For all the fear that Iraq is generating with its threat of using chemical weapons, the fact remains that the United States has a far larger and more potent supply of nerve and mustard gas at its disposal - enough, by some estimates, to kill everyone in the world 5,000 times.

U.S. delegate Stephen J. Ledogar reminded the 40-nation Geneva Disarmament Conference of U.S. capabilities Thursday, when he repeated the U.S. position that it has the right to "respond in kind" if its troops are hit by chemical weapons.Still, the possibility of the United States turning its chemical weapons on the Iraqis remains remote, even if Iraq uses chemicals first. For one thing, world opinion likely would turn against a superpower that inflicted the torture of chemical weapons; for another, other weapons probably would work better.

"Rather than make their missile sites more difficult to operate (by disabling Iraqi troops with chemical weapons), blow them to smithereens," suggested Gordon Burke, senior policy analyst for EAI Corp., a defense-industry consulting firm. "That would get to the point much faster."

Using chemical weapons is a decision that could be made only by the president. However, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney said Tuesday that he "cannot conceive of a situation" in which the United States would use chemical weapons against Iraq.

The world has viewed chemical weapons with particular horror since the Germans used mustard gas in World War I, killing 100,000 people and causing 1.3 million casualties. Troops sometimes woke up in their foxholes to find that they were lying in pools of the viscous liquid, which causes terrible blisters when it touches skin, Burke said. Inhaled, it can blister the inside of the lungs.

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Nerve agents, developed in the late 1930s, cause the entire nervous system to break down. A lethal dose of some types could fit on the point of a pin, and a liter jar could contain enough to kill a million people, Burke said.

Iraq is believed to have several thousand tons of chemical weapons, CIA Director William H. Webster told Congress in early 1989.

More frightening than the size of Iraq's arsenal is its inclination to use it. About 200 civilians died during the Iran-Iraq War when both sides used chemical weapons, and Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has used nerve gas against Kurdish rebels in his own country.

Both the United States and Iraq signed the Geneva Protocol of 1925, which banned first use of chemical weapons. The talks currently under way in Geneva are aimed at a global ban, but it probably will be years before a treaty is negotiated and signed.

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