From the Archives: 'School Training for Civil Defense' (1981)

Some background may shed light on this 1981 article, retrieved from my paper archives.  Fortunately the story behind it has already been told, in a remembrance of celebrated debate coach James J. Unger, which I posted in April 2008:

The high school debate topic the previous year (1981-82) was "Resolved: That the federal government should establish minimum educational standards for elementary and secondary schools in the United States." I came up with the idea, based upon research I was doing in the real world -- if the world of Washington think tanks can be described as "real" -- that we should write a case about civil defense education in elementary and secondary schools.

The problem with this idea was that there was little, if any, information available about civil defense education. (There was some material from the 1960s, but nothing recent and little that was usable by debaters.) But I was convinced this could be a winning case.

So I asked Professor Unger, "What do you do when something is topical but so obscure that there is nothing written about it that you can use as evidence for inherency?" He replied that there was not much to do in that situation, other than to intensify your research and find the evidence you need.

My solution: since I had already had one article published on the topic of civil defense -- appearing in the Washington Star on October 10, 1980, months after I submitted it and based on research I did during the summer 1980 forensics institute -- and had subsequently become an officer in the American Civil Defense Association, I could just write another one, with a focus on education, that could be used as evidence to support our case.

And that's what I did. I submitted the article to several newspapers, and it was published in the New York Tribune (a sister newspaper to The Washington Times), just days before the institute tournament. We inserted the appropriate quotations into the case (not citing me by name), held others in reserve for second affirmative and rebuttals, and moved forward.

The case was relatively successful, with two of my teams making it into the elimination rounds. After the last round that one of the teams lost, they told me that my qualifications as a source had become an issue in the debate. The judge from that round added: "Your boys defended you valiantly, but they lost on other issues."

This is a long tale meant to be background of something that happened a couple of years later. As it was told to me, late one night while preparing for a tournament, members of the Georgetown debate team had hit a brick wall, unable to find the evidence they needed to complete a brief they were working on. Professor Unger popped up and said, "Well, why don't we just pull a Rick Sincere?" -- meaning, why not write an article and get it published in a reputable newspaper or journal? I don't think they ever followed through on that suggestion, but just the idea that my name became associated with a new debate tactic was enough to warm my ego.

This article was published in The News World, a New York City daily newspaper (later called the New York City Tribune), on July 28, 1981:

Richard Sincere

School Training for Civil Defense

Perhaps no aspect of the strategic competition between the United States and the Soviet Union is ignored more than civil defense and emergency preparedness. Americans waste too much effort in debates which obfuscate strategic issues by statistical manipulation of throw-weights, megatonnages, and MIRV capabilities. Public and policymakers alike are blind to the reality of the strategic balance: Deterrence of nuclear war depends as much on the willingness and ability to survive such a conflict as it does on the technical capacity to fight the battle.

Soviet political and military policies do not reflect a frightened belief in the universal destruction of nuclear war. Instead, they maintain that nuclear weapons are instruments for war-fighting. In many ways, Soviet leaders view nuclear weapons as extensions of conventional war-fighting techniques; Soviet military literature categorizes war by who does the fighting, not by the weapons which they use. Most importantly, Soviet military strategy is fundamentally a survival-oriented strategy.

One result of this thinking has been the establishment of a nationwide civil defense network. The chief of Soviet civil defense is an army general, filling an office equivalent to our own secretary of the Army. The Soviets treat civil defense as a co-equal branch of the military. On the other hand, in the United States responsibility for civil defense lies buried in an obscure bureau of the Department of Commerce called the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Which country takes its self-protection more seriously?

In accord with the principle of protecting their people from the ravages of nuclear war, the Soviets have launched an extensive training program in all public schools from elementary to university levels, and as continuing education industrial plants and communities. Towns and villages celebrate “civil defense days” as holidays, with sports competitions and games geared toward teaching the citizens survival techniques. And if some Soviet citizens scoff at these methods, they will at least have some skills to draw on in an emergency.

A widely-circulated Soviet civil defense manual state: “Civil defense training in the public schools occupies an important place in preparing the people of our country for protection against weapons of mass destruction.” In contrast, the editor of the Journal of Civil Defense told me recently that “civil defense education has been badly neglected in the United States in the past few years. With no initiative from the higher levels, it apparently has fallen off to almost zero.”

This attitude seems unlikely to change. The shame of this neglect is that civil defense survival methods are so easy to teach. Generally, Soviet schools spend no more than 15-20 minutes each week on it, mostly in conjunction with sportsmanlike competition. One civil defense game involves nearly 20 million children each summer. The final match of this game, called “Summer Lightning,” is played in Leningrad as an object of intense national interest.

In the United States, inaccessibility to civil defense literature is the greatest obstacle to survival training. A good beginning for civil defense instruction in America’s public schools would be for the Department of Education to sponsor distribution of survival handbooks (such as Dr. Cresson Kearny’s “Nuclear War Survival Skills,” published in 1979) to all school libraries. Such a minimum requirement would allow individual school districts to expand civil defense education as much as they like, especially if assistance from the Department of Defense and FEMA were available.

Civil defense education will immeasurably increase the maintenance of a peaceful deterrent to nuclear war. As long as no civil defense training is available to United States citizens, our country remains a willing hostage to Soviet weapons with little hope of survival or recovery. Survival plays a major role in Soviet strategy and plays almost no role in our own. To neglect such a vital aspect of the strategic nuclear balance is to assure our own destruction.

Richard Sincere is research assistant for church and society at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. A member of the American Civil Defense Association, he also holds a degree in international affairs from Georgetown University.

Subsequent to this and other newspaper articles on civil defense, I testified on the topic before a subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee, discussed it on many television and radio shows, and published a journal article that was reprinted in pamphlet form by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, which included a foreword by actor Lorne Greene. It was a central focus of my professional life in the 1980s but faded into the background after I finished my master's degree at the LSE and the Cold War came to an end. Civil defense and nuclear weapons policy took a back seat to Africa policy.

As an added bonus, here is a 1950s-era government training (propaganda?) video about school-based civil defense education.

Despite the jokes about it, civil defense in the schools was much more than "duck and cover."

From the Archives: A Look Back at 1989's 'The End of History?'

There were, perhaps, only two scholarly articles published in limited-circulation journals of opinion in the twentieth century that stimulated debate and discussion far outsizing the usual readership their authors and editors might have expected.

One was George Kennan's "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," based on his "long telegram" from Moscow and published pseudonymously in Foreign Affairs in 1947. The other was Francis Fukuyama's "The End of History?," which appeared in The National Interest in 1989.  (You readers might be able to suggest other articles with similar reach and controversy; feel free to name them in the comments section, below.)

The phenomenon that was "The End of History?" was described by James Atlas in the New York Times Magazine in October 1989:

Within weeks, "The End of History?" had become the hottest topic around, this year's answer to Paul Kennedy's phenomenal best seller, "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers." George F. Will was among the first to weigh in, with a Newsweek column in August; two weeks later, Fukuyama's photograph appeared in Time. The French quarterly Commentaire announced that it was devoting a special issue to "The End of History?" The BBC sent a television crew. Translations of the piece were scheduled to appear in Dutch, Japanese, Italian and Icelandic. Ten Downing Street requested a copy. In Washington, a newsdealer on Connecticut Avenue reported, the summer issue of The National Interest was "outselling everything, even the pornography."

"Controversial" didn't begin to cover the case. Unlike that other recent philosophical cause celebre, Allan Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind," Fukuyama's essay was the work of a representative from what is often referred to in academic circles as the real world. This was no professor, according to the contributor's note that ran in the magazine, but the "deputy director of the State Department's policy planning staff."

Fukuyama later expanded his article into a book, The End of History and the Last Man, but before that was released, he participated in a lively conversation about the changing conditions that resulted in the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the return of liberal democracy to Central Europe, and the economic liberalization of the People's Republic of China.  That era also saw the end of non-communist, authoritarian regimes in South Korea and other East Asian countries, Chile and elsewhere in Latin America, and South Africa and its neighbors, with varying degrees of successful transition.

Some of that conversation appeared in print but some of it was conducted face-to-face with scholars, policy analysts, and politicians.  One such occasion was a conference at the U.S. Institute of Peace on July 24, 1989 (mentioned in passing in Atlas' article, cited above), coincident with the publication of Fukuyama's article in The National Interest's summer number.

I happened to attend that event and apparently took comprehensive notes, which I transformed into an article that was published just after Labor Day in the New York City Tribune.  It's hard to believe that "The End of History?" controversy is almost a quarter-century old.  Many of the doubts expressed by participants in that USIP conference, you will see, proved to be prescient given all that has happened since then -- the first Gulf War, the Global War on Terror, the Arab Spring, the decline of liberal democracy in Russia under Vladimir Putin, and so forth.

Here, for the first time on the Internet, is "Historians Debate End of History," as it appeared in the New York City Tribune on September 5, 1989.

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An amazing debate is taking place in Washington and other world capitals. The subject is more cerebral than the typical debates about policy and performance that we read about in the papers. Participants in this debate include historians, philosophers, journalists, literary gurus, and politicians. And the time-frame of the events discussed in this debate is “plus or minus 200 years”!

The object of this intense speculation and discussion as an article in the current issue of The National Interest, a quarterly journal devoted to defense and foreign policy issues. In the article entitled, “The End of History?”, author Francis Fukuyama argues that our era will see the end of ideological struggle because liberal democracy has triumphed and all contenders against it – including fascism and communism – are in quick retreat.

Drawing on the philosophy of history developed by the 19th-century German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel (who also inspired Karl Marx) and Hegel's 20th-century disciple Alexandre Kojeve, Fukuyama asserts that the fundamental changes we see occurring in the Soviet Union and what we used to call Red China signify something far greater than anyone has yet thought.

“What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history,” says Fukuyama, “but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

Heavy stuff! To consider the implications of Fukuyama's thesis, the United States Institute of Peace gathered an impressive array of scholars at its headquarters in Washington recently. The panel included Gertrude Himmelfarb, a professor of history emeritus from New York University; syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer; Ambassador Owen Harries, co-editor of The National Interest; historian Richard Pipes; and Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic. Fukuyama was there to defend his thesis.

Needless to say, the three-hour workshop was intellectually stimulating. Wieseltier launched the first salvo. “I don't believe we are witnessing the end of history,” he said. “We are witnessing the end of the 20th century, and good riddance,” explaining: “The defeat of communism is not quite the same thing as the triumph of liberalism.”

Others found shortcomings in Fukuyama's work without condemning it. Pipes, for instance, said that history is not a good tool to predict the future. “History does not teach clairvoyance,” he noted, “it teaches patience.” Pipes was seconded by Himmelfarb, who said that “history doesn't tell us what will happen, only that something will happen.”

For his part, Krauthammer – who in an essay in Time magazine last year may have been the first American intellectual to proclaim an end to the Cold War – said that Fukuyama has it “half-right.” There may be an end to ideology, he argued, but it is an unwarranted leap to call that an end to history. Simply because the world lacks competing ideologies does not mean evil will be eliminated. “Evil will always be inherent in human nature and will always be able to find an organizing principle.”

Krauthammer was echoed by Harries, who said that “one shouldn't underestimate the inventiveness and imagination of evil.” He said that “it's more certain that Marxism-Leninism has failed than that liberal democracy has triumphed,” adding the perspective that Fukuyama's article “could have been written in 1928.” At that time, he said, “the prospects for liberal democracy looked good … but then the Great Depression came and all bets were off.” The Depression made possible the rise of the Third Reich and, eventually, the Soviet-Nazi alliance that started World War II.

Himmelfarb warned that we should not be too complacent. Using a phrase familiar to anyone who has studied Soviet propaganda, Prof. Himmelfarb said: “It is no accident, comrades, that liberal democracy exists in so few countries.” Although both communist and Third World regimes seem attracted to liberal democracy because of its economic success, the finality of the triumph of liberal democracy depends on more than continued economic prosperity.

“Liberal democracy is a very difficult regime to sustain,” she said. It is fragile – it requires compromise, accommodation, civility, consensus on large questions.

There is little evidence that these nuances of democracy are understood by current communists seeking reform. Pipes pointed out that “the liberalization of the Soviet Union is an extremely superficial phenomenon.” He said that his conversations with reformers in Moscow showed him that they don't understand what liberalism really involves.

For example, they don't understand the idea of protecting the rights of accused criminals even if that person is obviously guilty of a crime. Concepts like habeas corpus are totally alien to them. A basic problem of perestroika is convincing Soviet citizens, steeped since birth in the teaching of Marx and Lenin, that it's okay to make a profit. These are all things we take for granted in the United States.

Fukuyama agreed that there is no certainty in the changes taking place in the world. “It looks increasingly dicey,” he said, that Gorbachev “can keep all the balls that he's juggling in the air.” He warned of a real threat of fascism in the Soviet Union, Slavophile fascists and militarists who make no secret of their anti-Semitism and disdain for non-Russian ethnic groups.

Still, he said, what you see in many countries is “liberalism corroding the moral basis” of political ideologies like communism. He used China as an example. Despite the June 4 massacre, he asserted, “Tiananmen Square vindicates my position.” The remarkable thing about the Chinese experience is that Deng Xiaoping's economic liberalization was supposed to take place without accompanying political reform. The people would not stand for that. The Chinese people, Fukuyama said, “wanted political liberalization not because it brings economic rewards but for itself.” The basic human urge for liberty is hard to stifle.

Ironically, Fukuyama's article about the end of history is just the beginning of what will be a long and fruitful debate about human nature and politics. Already some of the sharpest minds in the United States are participating in this subject.

Richard Sincere is a Washington-based issues analyst and writer.

From the Archives: 'The Poverty of Development Economics in Africa'

(This article appeared originally in the New York City Tribune on March 16, 1990, under the headline, "The Poverty of 'Development Economics' in Africa."  It has not previously appeared on the World Wide Web.)

African development specialists complain that Poland and Hungary will get over $500 million in economic aid in 1990 while the entire continent of Africa gets only about two-thirds that amount. There are substantial arguments to justify this imbalance, the most persuasive being that the Poles and Hungarians are eager to transform their deteriorating economic systems into free enterprise zones.

At the same time, it is clear that billions of dollars poured into persistently socialist and increasingly corrupt African governments over the past two or three decades has been money down a rathole. Congress and the President seem to think that American aid should be sent where it will be used most wisely and most profitably.

Certainly, poverty in Africa is one of the most serious problems facing the world today. Pervasive hunger and heavy national debts on that huge continent drain the international economy of resources that could be put to better use elsewhere, creating wealth rather than depleting it. To understand the current sad state of economic development in sub-Saharan Africa, one must go back to the early independence period.


Unfortunately, for both political and economic reasons, African governments adopted statist economic policies whose effect was to stifle growth, not enhance it. As Indian economist Deepak Lal put it in his aptly-titled book, The Poverty of 'Development Economics', “The most serious current distortions in many developing countries are not those flowing from the inevitable imperfections of a market economy but the policy-induced, and thus far from inevitable, distortions created by irrational dirigisme.”

In other words, current poverty in Third World countries and especially in Africa is the result of conscious policy decisions by ruling elites, often aided by development economists trained in the West who quite readily discarded the classical and orthodox economics in the tradition of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and even John Maynard Keynes in favor of dicier theories and practices.

Perhaps the most trenchant and unconventional critique of orthodox development economics is found in Jane Jacobs' widely-discussed 1984 book, Cities and the Wealth of Nations. In it, Jacobs tackles head-on the field of macroeconomics and the development policies that flow from it, calling the whole field “a shambles.”

Like others who have analyzed the history of development aid, Jacobs notes that the impulse to send aid to underdeveloped countries was electrified by the success of the Marshall Plan in post-war Western Europe. The problem, of course, is that Marshall Plan aid was intended to repair fully developed but war-damaged economies, not transform embryonic economies ex nihilo.

“The healing of organisms,” she says, “including the organisms known as economies – is not at all the same as the metamorphosis of organisms, the conversion of them into something different.” Since the growing development industry of the 1950s and 1960s insisted on calling its projects “mini-Marshall Plans” and the like, disappointment was inevitable. This disappointment came at a high prices, as well.

One estimate is that in the 30 years ending in 1986, the West transferred about $1.6 trillion to the Third World, an amount equal to the total worth of all industrial stock traded on the New York Stock Exchange, and double the value of the entire U.S. agricultural sector.

The failure of the development economists was in their definition of development. They saw poverty as an obstacle to be overcome. They used military rhetoric to define development as a single-minded goal that can be reached by strategies, long-term planning, and setting targets. The unstated assumption was that “economic life can be conquered, mobilized, bullied, as indeed it can be when it is directed toward warfare, but not when it directs itself to development and expansion.”

Moreover, as Michael Novak has often pointed out, development economists are forever seeking the “causes of poverty.” Poverty, across all cultures and for most of human history, is mankind's normal state. What needs to be explored are the causes of wealth. Fortunately, that project was set off on a good start by Adam Smith in 1776.

The key, argues Jacobs, is that by its very nature, “successful economic development has to be open-ended rather than goal-oriented, and has to make itself up expediently and empirically as it goes along.” Jacobs defines economic development “as a process of continually improvising in a context that makes injecting improvisations into everyday life feasible,” amplifying this definition with the concept of “drift”: development entails “unprecedented kinds of work that carry unprecedented problems, [which drift into] improvised solutions, which carry further unprecedented work carrying unprecedented problems ...”

Small-scale economic actors in the Third World can be remarkable flexible in this fashion. Precisely because of the precariousness of their situation (most often in the unprotected, informal sector that exists apart from the officially sanctioned economy), peasants and micro-entrepreneurs respond well to the price mechanism. Deepak Lal argues that “unlike in richer countries, economic agents in poor ones will have few 'reserves' to fall back upon and will thus have to adjust speedily to a change in their economic environment by swiftly altering the terms on which they are willing to exchange economic commodities.” In developed economies, protected by large savings or the safety net of the welfare state, economic actors “can postpone the required price adjustments in a changing economic environment.”

It seems clear from this analysis that the informal sector – which, after all, existed and grew in the pre-modern era in Western countries even during the age of mercantilism – is the most effective engine of economic growth. It alone, unencumbered by the conservatism of bureaucracies and political elites, ready to adjust to changing conditions, willing to risk arrest and prosecution in order to achieve economic success, can create the conditions for growth even in the poorest of countries. Western development aid should thus be focused on assisting the informal, small-business sector and avoid government-to-government transfers that entrench unproductive, statist policies.

Richard Sincere is a Washington-based issues analyst and author of Sowing the Seeds of Free Enterprise: The Politics of U.S. Economic Aid in Africa, published in 1990 by the International Freedom Foundation.

From the Archives: 2013 Nobel Peace Prize Recalls Chemical Weapons in Africa

Yesterday in Oslo it was announced that the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize will go to a group that monitors and discourages the use of chemical weapons in violation of international law.

As Alan Cowell reported in the New York Times,

Urging the destruction of an “entire category” of unconventional weapons, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded its 2013 Peace Prize on Friday to a modest and little-known United Nations-backed organization that has drawn sudden attention with a mission to ensure that Syria’s stocks of chemical arms are eradicated.

The award, to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, surprised some Nobel watchers partly because of the unprecedented nature of its current task: overseeing the destruction of a previously secret chemical weapons program quickly amid a raging civil war.

The award brought to mind an article I wrote almost a quarter-century ago about chemical-weapons use by the Soviet Union and its Cuban ally in Africa. Published in the New York City Tribune on July 25, 1989, the piece appeared under the headline, "Nerve Gas Use Poisons U.S. Relationship with Soviets." The headline is somewhat inaccurate, as the article is about calcium cyanide gas, not nerve gas (a distinction brought out in the text).

One sentence stands out as though it could have been written in recent weeks about the situation in Syria:

While 400 or 500 poison gas casualties among tens of thousands of Angolans killed by conventional mean in the past few years seems militarily insignificant, it appears that the Soviets and their Cuban surrogates are using Africa as a laboratory for inhuman experiments.

So far as I know, this article about chemical weapons deployment in Angola in the 1980s has not previously been available on the Internet.

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Is the CIA covering up the use of chemical weapons by Soviet and Cuban forces in Angola? This question was raised recently when strong evidence came to light showing that calcium cyanide, a deadly poison with no known antidote, has been used by Cuban forces against Angolan civilians and supporters of UNITA, the anti-Marxist freedom fighters led by Dr. Jonas Savimbi.

Despite the physical evidence, which has been verified by teams of scientists in Austria, Belgium, Britain, and West Germany, the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies refuse to acknowledge that the Soviets have a new chemical weapon nd that they are using it in Angola.

Prof. Aubin Heyndrickx, a distinguished toxicologist from the University of Ghent in Belgium, came to the United States recently to bring his findings regarding these chemical weapons to the attention of American policymakers. He said that U.S. officials are afraid to acknowledge the use of calcium cyanide in Angola for political reasons, because there is a “direct implication of Russia” in the evidence. The United States, he said, “is one of the most difficult countries in the world to accept realism.”

Prof. Heyndrickx describes calcium cyanide as unprecedently effective. It is, he says, faster at producing death than nerve gas. In doses too small to kill, it causes irreversible brain damage, skin burns and abrasions. The surviving victims, he said at a luncheon sponsored by the International Freedom Foundation in Washington, need our humanitarian assistance. They need new clothes, because often all the clothing in their villages has been contaminated by the poison. They need medical care. But most of all, they need recognition by Washington officials of their plight.

The overarching reason for official U.S. skepticism on this issue is the renewal of detente and good relations with Moscow under Mikhail Gorbachev's policies of glasnost and perestroika, and the fear of damaging East-West relations. But the more immediate concern for American diplomats as well as others (from Cuba, Angola, and South Africa) is the success of the Angola-Namibia settlement agreement signed last December. This agreement, the result of eight years of hard negotiations under the leadership of Chester Crocker, former assistant secretary of state for African affairs, could be scuttled if news of chemical weapon use by Cuban forces became public.

In fact, Congress has mandated that if the president confirms that the Cubans are using chemical weapons in Angola, then the United States cannot provide money for the United Nations peacekeeping and transition forces in Namibia. The Bush Administration is hesitant to let Congress know – officially – that 400 to 500 Angolans are suffering the acute effects of calcium cyanide poisoning, not to mention the hundreds who have died since 1985, when the weapon was introduced to the Angolan conflict. As a result, despite the need for medical care in Western hospitals, the United States, Belgium, and the United Kingdom have denied entry visas to Angolans in great pain from cyanide gas poisoning. The authorities are afraid the victims' stories, once made public, will threaten fragile diplomatic efforts.

Still another reason why the intelligence community is afraid of this news coming to public attention is misplaced professional pride: the CIA and other agencies are embarrassed for not having discovered this new Soviet weapon. Moreover, because there is no known protective measure against this type of gas, nor any known antidote, its existence would throw NATO planning into a tizzy.

All the gas masks, all the poison gas pills, all the detection devices issued to NATO soldiers – all would be useless in the face of a Soviet calcium cyanide attack on the European front. Coincidentally, it has been demonstrated that in Afghanistan, Soviet troops have been testing new protective clothing and new types of gas masks. A captured gas mask is currently being examined by scientists in West Germany; no results of their investigation have yet been announced.

That is why this situation is worrisome. While 400 or 500 poison gas casualties among tens of thousands of Angolans killed by conventional mean in the past few years seems militarily insignificant, it appears that the Soviets and their Cuban surrogates are using Africa as a laboratory for inhuman experiments.

Like the Nazis and the communists who faced each other down during the Spanish Civil War, using the plains of Spain to test new weapons as a prelude to World War II, the Soviets and Cubans are testing this previously unknown poison on innocent Angolan civilians caught in the crossfire. Captured Angolan army officers have told Western intelligence agents that they themselves are not allowed to handle these weapons; only the Cubans use them under strict Soviet supervision.

Fortunately for the Angolan people, there has been no recorded use of these horrid weapons since April of this year. Still, that use came after the settlement agreement that is bringing an end to the 15-year-old conflict in the region and bringing independence to Namibia. It constitutes a violation of that agreement – not a minor violation, but a major breach of trust by one of the parties (Cuba) against the others (South Africa and the United States).

In light of the Soviets' use of poison gas against their own people in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi a few months ago, this situation should not go unnoticed. The Bush Administration should order a full-scale investigation.

Department of Defense scientists should go to Jamba in Angola, where an unexploded calcium cyanide bomb has been captured by UNITA soldiers and sits ready to be examined. The State Department should hurry along visa applications to allow gas victims to come to the United States for medical care.

President Bush should put pressure on our NATO allies to release the results of scientific studies that are currently being hidden from public view for political reasons, studies that demonstrate conclusively that new Soviet poison gas weapons have been used in Angola. The Soviets and Cubans should be called to account for this violation of human rights and the treaties that banned the use of such weapons more than 60 years ago.

Most of the world applauds the diplomacy that led to the Angola-Namibia settlement late last year. It would be foolish to jeopardize that agreement for trivial reasons. However, that risk is worth taking in order to expose to the world the Soviet Union's use of dangerous, new chemical weapons.

Richard Sincere is a Washington-based policy analyst who writes frequently on African affairs.