THERE鈥橲 a flare-up in Kosovo or on the streets of Sierra Leone. United
Nations peacekeepers arrive to find bullets flying. TV cameras are there too,
keeping a watchful eye. The blue berets don their gas masks and fire grenades of
鈥渟leeping gas鈥� at the opposing lines. Within an hour the dozing combatants are
separated. A bloody massacre has been averted.
This optimistic notion of warfare without bloodshed was raised last week by a
US Marine Corps colonel at a conference on non-lethal weapons. At first sight,
it鈥檚 hard to criticise. Order reigns. TV makes heroes of the peacekeepers.
Parents everywhere are happy that their children are not dying. Yet the
colonel鈥檚 idea caused controversy because to realise his dream, he must first do
battle with the Chemical Weapons Convention.
The CWC outlaws all chemicals that have no peaceful purpose. Its aim is to
rid the world of killer gases such as mustard, sarin, tabun and VX. It is built
on openness and cooperation, and provides for a complicated system of national
declaration and lab inspections to keep the 141 signatories in line.
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The convention also keeps knockout gas off the battlefield, which is why the
Marine Corps colonel wants it renegotiated
(see 鈥淲ar without tears鈥�). But critics say there is
no way to do this without wrecking it. Surprise is at the heart of military
strategy; if everyone knows what鈥檚 coming, they鈥檒l develop an antidote. So for a
sleeping gas to work, the US would have to revert to its old ways of working in
secret. At a stroke, this would undermine the openness that countries have
worked so hard to establish.
But knockout gas would still be great for peacekeeping, wouldn鈥檛 it? Well not
necessarily. British troops returning from Bosnia rejected non-lethal weapons.
They argued that armed intervention against Serb, Croat or Muslim could have
provoked all-out war. Peacekeepers should reserve weapons of any kind for
self-defence.
Even if the world opted for peacekeepers to have knockout gas, there鈥檚 the
problem of containing it. What鈥檚 to stop a country using it offensively? It
would be that much easier for the US or Russia to invade a dissenting nation if
it could send the defending troops to sleep rather than kill them. Reducing the
political cost of war鈥攊n crude terms, the number of body bags鈥攃ould
shift the balance of power even further in favour of the world鈥檚 mighty military
powers.
And paradoxically, non-lethal weapons can be and have been used to kill. In
Vietnam, the US and its allies deployed CS gas to flush out the Vietcong before
B52s started their bombing runs. And there is strong evidence that last May,
Turkish soldiers fired CS gas into a cave where 20 Kurdish rebels had holed up.
The rebels all died.
So where does this leave the colonel鈥檚 dream? Knockout gases do exist. The
CWC could be changed to permit their use. The irony is that this could pose a
more serious threat to world peace than the lethal weapons we already have.
