Deadly Dose

New charges about yellow rain

"The world cannot be silent in the I face of such human suffering and such cynical disregard for international law and agreements." So declared Secretary of State George Shultz last week as he presented a new ten-page report that, for the second time this year, accused the Soviet Union and its ally Viet Nam of using biochemical weapons against native rebel forces in Afghanistan, Laos and Cambodia in flagrant violation of two major international accords. Since 1975, U.S. officials charge, nearly 10,000 people have died as the result of "yellow rain," a distinctive yellowish mist that is sprayed from planes or that bursts from shells and bombs, and then falls to the ground in sticky drops. It causes an agonizing death through blistering, vomiting and internal bleeding.

Former Secretary of State Alexander Haig had previously made the accusation last year in West Berlin. According to last week's report, the U.S. has obtained from yellow-rain victims numerous blood, urine and tissue samples that are contaminated with rare fungal poisons known as mycotoxins, the key lethal ingredient in yellow rain. At a press conference that followed Shultz's statement, State Department officials showed one of two Soviet gas masks that they said had been captured in Afghanistan. One taken from the head of a dead Soviet soldier, the other obtained clandestinely in Kabul, each apparently carried traces of mycotoxins, which had presumably been used in attacks against Afghan rebels. The State Department also released photographs showing the skin lesions that afflict yellow-rain victims.

Vladimir Shustov, a disarmament expert at the Soviet mission to the U.N., denied the U.S. charges, describing them as "sheer invention from the beginning to the end." As proof, he cited a U.N. report due to be released this week. The result of trips to Thailand and Pakistan by a seven-man team, the U.N. investigation was undertaken when the U.S. expressed dissatisfaction with a previous U.N. probe that yielded inconclusive results last year. The latest report concludes lamely that the investigators "could not disregard the circumstantial evidence" indicating "possible" use of biochemical weapons. But the team led by Egyptian Military Physician Esmat Ezz included "political officers" from Bulgaria and Iran. It did not enter combat zones in Laos, Cambodia and Afghanistan to collect evidence, relying instead on samples and accounts from refugees.

Canada and Thailand are the only countries that have pursued the investigation with as much intensity as the U.S. In a statement to the House of Commons last week, British Minister of State Douglas Hurd declared that his country fully supports the U.S. charges. Said he: "The continued use of [biochemical] weapons calls for a vigorous condemnation by the civilized world and further demonstrates the need for early agreement to ban possession of these weapons." France has led the way in pushing through approval of a new U.N. committee to investigate chemical-warfare incidents. The latest U.S. findings, said a French official, "can only reinforce our conviction that a rapid and effective monitoring system must be set up."

The mounting evidence is beginning to convince skeptical scientists. H. Bruno Schiefer, a once critical Canadian veterinary pathologist who studied the problem in Indochina earlier this year, agrees that the only logical explanation for the symptoms he found among victims was that they had been attacked with biochemical weapons.

U.S. officials remain disappointed by the generally muted world reaction to their accusations. One explanation, according to some experts, may be that the U.S., unfortunately, has not persuasively demonstrated that it is doing its best to document the charges. Noting that the State Department has only two part-time nonspecialists collecting evidence in Thailand, a Western European diplomat says: "With all the resources the U.S. has to call on, you'd think it would have at least one qualified person working full time on chemical warfare." Still, the more other governments speak out, the more effective the campaign against chemical warfare will be.

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