A Farewell to Chemical Arms

The United States destroyed its last chemical weapon in 2023. That's something to celebrate.

In January 1985, I joined the professional staff of the House Armed Services Committee, then chaired by Rep. Les Aspin. It was not my first job in Washington, but this one gave me a small role in some of our biggest national security debates.

It was a tumultuous time, with major disputes over Central American wars, nuclear weapons, anti-missile “shields” and other issues. One of these was the future of chemical arms. Many were appalled at the Army’s plan for a new generation of sophisticated chemical weapons. I was lobbied to oppose the new “Bigeye Bomb,” as it was called, by two young activists from the Council for a Livable World, John Isaacs and Suzie Kerr.

It was an easy sell. The congressman who had hired me, Rep. Charlie Bennett, was a conservative Southern Democrat from Jacksonville, Florida. He was strongly pro-defense, but strongly against what he considered inhumane, unwise and wasteful defense programs, including nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. Over those years, Bennett sponsored and passed dozens of amendments in the House to curtail spending on the MX missile, the SDI program and other questionable weapons and to try to reform our military procurement system, including blocking the revolving door between the Pentagon and contractors.

I raise all this now because John Isaacs and I just co-authored an article published this week by The Washington Post on the successful effort to block the Bigeye Bomb and to negotiate a treaty to ban all chemical arms. I am still friends with John and Suzy and was glad to partner with John to briefly tell the story. It is an example of how, with persistence, we can accomplish what many consider impossible. In this case, successfully eliminating all chemical weapons from the arsenals of the major powers.

It also provides a roadmap for how we might do the same for nuclear weapons. It took decades, but last July the Army that once considered chemical weapons essential to national security and once commanded an arsenal of 30,000 tons of poison gases, destroyed the last bomb.

I provide excerpts from our article, below and a “gift” link to the full piece as published by the Post, so you can read it without a subscription HERE.

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Farewell to the last U.S. chemical weapon

In the mid-1980s, when we worked on Capitol Hill, the Army wanted to build a new chemical weapon. Called the “Bigeye” bomb, it was a binary device that combined two chemicals to form a deadly nerve agent before being dropped. One drop on the skin could kill.

When President Ronald Reagan put the weapon into his budget, it split Congress in two. Democrats mainly opposed it; Republicans largely supported the Army’s argument that if we did not have a response in kind to the Soviet Union’s chemical weapons, U.S. soldiers would die.

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When [George H.W.] Bush became president, he moved beyond the dispute by proposing a treaty for all countries to rid themselves of these horrible weapons. Today, 193 nations have joined the Chemical Weapons Convention that Bush negotiated and signed and that President Bill Clinton and Joe Biden, then the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, persuaded the Senate to approve.

On July 7, at the Blue Grass Chemical Agent-Destruction Pilot Plant in Kentucky, the Army — once convinced that it absolutely needed these weapons — destroyed the last of its stockpile. It was an M55 rocket filled with sarin, a nerve gas. The elimination of these armaments is a monumental achievement that the Defense Department celebrated last month with a gathering at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington.

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The use of chemicals in warfare goes back millennia. Archeologists have found evidence Persian forces killed Roman soldiers with a sulfur gaswhile attacking Dura, in present-day Syria, in 256. While humans have killed one another in large numbers since the beginning of recorded history, in the 20th century, we mechanized the process. We built machines capable of killing large numbers of people from a distance. Chemical weapons were among the first such innovations.

In April 1915, the Germans surprised British and Allied troops at the Second Battle of Ypres by flooding the battlefield with chlorine gas. Heavier than air, the pale green mist seeped down into the trenches, killing and wounding thousands.

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During the Cold War, both the Soviet Union and the United States amassed huge chemical arsenals. Though they were never used, eliminating them or the threat they posed was thought to be impossible.

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At a time when major treaties and mechanisms for eliminating and controlling nuclear weapons are being ignored or dismantled, it is worth taking a moment to celebrate our success on chemical weapons. With two of the three types of weapons considered weapons of mass destruction now banned, we could adopt a similar goal for nuclear arsenals. That is, not just to reduce or limit these stockpiles but to eliminate them, as the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, signed by 93 nations, hopes to do.

Those who say that this is unwise, impossible or dangerous might take a lesson from this history and from President Bush, who saw the danger and the pathway out of it. He said in 1988, “If I’m elected president, if I’m remembered for anything, it would be this: a complete and total ban on chemical weapons. Their destruction forever. That’s my solemn mission.”

Well done, Mr. President.

TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE, PLEASE GO HERE.