the next round of talks starting later this month. But among the neutrals there must now be suspicion, rightly or wrongly, that Britain's exclusion of CS from the gas protocol is due not so much to Mr. Healey's internal security argument as to a British move to legitimise the use of CS gas in Vietnam. (The US has never signed the Geneva protocol, but there are grounds for believing that if Vietnam operations were not interfered with, it could be persuaded to subscribe.) This apparent deviation from the impartial course that Britain has hitherto followed at Geneva could wreck not only the Convention itself but all other British initiatives in a field in which the United Kingdom has come to play a leading part. It is not too late for the Government to change its mind about CS. The argument which raged in the Cabinet throughout December and January is proof of the strength of feeling among Ministers. To put things right, it is only necessary to acknowledge-what everybody knows-that there is a difference between the use of tear gas for riot-control and the use of any gas in the uncontrolled conditions of war.

[From The New York Times, Dec. 6, 1969]

UNITED STATES NOW USES TEAR GAS AS ROUTINE WAR WEAPON

(By Ralph Blumenthal)

Saigon, South Vietnam, Dec. 5-Several years after the first American use of tear gas here provoked widespread condemnation, the gas is being used routinely by United States and South Vietnamese troops to flush out suspected enemy troops.

The practice, which has been no secret here, was confirmed today in interviews with United States military spokesmen. Critics in the United States of the war have complained of the practice and have insisted that it should have been included in President Nixon's recent ban on the offensive use of chemical weapons and on all development or use of bacteriological weapons. The White House made it clear that Mr. Nixon exempted the use of tear gas.

Current official confirmation of the use of tear gas marks a departure from a shifting policy of denying that gas was being used.

NO NEW LIMITATIONS

United States authorities here said there were no new limitations on the use of tear gas following the President's pledge on Nov. 25 to desist from chemical and germ warfare.

The two types of gas used, according to military spokesmen, are CN, a tear gas that produces intense burning of the eyes and face but is not lethal, and CS, a stronger irritant that may induce nausea in concentrated quantities but also is not lethal.

A third type-DM, or Adamsite, which can be deadly in extreme concentrations-reportedly has been prepared for use here on occasion but a spokesman said he had no knowledge of its use.

Apparently anticipating renewed inquiries about the use of gas in Vietnam, American authorities on Sept. 23 drew up a statement to be read to inquiries. It said:

"There is a continuing effort to use the most effective tactics and weapons in every combat situation in Vietnam to hold U.S. and Republic of Vietnam armed forces casualties to the absolute minimum.”

ONLY A SPLIT SECOND

The statement continued: "This effort can include the use of riot-control agents, either tear gas or CS. These agents have been used in the Republic of Vietnam to drive enemy personnel from caves, tunnels and fortified positions. It has also been used on occasions when the enemy has infiltrated into population centers, built up areas, and is suspected of holding innocent civilian hostages.

"Enemy troops who are driven from their bunkers or fortified positions and who do not surrender and who continue to fight are engaged as any dangerous armed enemy would be. Since the effects of the riot-control agents last only a few minutes it is not uncommon for the enemy to resume shooting at our soldiers.

"In short, the riot-control agents are employed when they will help save the lives of noncombatants and soldiers of the free-world military forces. The use of riot-control agents also permits rendering the enemy ineffective and subject to capture without taking his life when the situation permits."

In theory, according to the statement, enemy troops who are flushed out are to be given a chance to surrender. Often, in practice, according to men who have witnessed field operations, American sodiers have only a split second to determine whether the people flushed out are surrendering or fighting so the Americans may shoot rather than take chances.

One officer at the United States military headquarters, here said: "Sometimes it happens but that's not the way it's supposed to be done. Normally we try to capture them. Maybe they could lead us to others or to caches."

The tear gas, a headquarters spokesman said, is usually introduced into the suspected enemy retreats by gas hand grenades. They are available to all units at the lowest level and do not require special authorization for use, he said. The tear gas is also spread by helicopters, the spokesman said. The purpose of such widespread gas dispersion, according to those who have witnessed it, is to force suspected enemy troops out of protected areas and into clearings where they are vulnerable to air strikes or allied ground attacks.

The gas CN, developed during World War I, has the chemical name of chloroacetrophenone. CS, known chemically as o-chlorobenzalmalononitrile, and reportedly developed by the British in the nineteen-fifties, is employed here in the forms of CS-1, a more persistent gas, and CS-2.

The gas DM or adamsite, known chemically as diphenylaminochloroarsine, was developed by the Germans in World War II. It contains arsenic, causes acute sneezing and coughing and, in high concentrations, can lead to death.

United States military authorities say enemy troops have occasionally fired mortar shells filled with a CS-type gas at American troops. They have also thrown back captured United States gas grenades.

American soldiers are equipped with gas masks in Vietnam. Some North Vietnamese soldiers carry Chinese-made gas masks while the Vietcong sometimes carry improvised-and often ineffective-plastic masks.

American spokesmen said they were unable to say how much tear gas the United States has used. A correspondent in Washington reported in September that the United States purchased almost six million pounds of tear gas for use in South Vietnam in the fiscal year ended last June 30.

The United States has also used defoliants in the Vietnam war to destroy the vegetation that affords sanctuary to the enemy.

The defoliants come in three types and are said to cause no permanent damage to shrubbery or injury to humans. The United States is reported to have turned over more than 100 million pounds of the chemicals to the South Vietnamese for defoliation so far.

The Geneva protocol of 1925, which the United States has never ratified but says it supports, prohibits the first use in war of "asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases and bacteriological methods of warfare."

The United States has maintained that tear gases or riot control agents are not covered by the prohibition.

[From The New York Times, Dec. 11, 1969]

U.N. REBUFFS UNITED STATES ON TEAR GAS USE

VOTE DECLARES GENEVA PACT ALSO BANS DEFOLIANTS

UNITED NATIONS, N.Y., Dec. 10.-The United States suffered a new setback today in the United Nations debate on disarmament when the General Assembly's Political Committee declared that the wartime use of all chemicals-including tear gas and defoliants-was prohibited by international convention.

The committee's action, in an overwhelming vote, in effect reflected attitudes toward the United States policies in Vietnam, where tear gas and defoliants are being used.

Two weeks ago President Nixon solemnly renounced the use of biological weapons and all use of chemical weapons, except defensively, but he made it clear that this renunciation did not extend to tear gas and defoliants.

The action of the committee is certain to influence the forthcoming debate in Congress on ratification of the 1925 Geneva protocol on "poisonous gases and bacteriological methods of warfare."

Today's vote was on a Swedish resolution declaring that the "generally recognized rules of international law as embodied in the Geneva protocol" prohibit the use of "any chemical agents of warfare in international armed conflicts."

The vote was 58 in favor of the resolution, 3 against and 35 abstentions. The United States, Australia and Portugal voted against the resolution. The Soviet Union voted for it.

Britain and France abstained. Because the composition of the General Assembly is the same as that of the committee, the Assembly is expected to endorse the vote. James F. Leonard, the United States representatives, objected to the Swedish resolution on the ground that the General Assembly had no right to interpret internationl treaties and conventions. Mr. Leonard is the chief United States representative at the Geneva Disarmament Conference.

"For the Assembly now to arrogate to itself the right to resolve by majority voting a matter of deep dispute and differing interpretation of international law” was a "disservice to the international community," Mr. Leonard said.

He argued that the protocol had long been subject to differing interpretations that efforts to "resolve this ambiguity" had been unsuccessful before.

The administration takes the position that today's action by the Assembly's committee is merely a recommendation and therefore not binding on the United States Government.

Informed sources said that President Nixon would reaffirm the Administration's contention that the Geneva protocol did not preclude the use of tear gas and defoliants in Vietnam. The President three weeks ago declared his intention to ask Congress for ratification of the protocol.

[From The New York Times, Dec. 12, 1969]

UNITED STATES CRITICIZES VOTE IN U.N. ON MEANING OF CHEMICAL WARFARE BAN WASHINGTON, DEC. 11-The State Department asserted today that a majority vote yesterday in a United Nations committee interpreting a Geneva convention as banning the war-time use of all chemicals-including tear gas and defoliants— could not be regarded as "international consensus."

This comment was made by Carl E. Bartch, the State Department's spokesman, in connection with yesterday's action by the United Nations General Assembly's Political Committee, which approved a Swedish resolution putting such an interpretation on the 1925 General Protocol on "poisonous gases and bacteriological methods of warfare."

The resolution was approved by 58 votes to 3 with 35 abstentions. The United States was joined by Australia and Portugal in opposing the resolution on the ground that the Assembly had no right to interpret international treaties and conventions.

Mr. Bartch said the majority vote "does not in our view represent international consensus on the main issues raised by the resolution" because fewer than onehalf of the United Nations' 126 members supported it and one-third dissociated themselves from it by abstaining.

He said that in the opinion of the United States, the Geneva Protocol does not "prohibit the use in war of tear gas and herbicides" and that "we maintain that the United Nations General Assembly is not the proper forum to decide such disputed questions of international law."

The United States has been using tear gas and defoliation agents in the Vietnam war. When President Nixon announced on Nov. 25 that the United States had decided to renounce "the use of lethal biological agents and weapons, and all other methods of biological warfare," Administration officials made it clear that tear gas and herbicides were not considered as such.

The same reservation is expected to be attached to the Administration's request to the Senate to ratify the 1925 Geneva Protocol.

Questioned whether Mr. Bartch's assertion that the absence of "international consensus" in yesterday's majority action represented a departure from the United States' attitude toward United Nations voting procedures, the State Department's legal advisers said the Swedish resolution constituted a "law-making" or "law-declaring" intent and had to be considered in a special light.

They said that in this context "international consensus" was meant as "unanimity" or "near unanimity" that the United States and many others considered necessary when the United Nations dealt with matters of international law.

[From Australian Outlook, vol. 24, August 1970]

CHEMICAL AND BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS: THE PROSPECTS FOR ARMS CONTROL (Hedley Bull*)

I propose to try to answer four questions:

(i) To what extent are chemical and biological weapons strategically or militarily useful or effective?

(ii) How great a danger do these weapons represent to the peace and security of the world and, accordingly, how important is it that an attempt be made to subject them to control?

(iii) What are in fact the prospects of effective arms control measures in relation to chemical and biological weapons?

(iv) Does Australia have a sound policy in relation to chemical and biological warfare?

THE STRATEGIC UTILITY OF CBW

It is as well to recognise that in talking of chemical and biological weapons we are in fact speaking of many different weapons, with many different uses and many different degrees of strategic utility. Chemical and biological weapons do have one central common property, and this is that they are uniquely anti-life : unlike nuclear weapons, and conventional weapons such as high explosive, they destroy or impair life without at the same time destroying things; indeed, it is one of the advantages commonly claimed for certain of these weapons that a military force equipped with them is able to kill or incapacitate an enemy force defending, say, a fortified position, a town or an airfield, while at the same time preserving that fortified position, town or airfield, so that it can be captured intact.1

However, while there is this common property of all chemical and biological weapons, the differences are more striking than the resemblances:

(i) In the first place there is the difference between chemical and biological weapons themselves. Chemical weapons are defined in the recent report of the UN Secretary-General as "chemical substances, whether gaseous, liquid or solid, which might be employed because of their direct toxic effects on men, animals and plants." (It is notable that in discussions of this problem, chemical weapons are always defined in such a way as to exclude non-toxic chemical weapons, such as incendiaries, which have always been a familiar aspect of warfare, and are counted as conventioned weapons.) Biological weapons (including both bacterial weapons and other living organisms such as rickettsiae and fungi, that can be used as agents of war) are defined the "living organisms, whatever their nature, or infective material derived from them, which are intended to cause disease or death in man, animals and plants, and which depend for their effects on their ability to multiply in the person, animal or plant attacked." The UN report treats toxins-which are poisonous substances produced by living organisms, such as snake venom-as chemical rather than biological because they do not multiply.)

Biological agents are, on a weight-for-weight basis, far more deadly than chemical weapons, primarily if we take into account their infectious or contagious

*Professor of International Relations, Australian National University. This paper was presented at the Symposium on Chemical and Biological Warfare held at Sydney University on Mar. 3 and 5, 1970 under the auspices of the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science.

1 It is true that fire destroys things as well as life. But, as is noted below, fire is one of the most customary means of wreaking destruction in warfare, and has always been considered to lie outside "chemical and biological warfare."

2 Chemical and Bacteriological (Biological) Weapons and the Effects of their Possible Use, Report of the Secretary-General, New York, 1969, p. 5. This document, prepared with the assistance of experts from 14 countries, is the most authoritative technical survey available. It does reflect, however, the desire to emphasise the dangers of CBW, so as to galvanise action to reduce them; and it is notably silent on matters that might give offence to members of the UN, such as the use of chemical warfare agents by Italy in Abyasinia, Japan in China, and the United Arab Republic in Yemen.

quality. But chemical weapons are much quicker to produce their injurious effects; while biological agents require an incubation period which may be a matter of weeks, and depend on conditions favourable to contagion, chemical agents, once they are delivered, may produce an instantaneous effect. Chemical weapons, moreover, are much more controllable than biological weapons, in the sense that the nature and extent of the damage they cause is much more predictable. This reflects the fact that there has been considerable experience in chemical warfare in this century, especially in the First World War, whereas there has been little or possibly no experience of biological warfare (there have been a number of allegations of biological warfare, but none has been clearly substantiated).

(ii) In the second place, chemical and biological weapons vary enormously in their destructive effect, ranging from, at one extreme, weapons that are clearly in the range of "weapons of mass destruction", to, at the other extreme, weapons which are, at least in intention, non-lethal, and whose chief virtue is said to be that they (in the salesman's language of the U.S. Chemical Corps) "take death out of war". The Secretary-General's Report quite rightly points out that the distinction between lethal and non-lethal agents is not absolute but rather refers to "statistical probabilities of response". Whether a given agent is lethal may well depend, for example, on the strength of the dose and the health of the victim. Nevertheless, there are certain chemical agents which are at least in intention non-lethal, and these include both incapacitating agents, and "harassing" or "riot control" agents. Some chemical weapons, of course, are directed against animals or plants rather than human beings.

(iii) Chemical and biological weapons are in fact capable of playing a role in almost every kind of violent conflict. Delivered in aerosol form by bombers or missiles, chemical or biological agents (given the solution of certain technical problems) might be used like nuclear explosives as the principal destructive ingredient in a strategic weapons system designed to destroy enemy centres of population. Delivered by short-range missiles, aircraft, artillery, mortars or grenades, they might play a role in tactical combat between opposing surface forces, as poison gases did in the First World War. In Vietnam it has been demonstrated that harassing agents, defoliants and anti-crop chemicals have a role in wars of counterinsurgency. It is sometimes suggested that chemical and biological agents might make possible a new, clandestine type of warfare, in which saboteurs would contaminate water-supplies or air-conditioning systems. The most widespread use of chemical weapons is the employment of agents such as tear gas, CS or CN by governments throughout the world to control domestic disturbances.

A few states (including, until recently, the United States, the Soviet Union and probably China) maintain a capacity for biological warfare, many states have a capacity for chemical warfare, and every state that takes defence seriously at all may be assumed to devote at least some attention to the problem of defence against chemical or biological attack, in the sense that it seeks to assess the likelihood of an attack, and studies how an attack could be identified and coped with by measures of public health. It is clearly the judgment of the governments of the world that CBW does have some measure of strategic or military utility.

There is, however, a tendency vastly to exaggerate the effectiveness of chemical and biological weapons, and especially to exaggerate their utility as strategic weapons designed to threaten centres of population. Exponents of what may be called the spine-chilling or horror-story approach to disarmament often conjure up a vision of CBW as the supreme weapon of mass destruction, comparable with or even superior to the multi-megaton thermonuclear explosives with which the United States and the Soviet Union are now equipped. This is quite mistaken. Chemical and biological weapons are no substitute for a strategic nuclear force. A modern strategic nuclear force has two functions. The first is to pose the threat of destruction and devastation to the population and industrial capacity of the opposing nation: the function which in United States parlance is referred to as that of "assured destruction". The second function is to strike at, and if possible destroy or cripple, the strategic forces of the other side, before they are brought into action against one's own population and industrial capacity: this is the function which in American strategic doctrine is called "damage limitation". Chemical and biological weapons are grossly inferior to nuclear weapons in the "assured destruction" or "counter-city" role. The destructive effects of nuclear