The Geneva Protocol

At Geneva in 1925, representatives of 38 nations signed a protocol prohibiting chemical and biological warfare. For a complex of reasons, the U.S. Senate never ratified the agreement; but as the decades passed, more and more nations did. Today, 85 nations are parties to the Geneva Protocol--including Communist China, the Soviet Union, the other Warsaw Pact countries and every member of NATO except the U.S. To President Nixon's credit, he sent the Geneva Protocol back to Capitol Hill last year for ratification. There was just one hitch. With Nixon's message went a statement from Secretary of State William Rogers: "It is the understanding of the protocol that it does not prohibit the use in war of riot-control agents and chemical herbicides."

The U.S. has been using herbicides and CS, a tear-gas riot-control agent, in Viet Nam, and there is genuine legal confusion over whether Rogers' interpretation is correct. But why should the Geneva Protocol not be considered to forbid all forms of chemical and biological warfare? Harvard Biologist Matthew Meselson, who spent six weeks in Viet Nam last summer, argues that CS has been decreasingly useful because of enemy countermeasures that range from Soviet-made gas masks to face cloths soaked in urine; even Robert Komer, who ran the pacification program under Lyndon Johnson, concedes that defoliants and crop-destroying agents may have harmed the allied effort more than they helped. So there is little practical reason for the U.S. to continue to insist that CS and herbicides should be legal.

Biologist Meselson argues that over the next few decades molecular biology will probably unlock the few remaining scientific secrets of life. The new knowledge could make the destructive capacity of chemical and biological agents immensely more horrible than it is today. Meselson insists that it would be better to be out of the business altogether, so that no war planner or procurement officer could ever be led into temptation.

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