That’s right. It doesn’t do any good to post irrelevant cites that don’t support your argument. Sorry about that.
Shodan, (the chemical) white phosphorus, used as a weapon, is a WMD?
Here’s an earlier go around on white phosphorus in GD:
Chemical Weapons found in Iraq…
And its mate in the Pit:
Italian TV: US Used Chemical Weapons
I remember those threads, what I´m interested in is hearing from Shodan if he would label white phosphorous as a WMD since he insist that a chemical weapon is by definition a WMD regardless of letality and/or its bang per buck ratio.
I, the ever optimists, think that he would then reconsider his definitions of what WMD means.
I tried asking him a similar question earlier in the thread. No luck in getting a response (though he did address other parts of my post).
From your link:
Vile? Yes. Mass destruction? Not remotely close.
Boy, that was easy. Any more tough questions?
Perhaps you should leave the direct personal insults in the Pit?
[ /Moderating ]
Apparently, then, no weapon that produces less than 100% fatalies is a WMD. Or, as I suspected, “mass” = at least one more than however many Saddam killed.
So I guess it must be 5,001.
If it matters, you are rather lonely in your denial that Saddam used WMD against the Kurds -
http://cns.miis.edu/research/wmdme/iraq.htm
http://www.kurd.org/halabja.html
http://www.cia.gov/cia/reports/iraq_wmd/Iraq_Oct_2002.htm
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A42671-2002May31?language=printer
I thought it was ‘no true Scotsman’, not ‘no true Kurd’.
Regards,
Shodan
Thank you, tomndebb.
This seems to be a matter of some dispute.
It seems to me that the weaponized form is a WMD. Is that what you were asking?
How so?
Regards,
Shodan
My highschool lab had a flask with white phosphorus, was that too a WMD?
Chemicals are miscible, if a 500 lb bomb of mustard is a WMD, a 5 pound can of it is a 1/100th WMD?.
Even a single small nuclear weapon makes a huge damage (you can downsize them by making them fizzle thoug), biological weapons are self-spreading; a chemical weapon depends on how much of it you use and how carefully you distribute it, like bullets and conventional explosives.
Calling any chemical weapon a WMD regardless of it´s size nature or effectivity is completely inacurate
(darn)
Calling any chemical weapon a WMD regardless of it´s size nature or effectivity is completely inacurate…
…; is a fistfull of dirt a hill?, does one drop make a bucket? where do you draw the line?
NBC weapons all can be described as non-conventional, that I can agree on; but no mather how you frame it, a weapon (single, as in one item) that by itself can´t produce a massive amount of destruction isn´t a WMD.
Now that we have droped to the tautology department I don´t know what else there is to say.
You’re probably right.
Regards,
Shodan
Mustard gas and sarin are not always WMD’s. They must be combined with another factor in order to be capable of mass destruction. Specifically, this item would be a helicopter or airplane capable of aerosol distribution over a large area. Lacking such a delivery system, chemical weapons are no more destructive than other battlefield munitions.
This is an important distinction to make, as the war was sold over the “smoking gun being a mushroom cloud.” And ultimately this does become a question of degree, which diligent minds must determine. The implication, of course, was that of terrorists conducting mushroom-cloud sized attacks on the fatherland (errr… homeland). Of course we now understand this hype was ludicrous, but it does set the parameters of the scale we’re talking about… mass destruction as being truly massive. Chemical weapons out of a suitcase simply do not qualify as mass destruction on a scale suitable for starting a war.
Color me a little confused then. If the term seems to have been originated by the Bush administration to loosely categorize destructive weapons that could be used by terrorists, and if they include Sarin and mustard gas in that definition, than how can we reasonably say that either of them aren’t?
If I invent a term, I get to define it, right?
I know that I included and agreed with you concerning mass lethality as being a necessary component of a WMD, but upon further reflection I’m not sure this is a true. I think the better term would be mass casualties. I think that mustard gas is a particularly fearsome weapon because of the scarring, crippling, and massive damage and suffering it creates in those that it injures as well as those that it kills.
Earlier you poo-pooed the Sarin shell that was detonated in '04 injuring two servicemen (I hope that’s not too strong a term,) but consider that the reason the shell didn’t injure many was because it was outside, and it didn’t mix because it didn’t rotate.
Take that same shell and give it to a terrorist who knows how to mix it and disperse it say, an office building, and you have a mighty fine WMD.
Same thing for mustard gas. It’s how it gets used. For that matter, Chlorine and ammonia make a fine WMD if you use them intelligiently to that effect.
Well, one of the most compelling arguments in my mind was the fact that Sadamm had been known to use mustard gas and nerve gas.
I think this is a bad argument. Just because they haven’t been used to good effect doesn’t mean they couldn’t be. That Sarin shell could be mixed and dispersed in an enclosed environment and take out a Superdome’s worth of people. Certainly that would make it a WMD. Blown up badly by the road so it doesn’t mix doesn’t mean it wasn’t exceedingly dangerous and couldn’t have done a lot of damage. Unfortunately, we have more to thank for the incompetance of the insurgents who found and used the shell than we do the Bush administration for protecting us from such. I don’t think though that we should be counting on incompetance to protect us.
Again, there is probably a lot more horror and terror value in a weapon that leaves people scarred blistered and crippled for life coughing their lungs out and going blind and (if they survive) dying of cancer, than there is in just killing them cleanly.
There’d be lots of heartbreaking stories and suffering and horrific injuries. The cost to care for all these people would be huge, and it would be something that we’d be living with for decades.
Like I said earlier, I did agree that a WMD has high lethality. In reconsidering, high casualties of this nature seem even worse. Perhaps, if you still disagree with it being a WMD you might consider that as a weapon of terror it’s just if not more fearsome than many things you would consider as WMDs.
We’re not all that far away from each other, here.
You realize, of course, that this makes no sense at all.
Feel free to support that implication with stuff I’ve actually, you know, said.
First of all: when you quote a source, aren’t you supposed to link to it?
Second: how many weapons did it take to kill 5000 people?
Since you don’t link to your source, for all I know you could be making shit up.
When did I deny this? I have taken no position on it, one way or the other.
The previous cite you gave did not remotely support a contention that weapons capable of causing mass deaths were used against the Kurds. I was assuming we were talking about events described in those links (one of them was simply a description of the properties of mustard gas - boy was that enlightening!), and were not extrapolating from the particular to the universal.
Feel free to quote from these links as part of an argument of some sort.
But a linkfest by itself ain’t an argument; I’m not going to each of these places to try to figure out what you intended me to read that would best support your contentions.
When come back, bring argument.
Did they? (Include mustard gas in that definition, that is.)
Maybe I wasn’t clear. I’m not arguing that the term didn’t previously exist as a term of art; I can’t vouch for the truth of that, one way or the other, although I’m assuming it pre-existed 9/11.
But I’m saying the Bush Administration initiated the use of the term in the popular discourse.
As you’ve surely noticed, the Bush speechwriters frequently avoid precision in what seems like a deliberate effort over time to associate disparate phenomena in the public mind (e.g. Saddam and 9/11) with the deniability of having avoided direct statements like “Saddam was involved in 9/11” that could be proven false.
As a result, I doubt that Bush ever said anything as definite as “mustard gas is a weapon of mass destruction” or “weapons of mass destruction are weapons that can kill thousands of people at once,” or even “by weapons of mass destruction, I mean all nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons.”
But if you can show me where the Bushies explicitly said mustard gas was a weapon of mass destruction, whether they spelled it out or used the acronym, I’ll concede the point.
I’d be willing to say there’s an argument for large numbers of severe casualties, though I’m still not sure which side I’d come down on. I’d still disagree with mustard gas as a WMD even by that definition, based on what I’ve read, since long-term injuries are dependent on heavy concentrations getting into eyes or lungs, and that does require a confined space. I have no idea how big a space a mustard-gas shell is capable of filling with a high concentration of gas/aerosol/whatever, though.
No, the term is apt.
Except that it takes the rotation of the shell, fired in the usual manner, to efficaciously mix the components. Are terrorists going to gain access to conventional artillery here in the U.S., or is there some more efficacious way of mixing the sarin components by hand than the folks on the Japanese subway knew about?
Actually, I am very concerned about them, chlorine especially. We transport carloads of it by train through central cities; I started a thread about that several months back. Seems one good wad of conventional kaboom on the side of a well-marked, poorly-guarded chlorine tank car in the middle of a big city could kill hundreds, perhaps thousands. And I’m not discounting ammonia; I just have read more about chlorine.
So yeah, chlorine can be a WMD, though the key thing here is our system of transporting it in train-car-sized quantities. In a way, it’s like the 9/11 attacks themselves: rather than bring a WMD over here, the easiest thing for a terrorist to do is look around for an elegant way of turning what’s already available over here into a WMD. And we transport hazardous chemicals by the train carload.
I agree that we shouldn’t rely on terrorists’ incompetence to protect us. But I think it’s safe to assume that our hypothetical terrorists need weapons that don’t require heavy, bulky equipment to use in an effective manner. And the part about their having one shot, I feel, is still valid. So that brings up the question: do we have bio/chem weapons capable of inflicting large numbers of severe casualties that are capable of doing so without the attacker’s carrying a lot of cumbersome gear? Or, more to the point, does a nation that has less stringent military security than we do have them in that form?
Two things. First, I’m just wondering how many people one could really do this to. It takes high concentrations in the lungs or eyes to cause that sort of damage, and gas wants to disperse. And as a skin blistering agent, mustard gas’ effects are apparently pretty treatable. So to be a weapon of mass casualties, you need a big enough enclosed area that there’s a lot of people there who can’t get away fast, and you need enough mustard gas that, even when effectively dispersee, it’s still in high enough concentrations to inflict that sort of damage.
If I’m playing the black pieces here, I’m gonna go with “this is an awfully tricky problem - why don’t I blow up the chlorine tanker car instead?” But I’ll admit that I don’t know how much mustard gas fits into how small a container in a way that a few terrorists could make effective use of it.
The other thing is, we had something a lot like this here a few years ago, and in terms of terror, its effects were in fact overshadowed by the larger number of deaths the same day. I work just a few miles from the Pentagon, and a fair number of people (over a hundred, IIRC) were severely burned there in the 9/11 attack. Articles I’ve seen about them in the past five years? Two, I think. Maybe three. No publicity = no widespread terror.
I can agree with that nomenclature. Hell, even the anthrax attacks in the fall of 2001, which killed five and affected 17 others, were a pretty effective terror weapon.
True dat. It’s made for something that’s been more of a discussion than a debate. I could go for more of those, 'round here.
I thought he did. I remember him saying it in terms of “Saddam used WMDs on the Iraqis and his own people” and I think he referred to mustard gas by name.
Here we go:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4518337-110878,00.html
"Saddam Hussein is a homicidal dictator who is addicted to weapons of mass destruction.
Some ask how urgent this danger is to America and the world. The danger is already significant, and it only grows worse with time. If we know Saddam Hussein has dangerous weapons today - and we do - does it make any sense for the world to wait to confront him as he grows even stronger and develops even more dangerous weapons?
In 1995, after several years of deceit by the Iraqi regime, the head of Iraq’s military industries defected. It was then that the regime was forced to admit that it had produced more than 30,000 litres of anthrax and other deadly biological agents. The inspectors, however, concluded that Iraq had likely produced two to four times that amount. This is a massive stockpile of biological weapons that has never been accounted for and is capable of killing millions.
We know that the regime has produced thousands of tons of chemical agents, including mustard gas, Sarin nerve gas, VX nerve gas. Saddam Hussein also has experience in using chemical weapons. He’s ordered chemical attacks on Iran and on more than 40 villages in his own country. These actions killed or injured at least 20,000 people: more than six times the number of people who died in the attacks of September 11.
And surveillance photos reveal that the regime is rebuilding facilities that it had used to produce chemical and biological weapons. Every chemical and biological weapon that Iraq has or makes is a direct violation of the truce that ended the Persian Gulf War in 1991.Yet Saddam Hussein has chosen to build and keep these weapons, despite international sanctions, UN demands and isolation from the civilized world.
Iraq possesses ballistic missiles with a likely range of hundreds of miles; far enough to strike Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey an…"
More from here:
A number of short quotes several of which seem to include mustard gas and Sarin as WMDs.
Ok. I hardly find this diabolical, though. I often strive to make statements that are not provably false, too.
On looking at those quotes and looking for others, I’m noticing that I’m having difficulty finding an instance wherein he rigorously defines WMDs, which kind of goes towards your earlier point. He sure does seem to strongly implicate and include mustard gas as a WMD though, doesn’t he?
I’ll leave it to you to judge.
Me neither.
Beats me, but how tough is it to mix if the rotation of a shell will do the job? It seems to me that if you seal up a container and use a mortar mixer with the shaft through a gasket (a rope and oil gasket might work) you could probably thoroughly mix two agents together without killing yourself.
Ammonia is yechy by itself but it makes a nasty poisonous gas when mixed with chlorine, so yeah, bad shit is everywhere.
I agree.
Good question. I was thinking something like this myself. I’ll adress it after I reply to the rest of your points.
Yes. I honestly don’t know how much that is. I’ve never sought to quantify how much mustard gas you need to hurt or kill a given number of people.
Well, if I was playing the black pieces I’d google “mustard gas toxicity” and see if that was more efficient than blowing up a chlorine tanker. It would certainly be more portable and easy to get where I wanted than trying to smuggle a chlorine tanker into, say, a Mets game.
Ahh, google works:
Good article on mustard gas toxicity. You need about 7grams per person to have a nice high lethality level. So, let’s plan our attack against Shea Stadium with 50,000 people in it. We need about 770 pounds. Let’s call it 1000 pounds to be on the safe side. Hmmm. We could use a crop duster.
Also, from that article, note how the danger is twofold, the liquid itself and evaporating it. Soaking a couple of filters in a buildings air filtration system would do a nasty job on the people in the building.
You could disperse it in a splash. Fill a water balloon and stike it with a baseball bat (assuming you want martyrdom.)
Let’s say that 125 pound shell contains 20 pounds of mustard agent. That’s good for about 1,000 people. I’m guessing a gallon is about 20 pounds, so say maximum toxicity is about 1,000 people per gallon. That’s unobtainable, so let’s half it and say that with a good plan and dispersal method you could kill 250 people and severely injure another 250 with a gallon of the stuff.
That’s pretty dangerous. A lot more dangerous I think than chlorine. I’m thinking it’s a WMD.
True.
And most would agree it’s a WMD, but put that way it ain’t that bad, is it?
Getting around to that last point I said I’d come back to, I think we need a new term. A rigidly defined one. “WMD” is vague and ill-defined as it stands.
What we need is a term and a definition for terror weapons that can inflict mass casualties without the need for major infrastructure or a military to deliver them. They also need to be bad enough and difficult enough to obtain as to warrant military intervention to deprive hostile regimes or groups from getting them.
Any further ideas for a term for this and an accompanying definition?
The term 'Weapons of Mass Destruction was fairly well defined in US Code prior to 9/11:
Definition of the phrase - weapons of mass destruction ?
Scylla, really now, this is overly simplistic. This assumes perfect distribution such that every individual in the stadium receives a lethal dose of mustard. Due to dispersal by wind, movement of the crowd in response to the attack, etc, you can’t even begin to predict mortality rates. I’m no expert on the matter, but this kind of oversimplification is total alarmism. Furthermore, soaking air filters is not an effective means of distributing mustard gas–its vapor pressure is 0.11 mm Hg (higher vapor pressure = more volatile). It is not volatile; it does not evaporate. In order to be distributed, mustard must be aerosolized. Compare this value to water at room temperature (55.35 mm Hg), ethanol (134 mm Hg), or glycerol (0.0025 mm Hg). If you’re not familiar with glycerol, it’s an extremely stable agent–so we’re talking a volatility just above maple fucking syrup.
I don’t think mustard gas is something to play with, but I take more than a passing interest in chemistry. Please don’t make the act of weaponizing mustard gas a trivial matter–it is not.
Excuse me, I should not have said that mustard gas does not evaporate. That is not true. It must, however, be heated to evaporate.