Mods: if this gets moved to Great Debates, so be it.
I get that chem weapons are considered the line you don’t cross, just before nuclear weapons. But nukes cause long-lasting harm to the environment and to offspring of survivors. Are chem weapons immoral because of the level or type of suffering they cause? Do they stay in the environment for long periods of time, or are they known to cause birth defects? It doesn’t seem like “the indiscriminate harm they cause” is a real exclusive anymore.
Depends on the chemical weapon in question, Some I believe do in fact stay in the environment for weeks. And several industrial chemicals have been linked to brthdefects, I suppose itsn possible that modern chemical weapons do the same.
As for immoral; well we use them all the time; tear gas is a chemical weapon.
To give a false impression that there are moral ways to slaughter people.
It is a rubbish argument that much in war is considered immoral. Submarines were considered beneath dignity.
As Jacki Fisher famously said about regulating warfare “You may as well try and regulate hell!”
Questions of morality are better suited to GD than GQ.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
A secondary motive is to show the enemy as inhuman because they use a weapon not commonly used by their opponent.
To take this thought one step further:
Consider a war where one side sees the writing on the wall; they will lose unless they take a chance on chemical weapons.
Despite deploying them, they still lose the war.
This is a big WIN for the other side. Now, not only have they won the war, but after their opponent surrenders they can STILL execute their military commanders and possibly head of state for war crimes!!
Agent Orange, used by the US in Vietnam, is a chemical weapon that is still causing harm, 40+ years later.
Read the Wiki article - I don’t see how anyone could seriously suggest that Agent Orange has been any less harmful than, say, nuking Hanoi would have been. Nuking Hanoi might arguably have caused less long-term harm.
Apparently moral ways to kill people:
Gut shooting them so their innards are drooping out.
Shooting them in the throat and letting them choke to death.
Blowing their limbs of via bomb, missle or grenade and letting them bleed out.
Cooking them via flamethrower.
Blowing up their vehicle and leaving their mangled bodies to both burn and bleed to death.
etc., etc., bloody fucking etc.
Shooting somebody is more moral than indiscriminately dumping poisons on a populated area. We maintain the combatant/civilian distinction for a reason.
A lot of it has to do with the fact that the weapons are indiscriminate. Once the agent has been released, it cannot be controlled or contained. This means civilians on the battlefield, prisoners of war, and wounded soldiers will be killed along with the combatants. As above, chemicals latent in the environment can continue to cause death and injury long after the battle has concluded. There is also no way for a victim to surrender. Even if they are incapacitated, they’re still going to die.
All of these things (proportionality, discrimination, opportunity for surrender) are regarded as “norms” in the coduct of warfare as defined by various treaties and conventions.
Further, there is always the matter of escalation. If we accept the premise of a “tactical” chemical weapon to be used on a small scale (um… okay…) then nothing prevents the stockpiling of quantities that could be used to attack entire cities.
Personally, I think that once you have decided to kill someone the means by which you do it are hardly relevant, but maybe that’s why they don’t let me make these decisions.
(I’m guessing you just read the New Yorker article)
The problem with nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons is their high potential for collateral damage and long-term aftereffects. If you shoot a bullet at someone you might kill them, but the bullet isn’t going to linger around and contaminate the ground water for the next 30 years. An artillery shell might go astray and hit a farmhouse by accident, but weaponized anthrax has the potential to trigger a worldwide epidemic.
This is also the reason there is an international push to ban landmines. An unexploded bomb might *accidentally *kill a farmer who digs it up years later, but landmines do that by design.
This is absolutely correct. I don’t have the time to enter a diatribe about the concept of moral killing. It would include stuff about landmines and humane bullets.
Per Wikipedia:
War is hell, indeed, but it’s much less hellish than it once was. Moral stands, like those against chemical weapons, deserve much of the credit for this. Modern nations agree, formally or informally, not to target civilians or use certain weapons. This frees them from having to engage in such distasteful conduct themselves, for fear of operating at a disadvantage. The system of refraining from using methods and weapons that you don’t wish your opponent to use on you, has been a reliable bulwark against the worst excesses of war, at least amongst the Western nations.
Chemical weapons fell out of favor in the West after World War One, when they were first widely used. The first effort to ban their use came in 1922, as a rejected part of the Washington Naval treaty. A successful effort came in 1925, with the Geneva Protocol. This immediacy should give you an idea of the horrors chemical weapons inflicted, even in relation to the other effects of war Czarcasm listed.
Hitler wouldn’t use them.
Well, except for THAT.
That’s actually a good point, most of the modern uses of chemical weapons have been by a government against a civilian population or a faction in a civil war: The Italians gassing Ethiopians, the SS in the Holocaust, the Halabja attack by the Iraqis on civilian Kurds, and possible use by the Syrians recently.
This is notable becuase such groups are unable to retaliate in kind, or escalate with chemical weapons of their own. So, we see that a sort of Mutually Assured Destruction, or at least a no-first use, policy exists between nations, but not within them.
More than just being indiscriminate, chemical weapons actually pose a greater hazard to non-combatants than they do to combatants who likely have protective gear and treatment. Unprotected contact with most nerve agents resulting in agonizing pain, disfiguring and disabling injuries (from the solvents used in the delivery vector), and mass death. Vehicles and wind can carry deployed chemicals well outside the theater of combat, and under optimum conditions some substances such as BZ and VX gases can persist for weeks, especially if they are not exposed to rain or sunlight, which can pose a hazard long after combat is concluded.
Chemical weapons also pose a hazard in manufacture (from byproducts and release), storage (accidental release, damage in handling), and destruction (incomplete destruction, toxic residue). Release of Soviet archives has exposed numerous incidents of accidents and deliberate testing on human subjects, but it isn’t necessary to travel to the Evil Empire to find such incidents; the Army Chemical Corps performed many experiments on unaware subjects and the general public. Such tests are necessarily considered classified, and so the subjects are not even aware of potential health impacts.
As many chemical weapons are nerve agents using potent solvents, the potential for both genetic damage and detrimental epigenetic changes, which may cause harm both to the immediate victim (in the form of cancer, histone dysfunction, mitochondrial damage, et cetera) and to offspring. So the damage can last much longer than the environmental persistence of the toxic.
From a tactical effectiveness standpoint, chemical weapons just suck. Their latency against protected/mechanized troops make it ineffective at stopping attack, the lack of controllability in deployment may result in equal hazard to your own side, and the inconsistent decay period makes it a poor choice for any territory you intend to occupy, which effectively makes it a “scorched earth” denial weapon, denying safe use of the land for peaceable purposes for an indefinite period. For practical use in “lawful” warfare (that is, a property or access conflict between two states) chemical weapons have little use. As a tool to terrorize the unprotected non-combatant population and cause numerous casualties that create a burden upon the opponent, on the other hand, it is well-suited…and this is generally considered about as moral as arresting a criminal by taking his family hostage.
Whether war can every be truly “moral” in any practical sense of the word is another discussion. Clearly, when push comes to shove, even the right side is willing to commit grave atrocities against a civilian population in order to achieve their aims (witness the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo, the bloody invasion of Okinawa, the strategic planning by both sides in the Cold War to deliberately cause devastating damage to civilian populations and infrastructure in order to debilitate the ability of the nation to recover, et cetera). Essentially immoral actions seem to be intrinsic in war. But having such weapons in an active stockpile and the use of them accepted in official doctrine certainly increases the likelihood of use even when the justification is questionable.
Stranger
Bah, scooped! These are exactly the two points I was going to make. Regrading the first one, the “greater hazard to non-combatants” is often quite marked; prepared military units can suffer as low as “negligible” casualties from gas attacks that kill pretty much every civilian in the (unpredictable) dispersal area.
So in addition to the indisputable horrors of chemical attack, one reason there’s been international agreement to ban them is they don’t work very well. Militaries are less willing to give up technology that actually works well.
What do you mean, “letting them” die in those agonizing ways? Causing someone to die with a bullet wound is of course permissible under the laws of war. However, I would not say that is “letting” someone bleed out or whatever. Denying an enemy medical care when it could be provided is a pretty clear violation of the Geneva Conventions on the sick and wounded, so as the term is commonly used, “letting” someone die because of wounds (i.e., standing around doing nothing when aid could be rendered) isn’t considered moral.
This is true, although there is still a substantial amount of work being done on supposed “non-lethal” chemical weapons which are generally referred to by the incongruous moniker as “incapacitants”. I say “supposed” because almost without exception all of these substances have a median lethal dose threshold that is typically inside of the limits of deployment variability (as well as the potential for secondary injury or death by suffocation, hyperthermia, self-injury, et cetera), and the more effective the “incapacitant” the lower the LD50 threshold. This was seen in the 2002 Spetsnaz raid in the 2002 Nord-Ost siege, where most of the hostages that were killed succumbed to the gas. Whether this was a good tactical decision versus more conventional means of entry and attack is another discussion, but the fact is that the non-lethal gas was in fact quite lethal in the confined volume of the theater and the dehydrated state of the hostages.
Stranger