When is the usage of nukes, poison gas, and bioweapons justified?

Great Debates
21

Under any circumstances in which I’m willing to bring about the same effects or consequences with conventional weapons. If wiping Moscow or Beijing (and their millions of residents) off the map is indicated, sustained bombing with fuel-air explosives isn’t a morally superior means of achieving that, compared to an ICBM (and taking into account persistent effects of nukes or chemical weapons).

Put a bit differently: it wasn’t in any sense better to die in the firebombing of Tokyo than to be vaporized in Hiroshima.

22

Under what circumstances are you willing to carpet bomb civilians?

23

Generally, I’m not. My point is that, if you’re going to foreswear nukes or nerve gas, then this is the proper reason to do so–that it’s never okay to create mass civilian casualties–rather than the particulars of the weapon. Debates about WMDs tend to get hung up on effects, implying that more conventional means of achieving the same horrific end are somehow less terrible.

To flesh this out a bit, I’d be more willing to use a tactical nuke to break up an armoured spearhead driving towards my capital than I would be to use it on an enemy city, but that’s to do with the military vs. civilian target distinction, not nuke vs. incendiary bombs.

24

Okay. I agree. I tried to make that distinction in my earlier post too. That it’s the indiscriminate nature of WMDs that make them horrible, not the scary radiation or chemicals. Which is why I said WWII style carpet bombings are just as bad.

Nukes could be used to safely break up an impending asteroid strike. (But please don’t get Aerosmith involved!)

Germs could possibly be used to target individuals.

Chemicals could be (and are!) used to power Humvees.

The Dresden bombing was certainly worse than all those.

25

I think Ns, Bs and Cs are all quite different.

Nukes are, at least in some ways, just like non-WMDs that already exist, but much bigger. So to a large extent I agree with Hansel’s analysis of the situation. If I were willing to drop 100,000 conventional bombs on a particular target, then I’m close to just as willing to drop a nuke, at least ethically (ignoring the issue of international censure).

Biological weapons are (to the extent that I know anything about them) not very useful on an actual battlefield, and incredibly hard to control. They’re good for inflicting mass casualties to a civilian population, or for depopulating the world… but I find it VERY hard to come up with a situation where I’d use them. And that’s not so much because they’re so uniquely evil (after all, dead is dead) but because it would require a hypothetical where biological weapons would actually accomplish something… maybe some crazy case where I live in an island nation, and an evil and heartless totalitarian state on the mainland has announced their intention of wiping my nation off the face of the earth and killing or enslaving every last one of its citizens, and my nation has zero chance of opposing them militarily, but has enough advance warning to release superFlu… but even if I could have a reasonable chance (since I live on an island) of preventing it from spreading to my countrymen, how do I keep it from spreading to the rest of the world, etc? That said, there was an episode of Battlestar Galactica in which our heroes, the only 40,000 humans left in the galaxy, were on the run from the pursuing cylons, who vastly outnumbered them and had already genocidally murdered 100 billion or so humans on 10 planets, and the humans happened on a way to potentially kill every cylon in existence, and one human took it on himself to screw up this plan because it was a biological weapon and that was cruel/inhumane. And I thought that was one of the stupidest things I ever saw.

Chemical weapons are different still. Again, they’re very hard to control, due to shifting winds and so forth. But I think a large part of the reason they’re so shunned is because of how painful and severe the suffering they inflict is. Combine that with the fact that lots of armies realized they just weren’t accomplishing much with them, and they’ve been banned since WWI. That said, if someone developed a painless and fairly-quickly-evaporating poison gas (not that I’m endorsing research into that topic!), I would have no compunction using it if national survival was at stake, as long as it was likely to actually accomplish something, as opposed to just killing for the sake of revenge.

War is hell… and if you’re already prepared to drop bombs that will rip people limbs off and eviscerate them and leave them begging for their mothers while they watch their own intestines fall out then it’s a bit weird to refuse to kill them with poison gas, even though that’s a status quo that we’re all used to.

26

How do you figure? Using WMDs is so terrible and horrible, and so uniquely worse than anything else that happens in war, that any nation that would consider using them, even in the most extreme of circumstances, forfeits all right to existence?

27

But it would be okay to achieve the same thing with fuel-air explosives and incendiary artillery? Or by blockading the enemy, causing mass starvation?

28

When the results of not using them are worse than the results of using them. I.E, when we’re already screwed anyway.

29

That would be the case in a reasonable world. It is probably the case in our current world, as evidenced that no nation is nuking the fuck out of another one.

But I could easily imagine a circumstance in a world not that much further from ours where WMD if not absolutely necessary were at least the best way of survival from a hostile international situation.

30

The fictional ansewer is when the Draka invade, otherwise strictly xenocide for when we have to dust the bugs.

Declan

31

As warfare becomes more targeted against military targets WMD becomes less useful. But as long as we still attack civilian targets and personel what does it matter if we do it with explosive or WMD. The only difference I can see is the environmental damage will that be enough to get warring peoples to refrain?

32

If war is politics by other means, then the point of war is to accomplish something by fighting. Weapons that actually make it harder to conduct the fight get shunned. For instance, with chemical weapons if you use them and your enemy retaliates in kind, then you’ve simply upped the misery index without really accomplishing much other than your troops now have to wear hot, restricting protective suits all the time.

The problem with nuclear weapons is that if you use them, than all other considerations become secondary. Who cares how many tanks or divisions your enemy has if they have and are using hundreds of tactical nukes? NATO and the Warsaw Pact could have turned Germany into a death zone where assembling any large force would be suicidal the moment it became big enough to be worth nuking. What would that accomplish?

In a sense, all wars are asymmetric in that no commander wants to fight a slugging match against an equal opponent. Either you have a numerical advantage that you can simply overwhelm your opponent, or you try to fight rock-paper-scissors style in that you attack with the portion of your force best suited for destroying one portion of the enemy’s forces. With weapons of mass destruction, unless you have them and your enemy doesn’t, or you think you can knock them out with a surprise attack, WMDs are equalizers that simply reduce both sides to the same level- often the same level of dead. So they primarily become deterrents- something that will only be used by someone with nothing left to lose.

33

I agree with this, with the one caveat that carpet bombing tends not to have the uncontrolled downstream effects or persistence of fallout or runaway epidemic that could result from nukes or biologicals. But the general thrust I agree with.

34

I consider FAEs to be WMDs too, and incendiaries are likewise regulated rather tightly against civilian targets. I would not be OK with these, either (you should know that I’m not OK with violence anyway, BTW)

How is this equivalent to anything WMDs do? Not that I’m for it, understand, but I don’t grok the equivalence you’re proposing. Just kill-count?

35

Doesn’t change what I said.

36

The point is that, for any amount of suffering caused by a WMD, you can achieve the same suffering conventionally–so yes, kill count, or rather, suffering count. I mentioned blockade specifically because that’s been seriously proposed as what the US should have done instead of dropping atomic bombs on Japan, as if hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians starving to death was somehow preferable.

Your point about downstream effects of WMDs is well taken, but again, we can always up the suffering of a conventional attack to match it. Dying of cancer five years after Hiroshima is terrible, but so is living with the burns sustained in the Tokyo firestorm.

37

But you have to work a lot harder at it, and put yourself in harm’s way, which discourages it from happening too easily. Whereas WMDs are easy and impersonal.

And no, I’m not OK with anything that leads to people dying, so you can mark me as a “No” for blockades, too.