And the only country to use a nuke on civilians is… the USA.
a.k.a. the world’s policeman.
Time to get off the "Moral " high horse. eh?
No. A WMD is a nuclear, biological, or chemical weapon.
♪* I am stuck on napalm
'Cause napalm sticks to me!* ♪
Nope. As long as there are people like you on the planet, we have Moral Superiority.
They’ve thrown in radiological now too. CBRN is the current acronym.
So NBC = CBRN = WMD?
I see.
I wonder how they define the difference between nuclear and radiological.
Blast vs radiation probably. Radiological would include dusting.
A dirty bomb would probably be “radiological,” or dusting.
I was remembering when I was a Sea Cadet, and one of the books (The Bluejackets Manual?) had a section called ‘NBC Defense’. I hadn’t thought about radiological weapons.
In reality, I don’t see ‘dirty bombs’ as WMD. They scare the hell out of people, but I don’t think they’re that dangerous. Wouldn’t like to be around one, but I don’t see them as being in the same class as the others.
Napalm sticks to little chilll-dren,
All the children of the world,
Red and yellow, black and white,
They’re the same when they ignite,
Napalm sticks to all the children of the world!
A radiological attack (ie, a “dirty bomb”) dumps a bunch of radioactive particles around an area, but doesn’t have an actual nuclear explosion.
Basically, you’re comitting a Chernobyl or Fukushima-type accident on purpose, to screw up your enemy’s land for years to come.
I don’t see the connection between the title of the post and its contents, except to have a sly dig at the USA.
And no napalm isn’t a WMD, just because a weapon is unpleasant doesn’t make it fall into the latter bracket, fuel-air explosives/thermobaric weapons would be a lot closer though but even the largest FAE can barely match the yield of the smallest practically deployable nuclear weapon.
Actually, it is. In fact, US Code was revised shortly after 9/11 so that even hand grenades and pipe bombs are WMDs. Anything that can kill more than one person per use, essentially, can now be classified as such.
I didn’t believe it either when I heard it - some pipe-bomber or somesuch was charged with using WMDs as part of the laundry list against him a few years back, and when I heard it in the news story I was incredulous - but Google is your friend.
So what you’re saying is that a car is a WMD? Well, now I owe George W. Bush an apology :smack:.
There are people who write US terrorism laws, and then there are people who still have some tiny shred of sanity & common sense. A “weapon of mass destruction,” the way the term is normally used, means a weapon which would be used to cause widespread devestation, such as wiping out an entire city. A single napalm bomb wouldn’t be a WMD, but a large scale attack (of the kind that were conducted against several Axis cities in WW2) would definitely be a WMD, as those raids were done with the specific intent of burning down the whole damn city, or at least as much of it as possible. Shit, a napalm raid on Tokyo killed more people than either atomic bomb!
LOL. The U.S. wasn’t the first country that tried to build an “atomic” super weapon. Germany, England, Russia and Japan also attempted to build a nuclear bomb. The U.S. program was the first to actually build a working model.
The use of Little Boy and Fat Man shortened WWII by at least a year if not more.
If the U.S. had been interested in world domination, there would have little that any country could have done to stop it. If the Nazis or Imperial Japan had been the first to develop a working nuclear bomb, they would have used it to conquer the world.
The U.S. didn’t prepare for another world war. The U.S. didn’t want another world war. The U.S. didn’t start another world war. The U.S. did help end WWII and then chose to help rebuild most of the war torn areas.
I think your “high horse” is lame.
It was a petty dig at the U.S…
As far as WMD’s are concerned, it depends on who you talk to and WHEN. The definition seems to be constantly changing so it might be different tomorrow.
WMD = weapon of mass destruction, so any weapon that causes MASS destruction could be considered a WMD. Legally-speaking, any weapon described by legislative action (aka a law) would be a WMD.
To stretch the point, a knife can only be used on one victim (or tire) at a time. One revolver could injure 5 or 6 people. One pipe bomb could injure dozens. One gas or biological weapon could injure hundreds or thousands. So it really depends on how legislators or government agencies currently define “mass destruction”.
Wow, talk about rendering a term down into meaninglessness.
Just a nitpick from a good post, it wasn’t a napalm attack on Tokyo but rather incendiaries wasn’t it? Not that that has any bearing on your point.
Yeah, I don’t think Napalm® was around just yet, they likely used phosphorus against Tokyo.
Edit- a dirty bomb could be made with really short-lived isotope, couldn’t it?
Disable a city for months or years rather than decades or centuries?
I thought they used thermite.