Word: poison
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...disagreement between the Republicans and Democrats been the principal obstacle to effective foreign policy in recent years. Rather, the source of poison and paralysis has more often been ideologically motivated obstructionism within each of the two parties...
...ivory. Since the early 1980s, the price of ivory has surged from $25 per lb. to $80 per lb. As a result, growing bands of wily and ruthless poachers have taken to hunting down elephants illegally all across Africa, killing the animals with everything from automatic weapons to poison. About 10% of the remaining African elephants were killed last year, reducing their ranks to fewer than 750,000. If the slaughter continues at the present pace, the wild elephant could be close to extinction within a decade...
When Iraq used poison gas to kill Kurdish civilians last year, the U.S. joined other nations in condemning chemical warfare. But last week it became clear that at least one American company has helped spread the deadly weapons. After Customs Service agents accused Baltimore-based Alcolac International, Inc., of illegally shipping hundreds of tons of thiodiglycol, a solvent that can be used in making mustard gas, the firm agreed to plead guilty to violating export laws. Prosecutors believe the chemical shipments eventually arrived in Iraq and Iran...
...declaration of international outrage against chemical weapons and a reaffirmation of the Geneva Protocol may at least slow the trend toward poison gases. "There's a general consensus that use of chemical weapons is wrong," says William Burns, director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. "I think we want to re-establish that." The U.S. hopes that the Paris meeting will pump momentum into the Conference on Disarmament, a 40-nation effort to write a treaty that would ban the gases outright. As an interim step, several participants want to strengthen the U.N. Secretary-General's authority...
...American manufacture of chemical weapons, the Soviet Union acceded to U.S. demands for on-site "challenge inspections" to enforce a treaty. Today the larger obstacle is posed by Third World nations that are reluctant to give up what is known as the "poor man's atom bomb." Poison gases, after all, are cheap and easy to manufacture. "All a terrorist needs is a milk bottle of nerve gas," says a British weapons expert, "and that he can get from a quiet lab in a back street of Tripoli." Thus even if a treaty could be hammered out to the satisfaction...