IMHO, it’s less about the properties of the weapon and more about when they were invented. Guns and bombs have been used in warfare for a long time and have become “normalized”. Chemical weapons were only widely deployed in WWI and there was sufficient political will to nip them in the bud before they got established.
Weapon usage in a war resembles the prisoner’s dilemma. As long as both sides promise not to use a weapon, the war is less damaging for all involved.
Yup, and gas shells are the absolute worst of the lot in this regards.
A rusty old shell might blow up in your face should you run your tractor over it, but at least it’s a binary system : either you’re blown up or you ain’t. Gas shells can leak into the soil to poison crops or water tables; or throw up a plume of old gas that’ll drift over to the next village (and give 'em a lot of lung cancer, pulmonary infections, chemical burns…) and as the old Country Joe song went, they might have killed you and you don’t even know.
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Weapon usage in a war resembles the prisoner’s dilemma. As long as both sides promise not to use a weapon, the war is less damaging for all involved.
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That’s pretty much the reason nerve agents weren’t used in WW2 Europe.
Churchill was sanguine about the idea of using them on German towns, but his commanders were concerned it might lead to retaliatory attacks in kind. Same goes for the German side - but there it was the reverse for some reason. Some commanders asked the Führer a bunch of times to authorize the use of poison gas, but he always said no. Possibly because he’d been gassed in the trenches himself.
So we were spared that particular horror at least. Instead German towns were doused in white phosphorus. See ? Much better ! :o
You’re looking at the past through rose colored glasses. There was no great moral struggle about the acceptability of bombing civilians, nor any feeling that the members of Bomber Command or the Eight Air Force were moral pariahs who had committed a great but necessary evil in our name. Bombing civilians was not in any way considered a compromise, it was the logical conclusion of total war, attempts were made at it in WW1 but the technology was clearly lacking but the theory of how to carry it out in future wars was written about extensively in the inter-war era by proponents of air power such as Giulio Douhet. To give an idea about public perceptions regarding bombing civilians, whether it was considered ‘evil’ or if any of the Allied powers felt exactly good about what had been done to win the war, consider this:
The entire argument that chemical weapons are banned because of either their potential use against civilians or their potential persistent nature is a dodge. Chemical weapons don’t have to be used against civilians, and there are plenty of chemical agents that are non-persistent. If those were the real objections, those would be the types and means of usage of chemical weapons that would be subject to international treaties, and no one would have been disturbed by the use of chemical weapons in WW1 where the agents used were neither persistent nor used against civilians. Yet international laws forbidding their use in warfare, which already existed at the time of WW1, became even more explicit and restrictive against their use, and their use during the war against soldiers using non-persistent agents was considered a great horror, worse of a horror than tens of thousands of soldiers a day being cut down by machine gun fire or obliterated by artillery shells while charging across no-man’s land. The simple fact is that there is something viscerally horrific about using chemical weapons, so much so that their use is considered wrong.
Again, persistence and potential usage against civilians aren’t the reasons chemical weapons are banned. As it stands the use of CS gas (tear gas) in warfare is a war crime.
That may be, but the OP was questioning the emphasis on WMD vs. regular weapons, when wars can be fought strictly with small arms and still have horrific death tolls.
Another issue, that was stated by JesterX but not really elaborated on, is that WMD can kill HUGE numbers of people without a correspondingly large effort on the part of the attacker.
Let’s use the hypothetical example of a packed football stadium- 100,000 people.
How many men with guns would it take to kill the vast majority of the people in the stadium? Probably hundreds. How many 500 lb bombs? Dozens, most likely, and they’d have to be accurately placed.
How many nukes? 1 small one dropped nearby, and that would likely kill a large number outside the stadium as well. How many nerve gas bombs? Probably a small handful would do the trick. A biological weapon could easily infect a huge number… and they could go on to infect many many more people- so it could potentially kill even more than the original 100,000.
That’s why WMDs are considered bad- for the same effort to deliver the payload, the effects are FAR greater, and in most cases much more horrific and terrifying.
The question in the OP was concerned exclusively with chemical weapons:
This is something people often say without thinking about it; just because the end delivery platform may be small does not mean that it didn’t require a correspondingly large effort on the part of the attacker. Two atomic bombs dropped by two bombers devastated two cities at the end of WW2, but the effort required to be able to do it in the form of the Manhattan Project was $2 billion, quite a hefty sum in 1941. The 5 Nuclear Weapon States as defined by the NNPT have spent trillions of dollars on nuclear weapons, and the cost of developing a nuclear weapons program even with the theoretic groundwork already having been laid out by the Manhattan program isn’t trivial as South Africa, Israel, India, Pakistan, et al can attest.
This isn’t why WMDs are considered ‘bad’; damage relative to the size of the warhead isn’t what makes nuclear weapons scary. You could make the size of a 200kT warhead 10 times larger or 10 times smaller and it will remain equally as scary; what makes it scary is the fact that a 200kT warhead will destroy the major metropolitan area of a city, not how small of a volume you can squeeze a bang into.
All of this is irrelevant to the OP though, modern civilian terrors about WMDs and the fact that chemical weapons fall into the category of WMDs have nothing to do with the reason why chemical weapons are and have always been considered worse than conventional weapons, regardless of if it makes any logical sense or not. The prohibition on the use of chemical weapons goes back to the first international conventions on war, the 1899 Hague Convention on the Laws and Customs of War on Land, Article 23
Notably the prohibition on employing poison or poisoned arms is the first listed. The widespread horror and disgust at the use of chemical weapon in WW1, where again it was used exclusively on the battlefield against combatants, not civilians, and the agents used were all non-persistent in nature led to the much more explicit Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare signed at Geneva in 1928 and reading in part:
Notably missing is any concern about their use on civilians or persistent agents, it is a flat prohibition on the use in war of asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases, and of all analogous liquids, materials or devices. The indiscriminant use of any kind of weapon on civilians was already prohibited, and persistent chemical agents hadn’t been invented yet.
Mustard gas, and probably chlorine too, sound like a much more agonizing way to go than a bullet. I imagine that after WWI there was a great public outcry–especially from returning soldiers, who were our boys; war heroes, goddamnit–against this strange new weapon that killed by torture.
For more fun info, check out the “Physiological effects” section in Wikipedia’s article on Sulfur mustard.
The point I was trying to make is that the destructive capacity of nuclear weapons is completely of another order when compared to conventional weapons. Pointing out that a say… 20kt nuke could be a relatively small bomb, while 20,000 tons of TNT is a colossally huge amount of explosives isn’t an unreasonable comparison.
Velocity it’s about undue suffering, not death. Your not allowed to use AP or expanding rounds because they cause wounding, and fragments. Ball rounds usually leave a clean wound so if you don’t die from it, you can have first aid administered with minimal suffering. Chemical weapons almost universally cause undue suffering. Your example of 10k people being gunned down vs gassing is a case in point. While some of those civilians who were shot undoubtedly would have experienced a prolonged death, most would have died relatively quickly. If they were exposed to VX, Tabun or Sarin they would all have died an agonizing , nasty death or suffered immensely for the rest of their lives.
The idea is that professional soldiers who fall under the aegis of the Hague and Geneva conventions will follow them because their opponents will, too. Civilians are not supposed to be targeted, nor are others who may be exempt from combat like medical personnel carrying out their duties.
Make no mistake, you are absolutely right that dead is dead no matter the cause. The bans are an attempt to minimize the use of weapons to maim, vice kill outright with directed intentionality.
Without getting subjective - “which death hurts more” can be a debate that leads nowhere - explosives can set fuel in vehicles on fire, and burns are agonizing. If a bomb results in both your legs gone, that’s agonizing. If 30 big pieces of shrapnel embed deep in your body, including some in your eyes, that’s agonizing. If you get shot a dozen times in your arms and legs, that’s agonizing. Getting hacked up with a machete has to be agonizing.
My point: I’m not convinced a death by nerve gas is necessarily more painful than a death by conventional means. And even if a nerve gas were invented that killed relatively painlessly, I think it would still be banned as a WMD.
Yes. Because it’s inherently indiscriminate. Unlike bullets, knives or many other weapons, which are perfectly able to be used discriminately.
Which is again untrue and has nothing to do with why chemical weapons have long been prohibited as a weapon of war. The only major war which saw widespread use of chemical weapons and led to the 1928 Geneva Protocol was WWI, where the use of chemical weapons was restricted to the battlefield which had become a long series of trench lines running from the Alps to the Channel long devoid of civilians. Chemical weapons are also in and of themselves not indiscriminate. Because it is heavier than air, CN and CS tear gases were used widely by US forces in Vietnam (warning, pdf) to flush Viet Cong and NVA forces from tunnels as well as from normal, but congested areas. As I stated earlier, this is in fact a war crime per the 1928 Geneva Protocol, and even officially acknowledged as such by the US in 1975:
Chemical weapons are worse because they’re cheap. It doesn’t take a lot of resources to make and deliver a load of Sarin gas, hell, a bunch of nuts did it on the Tokyo subway. The guys with the money make the rules, and they’re interested in keeping the guys without money as disarmed as possible. Most of them would like to see a lot of the guys with money disarmed as well, but that ship has sailed.
Ok, I’ll try again. Your original assertion is flawed for two reasons:
As I said before, you are right; at the end of the day, dieing at the hands of another is horrific at the best of times, but you are trying to differentiate between two different issues in your OP. The intention of banning chemical weapons serves the states’ interest by attempting to limit what weapons are used in conflict with each other. The idea is that any weapon used in war is directional, controllable and proportional to the intended result.
By banning all conventional weapons how would you expect a nation to defend its interests against external aggression, champions with fisticuffs at dawn?
The premise of the OP is flawed in that international law DOES in fact restrict bullets.
Hollow point bullets, in fact all bullets that are designed to expand or explode, are banned from military use by the Hague Convention.
In fact, the movie title Full Metal Jacket is a specific reference to the bullets designed for infantry use, as in jacketed to prevent expansion or distortion while padding through the body