The East Room smelled of polish and faint perfume. The scratch of pens on paper was the only sound for a moment. George H.W. Bush, in a dark suit, and Mikhail Gorbachev, his birthmark vivid under the lights, leaned forward to sign the bilateral Chemical Weapons Agreement. The treaty was technical, a pact to end all production and begin destroying stockpiles. It built on the 1925 Geneva Protocol, which had only banned use. Now, they were banning the making. The sensory details of the moment belied the ghosts in the room. Mustard gas from Ypres. Zyklon B from the camps. The scent of burnt almonds that is hydrogen cyanide. Sarin, VX, the obscure, oily substances kept in bunkers. The treaty was a ledger of horrors they agreed to stop adding to. It was not about disarmament of existing stocks—that would come later with the broader Chemical Weapons Convention. This was a valve, turned shut. A promise that no new weapons of this particular, insidious kind would be manufactured by the two nations that held most of them. The handshake was firm, the statements hopeful. The air in the room, clean and climate-controlled, carried the weight of a century’s poison, and a decision to make no more.
1990
The Smell of Burnt Almonds and a Promise
In a White House ceremony, the leaders of the Cold War superpowers signed a treaty to forever halt the production of chemical weapons.
June 1Original articlein the voice of ground-level