You are a research chemist for a large firm. In your off hours, you discover a easily synthesized gas that has important effects upon humans:
-it renders people immobile (a deep sleep) for 48-36 hours
-it is non-toxic
-it has excellent characteristics (heavier than air, does not disperse easily)
You see the military potential-an invading army can be stopped dead, without killing anybody.
Would the use of such a gas be OK, under the Geneva Convention?
The gas would still kill its victims – if it’s heavier than air, then anyone who falls asleep in it will asphyxiate.
But nitpicking aside, the Convention is titled “Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare.” This would fall under the category of “other gases.” Even tear gas is banned by the convention in effect currently.
I think they would make an exception for this
I don’t know if it would still be allowed, even under those rosy characteristics.
At the very least, you run the risk of putting people to sleep in the midst of doing things like cooking. It’s only a matter of time then until a building burns down, killing a hundred people while they sleep. Likewise, some people will fall down stairs, fall into water, fall asleep at the wheel of a vehicle, etc.
All of that is without looking at other real-world effects like overdoses or a tiny percentage of people who might be allergic or who have complicating conditions of their own (like, it’s fatal to asthmatics or diabetics).
This is flatly contradictory: Anything capable of knocking people out for any length of time is mildly toxic at the very least, and is likely riding the edge of being dangerously toxic in doses high enough to be effective. Anesthetists are trained specialists who monitor a number of vital signs throughout every procedure general anesthetics are in use, and must occasionally make quick life-and-death decisions due to relatively small amounts of individual variation causing serious differences in how that person’s body responds to the drugs.
Every drug which causes a loss of consciousness necessarily interferes with the most basic core autonomic functions we rely on to stay alive, such as breathing and heartbeat. If your drug is real, it will have something like a dose-response curve, and that will be different based on the mass of the person it’s being used on. Long story short, the very idea that a given dose of your drug would knock out a full-grown man but wouldn’t kill a smaller woman, let alone a child, is fantasy.
You aren’t positing a drug, you’re positing a magical sleeping potion in gaseous form.
Do such gaseous potions in fact already exist (with, most likely, the problems that Derleth describes here)?
IIRC, when that group of Chechen radicals took hostage a school house full of Russian children, there were people asking why the Russians didn’t just flood the school with some sleepy-gas and knock everyone out. (For all I can remember, it might have been a discussion on this very board.) And the response was, substantially, just what Derleth describes here, that such a drug would have problems like this.
But I don’t recall anybody questioning or disputing whether such a sleepy-gas actually exists.
The Russians probably learned their lesson about stopping Chechen terrorists with " sleepy-gas" during this. Moscow theater hostage crisis - Wikipedia
Okay, did a bit of googlizing. Looks like they didn’t use gas in the school hostage incident, Sept. 2004 (Pit thread here), having learned the hard way when they did use gas in the earlier theater hostage incident, Oct. 2002 (GD thread here). I only just skimmed that thread to review. Looks like some people got sick from the gas, passed out and puked and choked on their own puke.
ETA: OTOH, another view is that, given that most of the hostages were rescued and most of the terrorists were killed, this was probably the least-bad possible outcome.