“SO you’re telling me that killing people with gas is a crime against humanity,” says the doing the rounds on the internet. “But killing them with bullets, grenades, bombs and missiles is not?”
Good question, kid. Syria’s civil war has killed some 100,000 people over the past two years. No foreign power intervened until the US threatened strikes after the gas attack in August that killed hundreds. Washington has now backtracked and is effectively working with the Assad regime to scrap chemical weapons (CW).
That at least is good: CW are repulsive, have clearly been used in Syria, and could be captured by terrorists. But as 91av went to press, there was no end in sight to the war or the world’s biggest refugee nightmare.
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So the kid seems to be right. It appears to be OK to kill and wound people with conventional weapons, and even some kinds of , but not mustard gas or the nerve agent sarin.
It seems an obscene hypocrisy. Yet unlikely as it seems, the path to Syria’s chemical disarmament might turn into a more general road to peace.
“Unlikely as it seems, Syria’s chemical disarmament might turn into a more general path to peace”
To understand why, we must start with the first world war. Of all that war’s many horrors, the one that most scandalised people was gas. The result was the banning the use of CW in battle.
That did not stop combatants in the second world war stockpiling them; indeed, Nazi chemists invented sarin. But no one used them. That was partly because bombs were more reliable killers than drifting clouds of gas. But the Geneva Protocol created the idea that some weapons are beyond the pale. Even Hitler, wounded by gas in 1918 and not known for respecting international agreements, obeyed.
Then came the cold war. The 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty tried to limit nuclear weapons to the five nations that had them already. There are now four more – but experts say there would have been a dozen or more without the treaty.
The 1970 treaty introduced another idea: verification – in other words, empirical investigations to ensure treaty members weren’t cheating. International inspectors armed with science track uranium and detect bomb tests. Verification was added to the “norm” against CW with the 1997 .
Both treaties, and their many cousins, have limitations. But in a world where sovereign states routinely disregard their to make war only with UN permission, arms control treaties are almost the only means we have to intervene in other people’s wars.
It almost worked in Iraq. Saddam Hussein used CW with virtual impunity in the 1980s. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, the UN sanctioned military action. It then sent in inspectors, mostly civilian scientists, to find and destroy Saddam’s CW, long-range missiles and alleged nuclear and bioweapons programmes.
Some have forgotten – 3700 tonnes of CW and precursor chemicals, missiles, a biological weapons factory and a that could have made a weapon within the decade. But Saddam evicted the inspectors before they could verify that everything was gone.
In 2002, they went back to try again but Saddam did not want his weakness exposed and did not answer questions. Hans Blix, who led the mission, has told me that with more time, his team could have established that Iraq had no forbidden weapons left. But an impatient US and its allies claimed otherwise and invaded. They found no weapons.
If it really was only about the weapons, Iraq could have been fought as a proxy war between scientists – Saddam’s weapons labs versus the verifiers. A verifier victory would have left Saddam in place, but defanged and under permanent surveillance with his people ready for regime change. A better result? Arguably.
Now CW are again an issue in a Middle East conflict, and the world has another chance to turn it into a proxy war between scientists. If Syria, in its newfound embrace of the Chemical Weapons Convention, is to destroy its sarin and mustard gas and the means to make them, it will need inspectors and ceasefires, plus peacekeepers to back them up. That means the two sides in the civil war – and their patrons – must negotiate.
The US and Russia are already doing so. Talks in Geneva last week led to a plan for eliminating Syria’s CW, backed by . US secretary of state John Kerry added that the agreement “laid the groundwork for further cooperation that is essential to end the bloodshed”. Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov agreed. If nothing else, they will need enough peace in Syria to make their CW plan work.
Time will tell whether it does. But just getting rid of the sarin is progress. Who knows what else might happen now the opponents are being forced to talk.
So, kid, the answer is this: we’re not saying it’s OK to kill people as long as you don’t use gas. We’re also saying it’s not OK to use , or , or , or , or a lengthening list of other horrors, including . All are banned by international treaties.
No treaty works perfectly. But they send messages and create norms: some kinds of war are definitely not OK.
It’s a slow, inefficient way of making peace. But global rejection of certain kinds of weapons, via treaties backed by scientific evidence, is the closest we have yet come to a working global norm against war.
Don’t laugh. In 1961, all UN countries actually , taking all weapons and even armies away from national governments, leaving only an international “peace force”. We may never get there. But taking away the worst weapons is a start.
This article appeared in print under the headline “Make science not war”
