Invention of Ecocide: Agent Orange, Vietnam, and the Scientists Who Changed the Way We Think About the Environment

EIGHT: Against Protocol

138 CHAPTER EIGHT AgAInST proTocol fortuitous timing allowed the protesting scientists to help end herbicidal warfare for all time. The hac members and their colleagues found an unwitting ally in President Richard M. Nixon. By attempting to ratify the Geneva Protocol of 1925, the president aimed to showcase American global leadership to stop the proliferation of chemical and biological weapons. Fresh from their trip to Vietnam, the hac scientists and their colleagues pivoted off Nixon’s policies by demonstrating that Operation Ranch Hand made the United States not a leader but a pariah. The question came down to whether herbicidal warfare constituted chemical and antipersonnel warfare and was therefore prohibited by the Geneva Protocol. The Nixon administration, fixated on the grand designs of Great Power politics and contemptuous of its domestic critics, did not initially give the issue much thought: previous administrations considered herbicidal warfare outside the prohibitions of international law, including the protocol. To the bafflement of Nixon and his advisors, the scientists rebuked the legal rationale that separated antiplant from antipersonnel weapons. Arthur Galston and his colleagues convinced a sympathetic scfr that ecocide violated the letter and the spirit of the Geneva Protocol. To gain the Senate’s consent to ratify, U.S. policy would first have to renounce the first use of herbicides in war. In his first foreign-policy report to Congress in 1970, President Nixon declared, “The postwar period in international relations has ended.” He then proceeded to lay out his plan for American leadership in a period of global flux. Nixon sought to overhaul the assumptions that had guided U.S. cold war policy since the Korean War. Rising tensions between the Soviet Union AGAINST PROTOCOL 139 and China, along with the war in Vietnam and waning influence within the Atlantic Alliance, convinced Nixon and his national security advisor Henry Kissinger that the cold war could no longer be defined as a global struggle waged by two monoliths.1 Kissinger’s realist approach to foreign affairs , combined with Nixon’s long-standing reputation as an anticommunist hardliner, heralded an opportunity for the United States to foster cooperation and political dialogue with cold war allies and enemies alike. In the strategy that Nixon termed “a structure of peace,” a budding détente with the communist world could offer a way out of Vietnam by enhancing U.S. diplomatic and military flexibility and thereby diminishing the war against communism in Vietnam as the dominant symbol of American resolve in the cold war.2 Central to this strategy was disarmament , which the administration defined on two levels: (1) international reduction in strategic stocks of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons; (2) massive withdrawal of American troops from Indochina to be replaced by the American-supported Army of the Republic of Vietnam and a new round of negotiations with the North to end the war. In recognition of the Soviet Union’s achievement of “strategic parity,” or capability to inflict unacceptable damage to the United States and its allies , the president initiated an ambitious plan to slow the nuclear arms race with the Soviets by shrinking existing stocks and pledging limits on the development of new weapons systems. Nixon was equally intent on curbing America’s chemical and biological weapons arsenal, which had proliferated since the 1950s when Pentagon strategists had looked to bolster the deterrent value of nuclear weapons.3 At this relatively late juncture in the superpower competition, the Nixon disarmament initiative recognized the United States’ limited capacity to contain communism abroad and accepted that it was safer to accommodate rather than challenge Moscow’s strategic and political power on the world stage.4 Thus the cold war would continue, albeit in a way that would militate against a crisis that could erupt into strategic nuclear war. On November 25, 1969, the president issued a sweeping statement on U.S. policy on chemical and biological warfare based on a major interagency review (the first undertaken in fifteen years) by the nsc, the Departments of State and Defense, and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (acda). Nixon reaffirmed the long-standing policy that the United States would not be the first nation to introduce chemical weapons in war, but he vowed to keep a chemical arsenal solely for retaliatory (and hence, deterrent) pur- 140 CHAPTER EIGHT poses. Citing the “massive, unpredictable and potentially uncontrollable consequences” of biological weapons, the president renounced all forms of biological warfare...