The US also had a functional chemical weapons program in 1970, which could have been used for a proportional response and a deterrent. We signed the chemical weapons treaty in 1993, and have been disposing of our chemical stockpiles since then.
The United States has refused to sign the Ottawa Treaty (aka the Mine Ban Treaty). We’ve argued there should be an exemption for the Korean DMZ. But there is no exemption so we haven’t signed it.
If you don’t like the terms of a treaty, you try to negotiate different terms. If you can’t get the terms you want, you don’t sign it. But you don’t sign a treaty and then decide to ignore the terms in it.
And technically, the Hague Conventions of 1899-1907 banned arming aircraft. It banned chemical weapons, too.
Back to the NNPT, different terms concerning C/BWs weren’t necessary at the time. Times have changed, the tactical and strategic setup of our country (and the world) has changed. And frankly, the following the pre-1991 interpretation of this treaty sounds like it would simply protect any non-nuclear country who uses non-nuclear WMDs from retaliation.
So what? If they, do this stance says we can nuke them. Should we be in the business of nuking everyone who might be working on a nuclear capability?
Except chemical and biological weapons are really not very effective. You can cause much more death and destruction with conventional weapons. About the only real advantage is the fact that it doesn’t harm physical structures. Of course the more effective versions do leave a long lasting residue that is expensive to clean up. Most nations have abandoned chemical weapons because they don’t make tactical or strategic sense, not because of their horrors.
Only if you assume we don’t have any non-nuclear options of our own. As it turns out, we managed to reach out and touch Saddam Hussein without using any nuclear weapons.
The Hague Conventions, like the NNPT, have an option built in for countries that change their mind. Any signatory can tell the other signatories that it’s withdrawing from the treaty after giving notice (ninety days for the NNDT, one year for the Hague Conventions).
The Kellogg-Briand pact went further, and outlawed the use of military force except in self defense.
They’re good terror weapons. They’re helpful at making up for a lack of strength in conventional arms. They’re good at area denial.
As I recall, they killed tens of thousands in the Iran-Iraq war, and left tens of thousands more as casualties. Not counting Kurds. The Tokyo Sarin attack only killed about a dozen, and injured thousands, as the nerve gas that was used by the cult that made it was an impure form.
Yes, they’re less effective than, say, the United States Air Force. If you have a United States Air Force.
Yes, Saddam Hussein, who didn’t attack coalition forces with his chemical stockpiles, possibly because of the threat of nuclear retaliation, at least in part.
And if we’re in a conflict with a country that has chemical arms, what’s the motivion not to go chemical if we have troops on the ground? That we won’t unleash a massive aerial bombing campaign to destroy their military and industrial infrastructure if they hold back?
No country is going to use nukes against the United States. Here’s what they’ll do, they’ll pay some two-bit, self styled terrorist to blow us up and then they can claim they had nothing to do with it.
Remember WWI, a Serbian terrorist with an organization with ties to the Serbian government killed the archduke. Now how strong these ties were were still debateable.
The best defence against the USA is still getting nukes. No president will risk any American lives. Sure if North Korea were stupid enough to nuke the US it’d do some major damage, well perhaps, but then the USA would be free to respond in kind with nukes and long story short, no North Korea.
But by giving a terrorist a bomb or bombs and have them do the dirty work there is plausible deniability.
And so what if Mr Obama, changes policy, we all know that policy can only last 7 more years at most, and can easily be modified later on.
It’s just political talk. If France and Great Britian hadn’t relied on a promise by Hitler and started rearming sooner, they’d have a much tougher target for Hitler.
Talk is cheap, and we all know politicans are 100% talk
This will encourage the secret production and stockpiling of chemical and biological weapons by Third-World dictatorships. Suppose for instance Iran perfected a mutated smallpox strain and released it on the US. Shouldn’t we at least threaten the use of nuclear weapons in such a case.
Have you been paying no attention to this story at all?!
Suppose they agreed to a compromise and ended their nuclear program but instead worked on a biological one? Or if say Myanmar or Libya or Venezuela or some nation without any nuclear ambition works in secret on chemical or biological ones?
The story linked in the OP says:
Which is just as it should be. Nuclear response would be disproportionate even to something on the order of Saddam Hussein’s gassing of the Kurds. And remember, the U.S. military is really, really good at devastating conventional responses.
A biological weapon actually is probably more deadly than a single nuclear missile were it to be used and as the United States does not have chemical or biological weapons it’s only possible response would be a nuclear one.
Not true. We have chemical weapon storage sites in Oregon, Colorado, Kentucky, Alabama, Arkansas, and Utah. We are slowly destroying the stuff (and have been since the 80’s) but we aren’t expected to get rid of it all until at least 2012. Some of that stuff is really hard to dispose of properly. While I can’t imagine the US ever using it, we do have plenty of chemical weapons left.
The bio stuff is mostly true. We do produce small batches at the US Army Medical Research Center. It’s for defense research reasons, which I’m okay with, but again if we really wanted to we could start making the stuff extremely quickly.
First, nations just don’t DO that. They don’t hand over that kind of weapon to loose cannons like terrorists. We didn’t. The USSR didn’t. China doesn’t. Israel doesn’t.
And second, plausible denability wouldn’t matter in the slightest. If Iran handed over a bomb to some terrorists and we got nuked, we’d nuke Iran in retaliation regardless of “plausible denability”, and they know it I’m sure. We might well nuke them in “retaliation” even if we have no idea as to who is actually responsible, and I’m sure they know that too.
Sure, but how many people do we have who’re trained in using this stuff, offensively? How much of it is even still usable? Plus we’ve signed the Chemical Weapons Convention, which prohibits their use—I don’t think it even allows their use in reprisal.
But a cash-strapped post-Soviet kleptocracy might. Especially if some in its government have jihadist sympathies.
This isn’t the first time you’ve advocated this childish, tit-for-tat foreign policy. What you continually fail to recognize is that our capabilities are so much greater than any other country, that our deterrance for either strategic or conventional attack is based not only on firepower but also precision of effect.
Let’s say Iran planned to launch a chemical weapon, Pearl Harbor type sneak attack on the US. In your world, you seem to think the only thing Iran fears would be the US nuking Tehran or the US killing massive numbers of Iranian with chemical weapons.
In reality, our ability to strike with very large numbers of precision weapons is more fearsome to them. They know that within days, we could evicerate they key organs of their government with far, far fewer civilian casualties than a nuclear retaliatory strike. The fact is that we don’t need chemical or nuclear weapons to keep Iran from attacking us directly, because our conventional capabilities are overwhelming and there is no moral threshold we would have to cross to drop smart bombs, as opposed to nuclear weapons.
It is a shame that for as great and powerful as you think America is, that you cannot see that the mulifaceted aspects of our power are so much more awesome than the single bludgeon you think we must rely upon. Here’s the reality: nuclear weapons are increasingly the weapon for weak states, not powerful ones. Chew on that for a while.