Chemical
Nightmare

HELEN DAVIS

Foreign Correspondent

Israel soldiers practice for
chemical warfare.

24

FRIDAY, JANUARY 27, 1989

Vulnerable to attack from all sides and largely
dependent upon a preemptive strike strategy, Israel is
surrounded by Arabs equipped with the 'poor man's
atomic bomb: chemical weaponry.

he recent 145-nation confer-
ence in Paris on chemical and
biological weapons, coupled
with the recent revelations that
Libya has constructed a massive
plant for producing poisonous gas, has
focused international attention on one
of the nightmares haunting Israeli
military planners. .
For, while chemical weapons are
widely regarded as "the poor man's
atomic bomb" — a threat generally
associated with financially and
technologically strapped Third World
countries — the production and use of
these weapons are specific to the Mid-
dle East theater.
Today, even though they affirmed
the original Geneva protocol condem-
ning the use of chemical warfare, a
galaxy of Arab states around Israel
,pose a potent twin threat: chemical
weapons and the means of delivering
them — medium-range, ground-to-
ground missiles.
For the first time, these weapons
provide the Arab states with the abili-
ty both to breach Israel's defenses and
wreak havoc on its civilian population
centers.
"This threat adds a new dimension
to a future Arab-Israeli war," according
to Reserve Gen. Aharon Levran, a
senior member of the Tel Aviv Univer-
sity Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies.

War and against its own Kurdish
minority who were suspected of aiding
the Iranians.
In one attack alone last year, some
5,000 Kurdish civilians were estimated
to have been killed, leading to a mass
flight by thousands more across the
border into neighboring Turkey.
Indeed, the Gulf War was the first
full-scale modern battle which involv-
ed the extensive use of both ballistic
missiles and chemical weapons. The
combined effect of these weapons by
Iraq proved so compelling that it has
plunged other states in the region in-
to a frenzied new arms race.
Now, medium-range missiles, ac-
quired from the Soviet Union and
China, are being deployed not only by
Iran and Iraq, but by Syria, Libya and
Egypt. And Saudi Arabia, the latest
entry into the race, has recently taken
delivery of Chinese-made CS-2
missiles.
While Israel has 12 surface-to-
surface missile launchers, Egypt has
20, Iraq 48, Syria 60 and Libya 100.
According to military sources, the
Soviet-made SS-21 missile system in
the Syrian armory is equipped with six
missiles per launcher, giving the
Syrians the potential for delivering
some 150 tons of ordnance, much of it
quite accurately, on Israeli targets.
While Israeli military planners are
confident that their undisputed air
"Together with the advanced superiority will enable them to stop
weapons systems present in the region, any concerted attack by conventional
it would render such a war more dif- warplanes, they concede that nothing
ficult and costly," says Levran, who can stop an incoming missile.
edits the Center's authoritative annual
"Without taking physical risks,"
Middle East Military Balance.
Levran notes, "the Syrians can cause
The efficiency of chemically-tipped significant damage to Israeli military
missiles was amply demonstrated by installations."
Iraq, which repeatedly used them
Israeli scientists are indeed work-
against Iranian troops during the Gulf ing on the technology to produce an

anti-missile missile response, but such
weaponry is unlikely to be developed
and deployed before the end of the cen-
tury.
This will leave Israel, the ultimate
focus of Arab aggression, vulnerable for
at least the next 10 years and possibly
well into the next century.
While the missile race_ has been
underway, at least five countries have
made substantial progress in develop-
ing the potential to arm themselves
with chemical and biological weapons.
And while international law bans the
use of chemical weapons, it does not
bar their production and stockpiling.
The production of such weapons
already is reported to be well underway
in Iraq, Iran, Syria and Egypt, while
Libya is thought to be just weeks away
from commissioning its plant in Rab-
ta. The Libyan plant, the largest in the
world, is expected to be capable of
manufacturing some 20,000 pounds of
poisonous gas a day.
Despite the claim by Libya's Col.
Moammar Qaddafi that the new com-
plex in Rabta is a pharmaceuticals
plant, both the United States and Bri-
tain have accumulated irrefutable pro-
of that the plant is intended for mak-
ing both mustard gas and the Sarin
nerve gas.
And according to Western
estimates, the plant — sited in the
desert wastes, some 50 miles southwest
of the Libyan capital, Tripoli — is sur-
rounded by a protective shield of
SAM-6 anti-aircraft missiles.
"You don't site an aspirin factory
in the middle of a desert," noted one of-
ficial who is skeptical of Qaddafi's
claims, "and you don't surround it with
a battery of missiles."
The threat is real enough that the
Israeli Army last month started