Parsing The Meanings Of WMD

Weapons of mass destruction. The phrase, usually shortened to WMD, gained wide currency with President George W. Bush and his top officials, who invoked it repeatedly in early 2003 as a rationale for invading Saddam Hussein's Iraq. The Administration's incessant drumbeat catapulted a seldom used and virtually unknown phrase into the common lexicon of ordinary citizens.

Bush and his top aides used the phrase to mean nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons (NBC), just as the previous two presidents, Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush had, explains W. Seth Carus, deputy director of the National Defense University's Center for the Study of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Sometimes, he says, they also included radiological weapons under the nuclear column.

Unfortunately, the presidents' definition of WMD is not the only one with official or semiofficial standing. Carus makes that abundantly clear in his exhaustive analytical paper "Defining 'Weapons of Mass Destruction,'" which his university published in February.

Carus found more than 40 definitions that have been used in arms control treaties, U.S. national security policy documents and political discourse, and U.S. and Russian military doctrine. The Department of Defense (DOD) alone uses several definitions.

Some commentators have argued that the term WMD is so amorphous that the user decides what it means. Other analysts have offered new definitions to correct perceived faults in existing ones.

Michael L. Moodie, a former senior arms control official who is now an independent consultant, says, "WMD is a widely used term, but I don't think it is a terribly useful one."

Moodie, who reviewed Carus' paper, says the study "is of value because it alerts the analytical community to the fact that the term is used, especially in government, to mean different things." It's useful to have those differences spelled out, Moodie says, because they may lead to differences in how people think and develop policy.

Allison MacFarlane, a research associate in Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Program in Science, Technology & Society, cites intellectual problems with the term. She questions "whether it is really legitimate to call biological and chemical weapons WMD." Instead, she argues that "it's pretty clear that chemical weapons do not measure up to nuclear weapons in terms of destructiveness," and it's an open question as to "whether biological weapons pose a similar threat to nuclear ones."

Carus takes a different tack. He contends that "there are authoritative definitions specifying the meaning of WMD," and it would be "impossible to drop the term or arbitrarily adopt an alternative definition." The term, he points out, is deeply embedded in the language of disarmament where it is defined in several arms control treaties to mean chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear arms (CBRN), or NBC if radiological is subsumed under nuclear.

To define WMD as only nuclear "misses the point," Carus says. "WMD is a term of art that has been adopted by the arms control community and has specific meaning in international law and arms control." He underscores his point by noting: "In law, terms have specialized meanings that can differ from common usage, and this is the case here."

In his study, Carus writes that the ambiguity of the term WMD reflects less a lack of clarity than an "almost universal lack of familiarity with the history of its origins and use."

Carus was able to trace usage back nearly 60 years to when, in 1937, the Archbishop of Canterbury, William C. G. Lang, delivered a Christmas sermon on "Christian Responsibility." In his sermon, Lang didn't define what he meant by "new weapons of mass destruction." But, Carus points out, the sermon came on the heels of Fascist and Japanese bombings of Spain and China, respectively, and Italian chemical attacks in Abyssinia, now called Ethiopia.

Modern usage of the term began after World War II with President Harry Truman's signature on a 1945 document that contains the words "weapons adaptable to mass destruction." This phrase appeared again the next year when the United Nations General Assembly issued its first resolution setting up a commission to deal with issues raised by the discovery of atomic energy.

Within a few years of Truman's signature, the phrase, shortened to weapons of mass destruction, became the coin of the realm in disarmament diplomacy. In 1948, the UN adopted a standard definition for WMD that reads "atomic explosive weapons, radioactive material weapons, lethal chemical and biological weapons, and any weapons developed in the future which have characteristics comparable in destructive effect to those of the atomic bomb or other weapons mentioned above."

The international community has not negotiated a treaty banning WMD, but it has "imposed limitations on the location of WMD ... and has limited its prohibitions to specific categories of WMD," Carus notes.

Treaties that limit the location of WMD include the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, the 1972 Seabed Arms Control Treaty, and the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. All three treaties, which the U.S. has ratified, refer directly to "weapons of mass destruction." The term also appears in the preambles of the 1972 biological weapons and the 1993 chemical weapons treaties, both of which the U.S. has also ratified.

In his paper, Carus points out that after the end of the Cold War, WMD became "the term of art" in U.S. national security policy. Beginning with the first President Bush and continuing through the Clinton and current Bush Administrations, WMD appears repeatedly in national security directives, executive orders, presidential decision directives, national security strategies, and speeches.

Beyond national security policy, Carus writes that "10 of the last 11 presidents used the term in a public speech at least once." Democrats and Republicans have inserted the term in their political platforms; the Democrats since 1988, the Republicans since 1992. Using citations of WMD in the New York Times as a reflection of "the growing saliency of the term in political discourse," Carus notes that "except for 1973, at least one article has used the term at least once [per year] from 1945 to 2005." By his count, "WMD appeared in 1,069 stories in 2003."

The Pentagon, for whom Carus wrote his paper, has a jumble of definitions for WMD. The department's official definition found in the "DOD Dictionary of Military & Associated Terms" and issued by the Joint Chiefs of Staff offers CBRNE-that is, CBRN plus high-explosive weapons. Other U.S. government agencies, including some involved in federal law enforcement and homeland security, have also adopted CBRNE weapons as their definition of WMD.

Adopting CBRNE as the Pentagon's sole definition for WMD would have the advantage of aligning with definitions used by key interagency partners. It would, however, clash with the definition used by the State Department and the international community and could present problems "for other DOD interests," Carus notes in his study. In the arenas of arms control talks or treaty applications, it could "result in controls on conventional armaments that DOD may not want to have limited by international agreement, such as antisatellite weapons or naval mines," Carus writes.

In some contexts, Carus writes, the Pentagon narrows the term WMD to mean only NBC or CBRN weapons, definitions that comport with U.S. treaty obligations and national security policy documents.

The Joint Staff, however, uniquely defines WMD to mean "weapons of mass destruction or effect, potentially including CBRNE weapons and other means of causing massive disruption, such as cyberattacks," Carus writes. He explains that this definition tries to address deficiencies in other definitions, "particularly those arising from terrorism concerns." Its breadth of coverage and lack of clarity on weapons included present problems for the military. It also has not "gained traction outside the military," Carus adds.

To complicate matters further, just last year the U.S. Strategic Command came up with still another definition. This one defines "WMD as weapons-nuclear, biological, chemical, and radiological-and their means of delivery that are capable of a high order of destruction and/or of being used in such a manner as to destroy large numbers of people or cause significant infrastructure damage."

Carus points out that the Strategic Command's version, though similar to the official Pentagon definition, differs significantly in excluding high explosives, adding mention of infrastructure damage, and including delivery systems. He also contends that it "appears to exclude many small-scale uses of chemical and biological agents that are of concern to other agencies."

After weighing the pros and cons of the alternative definitions, Carus recommends that the Pentagon adopt one that equates WMD with NBC or CBRN. Either of the two clearly distinguishes WMD from conventional weapons, he says.

Carus recognizes that defining WMD as CBRN—or NBC if radiological is included in nuclear—is not "intellectually pristine." Still, he thinks the Pentagon "should stick with a definition that is consistent with U.S. treaty obligations and one that arms controllers have used for nearly 60 years."

"Carus makes the excellent point that because the term WMD is embedded in numerous arms control treaties and national security policy documents, it cannot simply be discarded but instead requires a single, universally accepted definition-at least within DOD," says Jonathan B. Tucker, senior fellow at Monterey Institute of International Studies' Center for Nonproliferation Studies. But Tucker still insists the term is misleading "even if you agree with Carus' suggestion that WMD should refer exclusively to CBRN."

Tucker believes that defining WMD as synonymous with CBRN is confusing because it "conflates four categories of weaponry whose technical characteristics and destructive effects differ enormously both across the categories and within them."

One solution, Tucker suggests, is "to restrict the use of the term WMD to official U.S. documents and to drop it entirely from public discourse." He offers the terms "unconventional weapons" or "CBRN weapons" as more "neutral and descriptive" replacements.

Tucker believes that "the ambiguity of the term WMD facilitated the Administration's prewar campaign to inflate the severity and imminence of the Iraqi military threat to the U.S. and justify the decision to launch a preventive war of choice." Because the threat ultimately proved to be not only inflated but nonexistent, he says the term WMD "has become discredited in the public mind and a new term is urgently needed." If public perception is allowed to persist, he argues, it "could handicap future efforts to prevent the real proliferation of such weapons."