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Pimlico, £12.50 and Arrow, £8.99)
Review by Paul Rogers
History of landmines, by
Lydia Monin and Andrew Gallimore of Killing: the secret history of chemical and biological
warfare, by Robert Harris
and Jeremy Paxman
The Devil's Gardens:
A Higher Form
Late last year, prospects for arms
control took two severe knocks in a matter
of days. In Geneva, the US
pulled out of six years of effort to strengthen
the
Biological and Toxin
Weapons Convention, while on the India/Pakistan border,
hundreds of thousands of anti-personnel landmines
were laid as tensions
mounted over
Kashmir. Both events demonstrate the problems
in trying to
control
proliferation, despite huge efforts to bring two particularly nasty
kinds
of weapons under control.
The Devil's
Gardens is a
highly readable and thoughtful account of
the
determined efforts to
call governments to account over the appalling human cost
of landmines. It
illustrates the global extent of the threat and the remarkable way
in
which a small number of campaigners succeeded
in focusing international
attention on it. They were sometimes divided in their methods, but still
created a
successful coalition, helped by a handful of
states (especially
Canada), that
resulted in the landmine treaty.
Too many states have failed to join
in, and the problems remain massive:clearing
up minefields from past
wars, preventing further use of mines and extending the
campaigning to
cluster bombs and other "area-impact" weapons. Indeed,activists
fear that their apparent success will lead to a false sense
of achievement. The
Devil's Gardens, with its unflinching descriptions
of mines and their effects, might
help to remind us of the limits of
progress so far.
The disaster in Geneva is in many
ways more serious. Robert Harris and Jeremy Paxman first wrote A Higher
Form of Killing more than 20 years ago, when most people were more
worried by the nuclear threat. Now, more than a decade after the end of
Cold War, they have produced a useful update, adding a chapter to their
original text – in its day, the most accessible account of the
development
of chemical and biological weapons.
The former remain a problem,
although there is at least a verifiable
Chemical
Weapons Convention and most of the Cold
War arsenals are now being
destroyed. This is not the case for biological
weapons, where the 1972
convention remains one of the weakest arms-control agreements. That recent
efforts to strengthen it have
come to nil is worrying enough, especially as we are
beginning to see the
potential for new kinds of weapons made possible by gene
manipulation and
biotechnology. But there is also a real prospect of a new
war
with Iraq, a state capable of using chemical
and biological weapons if the
Saddam
regime is threatened with destruction as part of the Bush "war on
terror".
We now have a US administration that
has made it clear that the war on terror
will include countries in the
"axis of evil", which will not be allowed
to develop
weapons of
mass destruction. Proliferation will now be controlled by
coercion
and,
where necessary, the use of force. We should not be too surprised if
a war
against Iraq later this year escalates to the most dangerous crisis since
Cuba, 40
years ago this autumn.
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