follow our lead, and we will see a worldwide proliferation of herbicides as a weapon of warfare. Japan recently ratified the protocol, adopting no formal reservation on the subject of herbicides, but agreeing with the U.S. interpretation in a statement måde by the Japanese Government in the Diet. Compared with other weapons, herbicides are cheap. Those used for military purposes are made of the same chemicals manufactured as a commercial herbicide. These can be purchased on the open market in a number of countries, including the United States, France, Italy, West Germany, Britain, the Soviet Union, Poland and Czechoslovakia. Spray tanks can be purchased in a number of countries and can be installed in many kinds of aircraft. With a modest investment, any developing country, say in Asia, Africa or Latin America, could wage environmental war on its neighbor. It could destroy a food supply and bring starvation. It could pollute fishing grounds. It could destroy cash crops on which a country's economy depended. The worldwide environmental consequences of this kind of warfare could be disastrous. The life cycle of nature could be disrupted on a vast scale, as I suspect they have already been disrupted in South Vietnam. Continents could be devastated and oceans polluted. For all these reasons, environmental war should be expressly outlawed under international law. RATIFICATION OF PROTOCOL URGED One way to accomplish this would be to seek a new international treaty on the subject. But that would take time. A quicker way would be to work for general acceptance among nations of the premise that the Geneva Protocol of 1925, which bans gas and biological warfare, also outlaws military use of herbicides. To bring this about, the first thing we must do is ratify the protocol. The protocol prohibits use in war of "asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases, and of all analogous liquids, materials or devices," and also prohibits "the use of bacteriological methods of warfare." It does not ban production of such weapons. It was signed at Geneva on June 17, 1925. The United States had proposed it and was one of the signatories. But it was never ratified by the U.S. Senate. More than 90 other countries have ratified it, including all of NATO except the United States, all of the Warsaw Pact including the Soviet Union, plus Japan, both Chinas, Israel and the United Arab Republic. President Nixon, to his credit, has placed it again before the Senate for advice and consent. It deserves prompt approval. CHANGING PRESENT U.S. OFFICIAL INTERPRETATION URGED The second thing we must do is change the present official U.S. interpretation of the protocol with respect to herbicides. A letter by Secretary of State William P. Rogers, dated August 11, 1970, which accompanied the protocol to the Senate states: It is the United States understanding of the Protocol that it does not prohibit the use in war of riot control agents and chemical herbicides. Smoke, flame and napalm are also not covered by the Protocol. When that letter was written, the United States was still in the midst of its herbicide program in Vietnam. The administration hardly wanted the protocol to go to the Senate with the interpretation that it banned this program. But now that we are phasing out the herbicide program by spring we have nothing to lose by taking the position that herbicides are banned by the protocol. To this end, I reintroduced in the Senate on January 29 Understanding No. 1 on the Executive Calendar. It would express the view of the Senate that the protocol outlaws military use of herbicides. It says: At the end of the resolution of ratification, insert the following: "It is the understanding of the Senate, which understanding inheres in its advice and consent to the ratification of the protocol, that the terms of the protocol prohibit the use in war of chemical herbicides." The protocol does not explicitly mention herbicides. It speaks of "other gases" and "all analogous liquids, materials or devices." Though herbicides may have been known in 1925, they had not been used in war. VIEWS OF MAJORITY OF WORLD'S GOVERNMENTS A great majority of the world's governments have said they think herbicides are outlawed by the protocol. On December 16, 1969, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution which said that "any chemical agents of warfare" which "might be employed because of their direct toxic effects on man, animals or plants" were outlawed by generally recognized rules of international law embodied in the protocol. It was passed 80 to 3 with 36 abstentions. Only Australia and Portugal voted with the United States in opposition and, incidentally, Portugal is the only other country in the world that I am aware of that has engaged in this kind of warfare, in Angola. The abstentions included most of our NATO allies and Japan. But the debate did not indicate that they wanted the right themselves to use herbicides in war. Canada gave as one of its reasons for abstention the following: It would, in our view, be an undesirable complication to seek to interpret the protocol, to which the widest possible adherence is being sought, at the very moment when a major power known not to agree with that interprétation has expressed its intention to ratify the Geneva proocol. WHAT HAS UNITED STATES TO LOSE? Now that we are ending our use of herbicides in Vietnam, what could we possibly have to lose by a world-wide understanding that such warfare is banned? How could we be disadvantaged? We certainly don't need herbicides to defend the United States. Last August Senator Charles Goodell and I introduced two amendments on herbicides to the Military Authorization Bill. One of these, Amendment No. 784, would have ended military use and procurement of herbicides by the United States. It was defeated 62-22. The second, Amendment No. 863, would have banned the U.S. crop destruction program only. It was defeated 48-33. During that debate, the argument used in behalf of the Defense Department was that the herbicide program was saving American lives. This argument could also of course be used for employing mustard gas or nuclear weapons in Vietnam. At any rate, it is not a relevant argument now that the herbicide program is being phased out. Quite obviously, at the time of the August debate, the U.S. Armed Forces were in the process of rapidly reducing their use of herbicides |