Perhaps “baby killer” was over the top, but your prior misrepresenation of my arguments led me to believe you wouldn’t take them seriously in any case.
Reference:
You seemed to go out of your way to avoid commenting on the substance of my post, and instead belittling a perfectly valid point as having come from some Cheney-esque source (which I most certainly am not). I naturally thought that the substance of any further posts I made would be equally ignored. I am apparently correct.
Oh, Lord love a duck! Your comment was silly. I mocked it. It deserved mockery. The WP rounds were not fired with the direct intention to kill, only as a prelude to rendering people into hamburger jello with HE. Therefore, the WP rounds are little more than a pyrotechnic display?
If I make you coffee and dump in a couple teaspoons of rat poison, would you claim that the coffee was made without lethal intent? Whoya kidding?
I’ve been following this thread, and my background is as a biology student, not military science. So, perhaps I’m misunderstanding the meaning of the words “chemical” and “chemical weapon”. Bullet are chemicals, metal alloys to be more specific, but they do not injure as a result of their chemical properties. They injure because they hit people at high velocity. Grenades explode, but the main purpose of fragmentary grenades to to hit people with shrapnel. There are high explosive which are designed to hit people with heat, from exothermic chemical reactions, as well as the shock wave, depending on the explosives brissance. Am I right so far?
Here’s where I’m confused. Burning someone alive is most definately a chemical reaction, but I take it that it doesn’t count as a “chemical weapon”? If we soak people in Napalm and light them up, the napalm sticks to them, thanks to it chemical properties, and burns them, again, thanks to it chemical properties. Are these “chemical” weapons?
I don’t know about you, but I’d be more terrified about being burned alive by white phosphorous, than dying by inhaling too much chlroine gas. The earlier cites about chemical weapon treaties and regulations don’t sound like they were written by applied chemists, they sound like they were written by people who, let me be generous, had a special working meaning of the word “chemical”.
So, what’s the word?
Nope, I “rebuked” Pjen, who hijacked his own thread with the usual broken record about "the US is losing the war/Moral High Ground™. It got pretty much back on track, then you lumbered in to try to derail it again.
Of course. You’re playing his song.
Oh, I see - I’m ticked off by the brilliance of your arguments. :dubious:
It’s intriguing how you can raise fatuousness to the status of an art form.
Awww, bless his heart, he means well.
Well, isn’t that special. He got up on his hind legs and spoke to us.
(Dude, this isn’t the pit)
Yes.
It’s my understanding that the phrase “chemical weapons” is a euphemism for poison gas. Poison gas is a terribly ineffective weapon on the battlefield–even the Nazis didn’t bother with it. This fact allowed a bunch of nations to get together and ban its use, so they could feel good about themselves while devising new and much more horrible ways to kill each other.
I don’t understand why chemical weapons are lumped together with biological and nuclear weapons as weapons of mass destruction. Compared to N or B weapons, C weapons seem more like weapons of mediocre destruction to me.
You’re approaching this from a scientific perspective. However, the definitions of incendiaries, chemical weapons, and so forth are written in law, not science. The various treaties that have been cited here several times lay out in great precision what compounds are considered to be chemical weapons.
Since you’re a scientist, however, the various schedules of the CWC may be interesting reading to you. (You know, if you’re into this sort of thing.) It’s basically lists of chemicals: IIRC, Schedule 1 is prohibited items, and 2 and 3 are those subject to restrictions.
Exhibit A–Sarin. It may make for a lousy battlefield weapon, but it was a pretty good terrorist one when released in the Tokyo subway. Imagine a properly-purified form being released.
The Tokyo attacks were certainly horrific for the people involved, but the amount of deaths was much fewer than the number Al-Qaeda murdered in Madrid and London using only backpack conventional explosives. And that number is exceeded by those McVeigh killed using a truck bomb, or AQ using commercial airliners. Yet truck bombs and Kamikaze airliners don’t count as WMD.
It’s true that the number of people injured in the AUM subway attacks was large, and that many of those affected have injuries that last to this day. But the total casualties would be dwarfed by the release of a highly contagious disease, let alone the detonation of a small nuke. And the sarin was released under ideal killing conditions–a small crowded underground space.
I’ll concede that the subway attacks were pretty terrifying, and that poison gas is an effective means to accomplish terrorist ends–spreading fear throughout a civilian population. And, as you imply, the form of sarin used in Tokyo was not the most lethal version. But I still maintain that to categorize poison gas as a weapon of mass destruction alongside nukes and smallpox is illogical, and renders the term WMD incoherent.