“Humane” war? “Civilized” war? “Moral” war? We have those. They’re called Chess, Risk, Axis & Allies, etc. Please note that none of them have chemical weapons.
A slight nitpick… Chemical weapons themselves are morally neutral. They have no faculties by which they can judge the morality of any situation. The humans who choose to use them or not use them are the moral agents.
That said, I’m with Czarcasm on this one, there is no moral way to murder someone; war is one of those things I hope humanity will one day abandon in its evolution. But we first have to get rid of our desire to control others for that to happen.
Killing an enemy combatant, while adhering to the laws of war, is not immoral. Unfortunate, sure, but not immoral. Nor is it murder.
The best innoculation against war available to us at the moment is economic interdependence; the more our economy is globalized, the more war will be confined to the (economically) irrelevant backwaters, until they, too, become advanced enough that war is simply too wasteful and disruptive.
War is always terrible, and generally tragically unnecessary and ultimately unproductive. There have always been collateral casualties, from the time that pre-industrial armies would ravage the countryside for supplies and plunder to modern times where a military will embed within an urban population or place ammunition depots next to hospitals. But the difference with weapons of mass destruction, such as incendiary bombs, chemical and biological weapons and nuclear weapons is that they not only disproportionately affect non-combatants who are ill-equipped to either protect themselves or even effectively flee the theater of battle, but they are often actually designed, deployed, and used specifically against civilian populations in so-called “total war” strategy to destroy basic production infrastructure and demoralize the civilian population. (Never mind that the civilian population during wartime typically has little or no influence over the decisions of warfighters.)
There is also the fact that such weapons, which can kill hundreds of thousands or (in the case of nuclear weapons) millions of people by the decision and action of a small handful of people. There is simply no sense of proportionality when it comes to this kind of warfare. When you have to think in terms of losing a few hundred or thousand people in a single conventional attack, there is still a sense of the human loss, especially since you are probably risking something like a comparable number of troops. When you start talking in terms of tens or hundreds of thousands using standoff weapons and having no intimate contact with the field of battle, it just becomes statistics, to wit, LeMay’s criteria of “number of deaths per tonnage of ordnance” or the gallows humor of Dr. Strangelove (see George C. Scott carrying around a binder titled “World Targets in Megadeaths”, taken from an actual SAC document).
Limiting the use of such weapons to only the most desperate response to extreme provocation, or better yet, banning them outright (even if not practicable to effect against all parties) at least produces a stigma that causes politicians and planners to seek alternative, more rationale, and hopefully less horrific solutions to international disagreements. There was never any conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union that would have been resolved to either parties satisfaction by a nuclear exchange, and yet both sides worked on improving the lethality and effectiveness of distribution of such weapons. In the end, what destroyed the Soviet Union wasn’t nuclear weapons or even the threat of attack, but the unsustainability of the economic system and the desire of the population to enjoy the economic and social liberalism of the West. NATO would have been better off flooding the Warsaw Pact with pop culture than building defenses. Similarly, Japan lost World War II to (primarily) the United States quite badly…and then turned around and soundly spanked the United States in nearly every area of manufacturing. (“Pearl Harbor didn’t work out so we got you with tape decks.”)
The real avenue to reducing the existence and use of such weapons, and the strategies behind them, is to appreciate how ineffectual they are in achieving desired goals at minimum cost, both financial and moral.
Stranger
This type of reasoning covers up genuine moral problems with some practices of war that can be prevented. We may have no fully moral and humane recourse to, say, blowing up a tank that is advancing on American military positions, and thereby killing three or four humans in a gruesome way. However, the fact that we have no fully moral alternative to preserve human life in that scenario, does not mean that we have no moral alternative to things like vivisections of enemy POWs, or engaging in attacks that would kill many innocent civilians for virtually no military purpose.
Just because armed conflict cannot occur without human tragedy does not mean that all human tragedy, no matter how obscene and avoidable, should excused during a war.
Its a fictional book, but with any Tom Clancy book you have to wonder whats simply been fictionalized to comply with those pesky military NDA’s. In Red Storm rising, a dialogue between two East Germans, having a conversation about Chemical weapons, opines that a purely nuke war would be alot easier to clean up, depending on what persistent agents would be used.
Declan
VX has an extremely small LD50 dosage, can be absorbed through the skin and in the best environmental conditions will persist for 10 days, under the worst conditions 90 days. Table from FAS.