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<i>Joe Cirincione was a professional staff member of the House Armed Services Committee</i>,<i> and John Isaacs was executive director of the Council for a Livable World during the fight for the Chemical Weapons Convention.</i>

In the mid-1980s, when we worked on Capitol Hill, the Army wanted to build a new chemical weapon. Called the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1983/05/07/pentagon-finds-unexpected-danger-in-bigeye-bomb/618c6b50-fdc5-44f7-9a27-238b833de697/" target=_blank>“Bigeye” bomb</a>, 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.

Over four years, votes in the Senate resulted in a tie three times, with then-Vice President George H.W. Bush <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1986/08/08/senate-narrowly-approves-nerve-gas/f1556fef-23fa-4530-8c37-6aeba6ac567f/" target=_blank>breaking the tie each time to approve</a> the weapon (earning him <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1983/11/11/reagans-call-a-balm-for-bushs-mother/b01efe58-41b2-4ccd-884e-17e21e1b3805/" target=_blank>criticism from his mother</a>). But the House refused to go along, so production did not proceed.

When 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 <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwj_urCoifmCAxVeEVkFHTT5DicQFnoECA8QAw&url=https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/cwcsig%23:~:text=The%25252520Chemical%25252520Weapons%25252520Convention%25252520(CWC,Korea%2525252C%25252520and%25252520South%25252520Sudan).&usg=AOvVaw1jGGb2bObOm6gOlL_hUNPM&opi=89978449" target=_blank>Chemical Weapons Convention</a> that Bush negotiated and signed and that President Bill Clinton and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/candidates/joe-biden-2024/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">Joe Biden</a>, 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 — <a href="https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/3554082/dod-celebrates-destruction-of-its-last-chemical-agents/#:~:text=On%20July%207,%20disposal%20experts,I%20and%20the%20late%201960s." target=_blank>destroyed the last of its stockpile</a>. 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.

The United States is the last nation party to the treaty to eliminate its declared chemical arsenal. It took almost three decades, but, to be fair, we had a lot to destroy. Before the treaty was ratified in 1997, the United States had <a href="https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/3451920/us-completes-chemical-weapons-stockpile-destruction-operations/" target=_blank>more than 30,000 tons</a> of these weapons. Once considered essential to our national security but now obsolete, they had to be disassembled, and their active chemical agents rendered inert, with great care.

No major nation has chemical weapons today. No nation anywhere admits to having them. Although a few nations might still harbor small arsenals, and small batches show up in wars such as  those in Syria, these deadly weapons are no longer a major factor in global power.

The use of chemicals in warfare goes back millennia. Archeologists have found evidence Persian forces killed Roman soldiers with <a href="https://www.livescience.com/13113-ancient-chemical-warfare-romans-persians.html" target=_blank>a sulfur gas</a> while attacking Dura, in present-day Syria, in 256.  While humans have killed one another in large numbers since the beginning of 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, <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/chemical-weapons-warfare-remembrance-day-poison-mustard-gas-first-world-war-ypres-isis-a7005416.html" target=_blank>killing and wounding thousands</a>.

Once introduced, these weapons were quickly copied by other countries. By the end of World War I, an estimated <a href="https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,968163-3,00.html" target=_blank>124,000 metric tons of chemicals had been used</a> by both sides. In World War II, the Nazis perfected nerve agents, including tabun and sarin, but did not use them in combat, reserving them for genocide in concentration camps.

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

President Richard M. Nixon, however, developed a way to do just that when, in November 1969, <a href="https://2001-2009.state.gov/r/pa/ho/frus/nixon/e2/83597.htm" target=_blank> he unilaterally renounced</a> the use of biological weapons and began advocating a treaty to ban them. That agreement, the <a href="https://disarmament.unoda.org/biological-weapons/about/history/" target=_blank>Biological Weapons Convention</a>, took effect in March 1975 and  banned the use of living organisms or biological toxins in weapons. It is now widely adopted, with 185 nations as members. The United States destroyed all its biological weapons, as did other nations.

The treaty banning chemical weapons built upon that success, adding an intrusive inspection regime to ensure compliance. Though opponents of the treaty in the 1980s claimed it could never be achieved, or that the United States would be vulnerable to attack if it was, the treaty has proved a remarkable success.

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 <a href="https://www.icanw.org/signature_and_ratification_status" target=_blank>Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons</a>, 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. <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1988/10/22/bush-ban-chemical-weapons/c1028ec6-d045-4733-addb-92cb3e50b1ca/" target=_blank>He said</a> 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.”

Joe Cirincione

John Isaacs

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U.S. chemical weapons are no more. Good riddance.

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