PERSPECTIVE ON PROLIFERATION : We Let the Genie Out of the Bottle : Weapons of mass destruction don’t require high technology, something U.S. troops may find out soon.

If U.S. troops now on their way to the Middle East go into combat against Iraq’s army, the Americans and their allies may find themselves poorly equipped for the task at hand and insufficiently trained for it. The reasons can be traced to our own critical policy errors.

From the 1950s onward, U.S. forces were shaped to fight the least probable but most destructive of wars, an exchange of strategic missiles between the United States and the Soviet Union. The likelihood of intercontinental nuclear war was never high, but an obsession with nuclear strategy diverted analysts and planners from less destructive--but enormously more probable--conflicts.

The possibility of strategic nuclear war siphoned money into such programs as mobile ICBMs and the Strategic Defense Initiative “research” effort, which have cost billions that could have gone into better training, more strategic airlift capability, better light tanks, and far more effective tank-killer weapons. The B-2 bomber has consumed $20 billion since its inception. American forces may go into battle distinctly less ready than we would wish because we have made the wrong investments.

Our troops also will be at a disadvantage from another direction, particularly in facing Iraq. American policy has for decades been to limit the spread of nuclear weapons, chemical weapons and long-range missiles. But this policy focused on the wrong targets.

U.S. trade and export diplomacy has tried to confine the spread of modern technology, as if there were some magic high-tech ingredients that were the keys to weapons of mass destruction and their delivery systems. Non-proliferation specialists carefully tracked the movement of krytrons--switches useful in triggering some kinds of nuclear weapons, but unnecessary for others. No krytrons fired the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Similarly, diplomacy has tried to restrain the movement of gas centrifuges to produce bomb-grade uranium. But there are other ways to produce enriched uranium using technology that has been on the world market for at least two decades.

Preventing the spread of long-range missiles has been another U.S. goal, as if large rockets could not be developed indigenously throughout the world. A Pentagon official once remarked that the Pershing II missile had a quarter of a million parts, every one of which had to work; he asked if a developing country could duplicate that missile. Certainly not; but he posed the wrong question.

The German V-2 has perhaps one-tenth as many parts and was built in 1944 and 1945 by slave labor in the horrendous conditions of the “Mittelwerk” underground factory. It deliveredone ton of high explosive at a range of 200 miles. The V-2 even used recycled pots and pans for its thrust chamber because Germany had no better steels.

Detailed plans for long-range rockets, foreign and American, are available in open archives.

During the long war with Iran, Iraqi engineers cobbled together Soviet-supplied SCUD missiles to develop a new rocket with twice the range and twice the payload--and did it without aid from the industrialized countries.

And, most immediately threatening, there were reports Wednesday of Iraqis loading chemical weapons on aircraft.

Saddam Hussein has already used chemical weapons against both Iran and his own rebellious Kurdish citizens. The gases used ranged from 1940s-type nerve gases to simple cyanide and mustard gases, often in combination. If he chooses to use chemical weapons against American or Saudi forces, he can do so. He can, at the very least, force our troops to fight inside chemical-protection suits (so hot that they are barely tolerable in northern European weather) on a desert battlefield in August. Water, the mainstay of decontamination procedures, will be scarce.

Iraq probably lacks nuclear weapons, but it does have weapons of mass destruction.

We could have taken strong diplomatic steps to make possession of long-range missiles and chemical weapons internationally unacceptable and undesirable, but we did not. Economic sanctions could have been sought when Iraq violated international norms using against chemical weapons, and Western nations could have offered solid security guarantees to any state attacked with weapons of mass destruction. But we relied instead on technical controls; and in this, as in so many of today’s problems, there is no purely technical fix. Chemical weapons, missiles, and even nuclear weapons can all be built or acquired by a determined nation.

In 1945 we thought the Soviets would take 20 years to build an atomic bomb; they took four. Again in Iraq we underestimated the intelligence and resourcefulness of our potential adversaries.

Perhaps international diplomatic efforts to stop the proliferation of the worst weapons have a chance in the world of today, with cooperation among nations emerging on an unprecedented scale. But for now the genie has escaped and is in Iraqi hands, ready to be used.

There are unclassified satellite pictures of an area near Baghdad called Salman Pak. Those pictures contain persuasive indications that Saddam Hussein has, or will soon have, a powerful biological weapons factory using germ and virus cultures supplied unwittingly by, among others, the American Centers for Disease Control and European and Soviet laboratories.

American options in Iraq are restricted, and our actions may be deterred, by Iraqi missiles carrying chemical, and perhaps biological, weapons. But it is our own fault.