Global ban on chemical weapons takes effect

WASHINGTON, April 30: A global ban on chemical weapons took effect yesterday with several key nations absent from the list of more than 80 ...

WASHINGTON, April 30: A global ban on chemical weapons took effect yesterday with several key nations absent from the list of more than 80 that have ratified it — notably Russia and Iraq, the only two besides the United States to admit having chemical arms.

The ban, hailed by arms-control advocates as a step toward a safer world, does not eliminate the threat posed by poison gas and other chemical agents. Indeed, some fear these will increasingly be a weapon of choice for terrorists.

In a well-publicized drill that underscored this concern, a specially assembled US Marine Corps unit demonstrated in Washington yesterday how it would respond to a chemical or biological weapon attack by terrorists on a city.

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It is the threat of terrorist attack not a deliberate chemical assault by the forces of a foreign government that most concerns the Clinton administration. The treaty, known as the Chemical Weapons Convention, outlaws the development, production, possession, transfer or use of chemical weapons.

Russia has signed the treaty but its Parliament has not ratified it. A Pentagon report three months ago said Russian pesticide processing plants offer “easy potential” for secret production of a new generation of chemical weapons.

The US and Russia both have pledged to destroy their entire stocks of chemical weapons, but that task is proving more difficult and costly than either had anticipated. The US expects to spend at least 12.4 billion dlrs to get rid of its chemical weapons by the end of 2004.

The Senate ratified the treaty last Thursday, more than four years after former President Bush signed it, but doubts remain that Russia will follow suit. All NATO countries, plus Japan and China, have ratified the treaty, but several countries perceived as hostile to the US have not even signed it. These include Iraq, Syria, Libya and North Korea, which has large numbers of chemical weapons stored near the demilitarized zone that divides it from South Korea.

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In all, more than 160 countries have signed the treaty and more than 80 have ratified it.

The latest to act was Kuwait, whose Parliament ratified it yesterday. Kuwait sees itself as especially vulnerable. Iraq, which invaded Kuwait in 1990, had a large clandestine chemical weapons programme, and it remains unclear whether the Iraqis actually used some of those weapons during the Persian Gulf war in 1991.