On this day in 1982, a high-ranking State Department official accused the Soviet Union of using poison gas and chemical weapons in fighting anti-government forces in Afghanistan.
Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Walter Stoessel Jr., the deputy
On this day in 1982, a high-ranking State Department official accused the Soviet Union of using poison gas and chemical weapons in fighting anti-government forces in Afghanistan.
Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Walter Stoessel Jr., the deputy secretary of state, said the information came from Afghan defectors, who had been trained by the Soviet Union in chemical warfare and from Afghans who had taken refuge in Pakistan.
“As a result of chemical attacks,” Stoessel said, “3,042 deaths attributed to 47 separate incidents between the summer of 1979 and the summer of 1981 have been reported.”
A State Department intelligence official, Philip Stoddard, who came to the hearing with Stoessel, said, “We think the actual total of numbers killed by chemical weapons was considerably higher.”
A week earlier, both the Defense Intelligence Agency and the State Department said they had no evidence that Soviet forces were using chemical weapons in Afghanistan. Some critics charged that the new accusations were a smoke screen, aimed at enabling the United States to move forward in developing its own chemical weapons’ arsenal.
The accusations mirrored earlier Soviet charges against the U.S. for using defoliants and other chemical weapons during the Vietnam War. In 1982, the Soviet-led war against the Afghan rebels was being referred to in Western circles as “Russia’s Vietnam.”
The Kremlin sent troops into Afghanistan in 1979 to prop up a pro-Soviet communist regime then under assault by Islamic insurgents, receiving support from the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. The last Soviet forces left Afghanistan in February 1989, closing what Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, described as “a bleeding wound.”
SOURCE: “U.S. ACCUSES SOVIET OF POISONING 3,000” BY RICHARD HALLORAN, THE NEW YORK TIMES, MARCH 9, 1982