The renewed use of these reprehensible weapons underlines the immorality of Vietnams efforts to exterminate opposition to its control of Indochina and sets as well a dangerous precedent. If the civilized worlds injunctions against the use of chemical weapons are flagrantly ignored in Southeast Asia. the legal. moral. and political sanctions against their employment elsewhere will almost certainly be weakened. With these concerns in mind. last January I visited Nong Khai. a refugee camp in northern Thailand. After personally interviewing Hmong who witnessed chemical weapons attacks. I became convinced of the validity of refugee claims and requested that the State Department launch a thorough investigation of the problem and raise the chemical weapons issue as a high priority item in appropriate international bodies. Unfortunately. the administration displayed surprising reluctance to confirm this past spring and summer that chemical weapons were indeed being used by the Vietnamese and Laotian Communist forces. despite the widespread refugee reports and the corroboratory intelligence information available at the time. The reluctance of our Government to confirm the irrefutable is reminiscent of the refusal of Western democratic governments in the late 1930s and early 1940s to accept the growing body of evidence that pointed to Nazi concentration camp gassing of Europes Jewish population. Tragically. this reluctance to confirm the usage of these terrifying weapons in Laos may have contributed to their further legitimatization and thus to their recent probable use in Cambodia.