Nuclear weapons can kill millions. So can biological weapons, if they start an epidemic. But let’s just address chemical weapons alone in and of themselves, for a moment.
Why was it a big deal when Saddam gassed the Kurds, and Assad used chemical agents in Syria, but not when people got shot, stabbed or blown up?
Chemical weapons, such as sarin, VX or mustard gas cause pain and suffering…so do bullets, knives and explosives.
Chemical weapons, such as sarin, VX or mustard gas can make an area dangerous for a long time…so can land mines and unexploded bombs.
Chemical weapons, such as sarin, VX or mustard gas can kill innocent people…so can bullets and explosives.
Chemical weapons, such as sarin, VX or mustard gas can kill a very large number of people…so can bullets and explosives, if you use enough of them.
So why exactly are chemical weapons condemned almost universally while almost every kind of conventional weapon gets a free pass?
Nuclear, biological and chemical weapons (NBC) are considered weapons of mass destruction because they’re:
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[li]Effective over a large area.[/li][li]Indiscriminate[/li][li]Extremely lethal for the size of the weapon (usually)[/li][li]Persistent. The effects can linger in an area for a long time.[/li][/ul]
Bullets and bombs don’t really fit any of those 3. A 155mm howitzer shell has 23.8 lbs of high explosive, and makes a crater a few feet in diameter. By comparison, a 155mm tactical nuclear weapon has a yield of 72 TONS of high explosive, and all the fun that comes from prompt radiation and fallout. (the prompt radiation will be the real lethal effect at that size of weapon)
Nerve gas shells spray out chemical weapons in roughly half the weight of a HE shell of the same caliber (i.e. a 155mm chemical shell puts out 10-12 lbs of chemicals). They spray as they come down, and a tiny droplet of say… VX gas is can be lethal, stay around for a while, drift on the wind and kill someone outside the target area, etc…
Biological weapons are basically what you’d expect if you’re trying to intentionally spread a disease.
Velocity, the goal of weapons is to immobilize the enemy military, not to destroy the enemy civilian population. Doing the latter is immoral. As bump stated guns and explosives don’t have the wide effect on the civilian population as chemical weapons do.
Yes, but in a conflict, repeated, extensive use of bullets and bombs in large quantities can kill many people all the same.
My point was, the international community seems more upset about 10,000 civilians being killed by nerve gas than 10,000 civilians being killed by AK-47s.
Even though, in both instances, 10,000 civilians are dead.
Yes, but in the former case it took one flight of jets/one battery of arty tubes dropping VX ; whereas the other skull pile was reached over tens or hundreds of firefights, any of which might or might not have been avoided/prevented.
In other words, the granularity of an AK-47 is much greater than that of a VX canister.
No, but if the ultimate added-up death toll is the same in the end, the carnage is equal.
It seems that a dictator’s secret police massacring 10,000 civilians with AK-47s over the course of a month doesn’t matter much to the international community, but a VX bombardment in one hour that kills 10,000 civilians, somehow ***is ***an issue?
So you’re just going to ignore the persistence issue? WMDs can continue to kille months or years after they’re used. They can make large land areas uninhabitable for months or years.
Well, yes. Civilians can fight back against ak-47s. Assad has been losing men ever since the conflict started. All civilians can do against chemical weapons is die.
Because they are. You aren’t going to get a more satisfactory answer than that; it’s an emotional issue, not a logical one.
Horseshit. The goal of weapons is to destroy things, not to immobilize them. Using weapons indiscriminately on civilians has at times been considered perfectly acceptable in warfare; see the bombing campaigns in WW2. Finally, in the one war with major, widespread use of chemical weapons, WW1, which led to even greater international condemnation of and laws against the use of chemical weapons in war, they were never even used against, nor did they have any kind of wider effect on the civilian population. They were used exclusively on the battlefield where their casualties were entirely combatants; but their use was considered just as devious, wicked, and horrid.
Sarin disperses quickly, persists for little time, and is a short-lived threat, if I recall right.
Land mines can continue to kill months or years after they’re used, too. And they can make large land areas dangerous for years or decades.
War is awful. However, if war does have to happen, it’s better if the casualties can be confined to soldiers. Collateral damage to civilians should be minimized.
This is why there is such opposition to landmines. They’re conventional weapons, but they often wind up inflicting civilian casualties long after the fighting is over.
Chemical weapons are likely to go astray, killing innocent civilians. They also are efficient tools of genocide. It’s a lot cheaper to gas a bunch of people than shoot them one by one. That’s why they are condemned.
To kill 10,000 people with guns requires ~1000 soldiers. To kill 10,000 people with chemicals just requires one guy with a truck and a timer. So if you actually have 1000 soldiers, arming them with guns still only nets you 10,000 kills. Arming them with chemicals allows you to kill 10,000,000 people.
The other thing is that chemical warfare was shown to not work in the battlefield. It’s easy to outlaw weapons that are more of a hassle to work with than they actually help.
If you’re a terrorist or practicing genocide, on the other hand, chemicals are perfectly workable. Since the most powerful nations of the world aren’t practicing either of those, again, it makes sense for them to outlaw them.
Yes, but the point is you can only know that in retrospect. The decision to use VX over AK-47 is prima facie evidence of disregard for the lives of non-combattants.
Should the dictator achieve the same tallies with more hand-crafted means, well, maybe that’s what he wanted, maybe his troops just got carried away, maybe they faced strenuous opposition - you can examine all that on a case by case basis. It can also be presumed that soldiers firing AKs were discriminate in whom they opted to shoot (even if that’s not always the case). Whereas lobbing VX broadcasts “I don’t give a fuck !” from the get go.
I don’t think the mass-scale civilian bombings in WWII (Dresden, Tokyo, etc.) were really considered ‘acceptable’. They were considered evil, but a necessary evil. I don’t think any of the allied powers- American, French, British or even Soviet- felt exactly good about what they had done to win the war, in the aftermath. It had been an existential struggle for civilization, though, so they’d made moral compromises.
War is bad but war is also unavoidable. If we established a rule that said “you can’t use any type of weapon, ever”, it would be worthless because it would be ignored. We want to reduce the civilian death toll as much as possible while putting as few limitations on military conflict as possible because we want our rules to be followed. The most effective way to do this is to ban weapons of great lethality that are minimally used, such as NBC weapons.
One point of distinction that no one has brought up thus far is that chemical weapons are really only good at killing civilians. Soldiers have and are trained to use appropriate protective gear. Military installations are designed to resist chemical attack, and those precautions are pretty effective.
Despite our best efforts at designing body armor and bunkers, bombs and bullets still work pretty well on military targets. Chemical weapons have only one use at which they excel - murdering civilians.
Yes. Civilian bombing as part of “total war,” particularly in the European Theater, was resisted by great swathes of the domestic populations on both sides of the conflict. There were active antibombing groups in the UK even at the height of the Allied bombing campaign in '44-'45…but it was hard to gain traction given the sociopolitical conditions (and a tough moral argument to make after the Blitz).
There are also treaties prohibiting or restricting the use of many conventional munitions, such as:
incendiary weapons
cluster bombs
mines
blinding lasers
weapon fragments not detectable in the human body by x-ray
Besides the civilian argument, I think there’s the idea that these things are basically overpowered and you can still kill people without them so let’s try to make things a little less horrible.
Speaking of persistence, every once in awhile an unexploded WWI shell kills someone.