Why Don’t We Use Chemical Weapons Anymore?(acoup.blog) |
Why Don’t We Use Chemical Weapons Anymore?(acoup.blog) |
Both the US and the UK wanted to target the war making capacity of the Germans. The Americans sought to achieve this with strategic precision bombing. The UK sought to do so with mass bombing campaigns targeting industrial workers. The disparity for example manifested in the reluctance of the US to fly bombing missions at night which for obvious reasons was preferred by the British.
Near the end of 1944 however, Allied High Command became concerned that the war might stretch into autumn 1945 and they were hoping the Soviet winter campaign could end the war early. So they initiated their own indiscriminant bombing campaign. In his autobiography, James Doolittle wrote that he opposed the bombing campaign of Berlin because it would , “...violate the basic American principle of precision bombing of targets of strictly military significance...”. In the end, the US adopted the UK's bombing regime and would pursue similar and even more liberal approaches later in the Cold War.
And it is not as if urban bombing wasn't a subject of moral discussion. In WWI the dropping of a grenade upon Paris by a pilot had made it clear that aerial bombardment would probably become a thing. There was a great deal of discussion through the interwar period. In the end though, it seems practicality will triumph over ideals given enough stress and time.
Don't get me wrong, the Germans had it coming, but let's stop lying to ourselves, shall we?
But... is that really what they were doing?
> In the raid, major industrial areas in the suburbs, which stretched for miles, were not targeted.[10] According to historian Donald Miller, "the economic disruption would have been far greater had Bomber Command targeted the suburban areas where most of Dresden's manufacturing might was concentrated".[48]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_Wa...
See, now there you go, giving in to the same logic you're trying to make fun of in the first sentence. Saying all Germans is like saying all Ukrainians welcome being annexed by Russia. Some probably went along because it seemed at the time the easiest way from receiving bullets into parts of their anatomy even if they didn't actually like it.
This stuff has been researched deeply. Something like 96% of the population. Nice people. Not idiots. Will swallow absolutely anything that the leader feeds them.
It may be unfixable. Or maybe the only way to fix it is to destroy all forms of mass media.
> The full fury of firebombing and napalm was unleashed on the night of March 9-10, 1945 when LeMay sent 334 B-29s low over Tokyo from the Marianas.5 In contrast to earlier US tactical bombing strategies emphasizing military targets, their mission was to reduce much of the city to rubble, kill its citizens, force survivors to flee, and instill terror in the survivors.
> Overall, by Sahr Conway-Lanz’s calculation, the US firebombing campaign destroyed 180 square miles of 67 cities, killed more than 300,000 people and injured an additional 400,000, figures that exclude the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki which took 140,000 lives by the end of 1945.13 Cary Karacas and Bret Fisk conclude that the firebombing raids “destroyed a significant percentage of most of Japan’s cities, wiped out a quarter of all housing in the country, made nine million people homeless, and killed at least 187,000 civilians, and injured 214,000 more,” while suggesting that the actual figures are likely higher.14
Note also that the British had been subjected to night bombing raids themselves
Similar thinking seems to apply here. Either your target is a modern, mobile, equipped army of professionals who will take minimal damage from chemical weapons, or they are a vulnerable population of civilians who will be massacred horribly if you use them.
A "superhero that shoots fire" (i.e. a guy with a flamethrower) — or a rolling cloud of nerve gas — isn't there to actually harm anybody; it's there to be a thing your enemy sees and stays well clear of. It's an https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_denial_weapon. The threat of it prevents your opponent from coming within range of it; and thereby locks them out of the area it threatens.
And, as it happens, a flamethrower is a much safer area-denial weapon than a cloud of nerve gas — as, whenever the enemy isn't around, you can immediately shut the flamethrower off, and use the area yourself.
In general, conventional weaponry is more effective at accomplishing military objectives.
1. The armed forces of major countries spend a lot of effort to LOOK as if they are prepared to operate under chemical and biological conditions. This includes large stockpiles of protective gear and regular exercises that include chemical weapons scenarios.
2. Chemical and biological weapons aren't used militarily because there's little reason to think that they would be effective. 2.
False propaganda unfortunately according to the OPCW inspectors who actually went to Syria, including the director of the OPCW. But you can ignore them and take the CIA's word for it instead like the author of this article did.
https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2020/02/a-and-b-resp...
>Quite frankly, we don’t use chemical weapons for the same reason we don’t use war-zeppelin-bombers: they don’t work, at least within our modern tactical systems.
Also false, we used white phosphorus extensively in Iraq and elsewhere.
https://www.thecut.com/2020/06/tear-gas-is-a-chemical-weapon...
https://www.newsweek.com/richmond-chemical-weapons-protests-...
My two cents: In general, shouldn't our elected "leaders" arrange to meet with protesters, people who are obviously very frustrated, and spend the time to talk to them, instead of sending in the police to gas them?
See: https://www.salon.com/2020/06/02/trump-may-have-broken-inter...
vs
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/21/us/protests-portland-seat...
The fact that it seemed to be impacting women’s menstrual cycles in my city makes me concerned about long term issues related to exposure (fertility among them): https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/01/us/period-tear-gas-study-...
Clearly this needs some study.
It’s certainly true that the people exposed to this gas are not currently dead, I’ll give you that.
Tear gas was developed by France and used on the battle field in WWI before being used for "crowd control".
https://www.kumc.edu/school-of-medicine/academics/department....
"Riot control agents, including tear gas and other gases which have debilitating but non-permanent effects as a means of warfare, is prohibited in armed conflict under the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention."
https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/customary-ihl/eng/docs/v2_rul...
And, if a government's leaders feel they need to gas, assault with sound cannons / water cannons / pepper spray, use flash bang grenades, beat with clubs, and/or fire rubber coated steel bullets at their population, it might be taken as a hint that the government involved has lost the consent of the governed.
> Now, I want to leave aside, for the purpose of this essay, the use of lethal chemical agents in genocide, the use of non-lethal chemical agents entirely, as well as the use of things like defoliants that were not intended to cause casualties (even if they did). Those things are all important, but if we get into talking about them, we will never get anywhere. Instead, we’re focusing on the battlefield use of lethal chemical agents against either opposing combatants or civilian populations.
My impression is the first order of business is declaring an official emergency.
I recommend everyone else ignore this summary and give the link a click, acoup.blog’s always a delight.
The reason we don't see more of this is pretty straightforward. Although we have active imaginations, the majority of people carrying out these attacks are not Walter White. It takes organizational power to pull off an attack like that.
So, most modern military would be keenly aware that the use of such weapons might have long term consequences for them personally and hands the moral high ground to their opponent almost automatically almost immediately. This has mostly negative consequences short term and it's probably counter productive. If that was not the case, we'd be seeing those weapons used in e.g. the Ukraine right now by the Russians. And they seem to have no reservations about targeting civilians otherwise. But it's hard to spin gassing civilians as heroic or patriotic. Even in Russia. Kind of destroys their de-nazificaton pitch.
Even the Nazis did not go there during WWII. Aside of course from committing genocide as part of the holocaust. They did actually develop chemical weapons but they never deployed them on the battle field: https://www.history.com/news/the-nazis-developed-sarin-gas-b...
The US Navy dispersed a microbe off the coast of SF to test natural wind dispersal of biological warfare agents. The microbe was harmless to healthy people, but hospitals contain unhealthy people-- some of whom the navy managed to kill.
In the midst of an international mosquito eradication effort that (temporarily) rid much of the Americas from disease carrying mosquitoes, the US Army was breeding and releasing mosquitoes within the US. The Army was testing mosquitoes as a vector for spreading weaponized biological pathogens. I'm not sure if this was a "success" i.e., proved it would have killed a lot of people or not.
When I was in university, there was a physics professor at UC Berkely who was trying to call attention to the UC system getting 1/3 of their funding from the military. Some of that funding was probably accounted for by the University of California being the entity that manged the national labs developing nuclear weapons. But, some of that funding was going into research into creating new strains of pathogens e.g., gain of function research which seems pretty much exactly the kind of research you would do when developing a biological warfare agent.
I guess <adjusts tin foil hat>, I'm not 100% convinced the US abandoned biological weapons. While I'm not convinced that they didn't abandon them either the US has invested a lot into them, and that gain of function research funded by the military was not that long ago.
And, non-nuclear states can more easily get the precursors for chemical and biological weapons than nukes. E.g., Iraq's chemical weapons program (mainly used against Iran) used some production equipment sourced from the US, and precursor chemicals sourced from Germany and the UK. And, the, apparently believable, cover story was that they were manufacturing pesticides. I'd be surprised if a lot of militaristic smaller countries didn't have this sort of weapons program.
Not sure which one you were under the misapprehension that it was. It's neither.
>White phosphorus munitions are weapons that use one of the common allotropes of the chemical element phosphorus.
>In munitions, white phosphorus burns readily with flames of 800 °C (1,472 °F).[74][75] Incandescent particles from weapons using powdered white phosphorus as their payload produce extensive partial- and full-thickness burns, as will any attempt to handle burning submunitions without protective equipment. Phosphorus burns carry an increased risk of mortality due to the absorption of phosphorus into the body through the burned area with prolonged contact, which can result in liver, heart and kidney damage, and in some cases multiple organ failure.[76] White phosphorus particles continue to burn until completely consumed or starved of oxygen. In the case of weapons using felt-impregnated submunitions, incomplete combustion may occur resulting in up to 15% of the WP content remaining unburned. Such submunitions can prove hazardous as they are capable of spontaneous re-ignition if crushed by personnel or vehicles.[77] In some cases, injury is limited to areas of exposed skin because the smaller WP particles do not burn completely through personal clothing before being consumed.
>Due to the pyrophoric nature of WP, penetrating injuries are immediately treated by smothering the wound using water, damp cloth or mud, isolating it from oxygen until fragments can be removed: military forces will typically do so using a bayonet or knife where able. Bicarbonate solution is applied to the wound to neutralise any build-up of phosphoric acid, followed by removal of any remaining visible fragments: these are easily observed as they are luminescent in dark surroundings. Surgical debridement around the wound is used to avoid fragments too small to detect causing later systemic failure, with further treatment proceeding as with a thermal burn.[77]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_phosphorus_munitions#Bur...
> Now, I want to leave aside, for the purpose of this essay, the use of lethal chemical agents in genocide, the use of non-lethal chemical agents entirely, as well as the use of things like defoliants that were not intended to cause casualties (even if they did). Those things are all important, but if we get into talking about them, we will never get anywhere.
I read up to that part, where he asserted that chemical weapons don't work well militarily (which I understand). But afterwards he appeared to explain this in great detail, and I tailed off, switched to skimming (seemed to already make sense to me, and it was a long article). I did miss the part above, where he left police use out of scope for his article.
But isn't it worth a thread or two here? Maybe from a couple different angles, now that I think more about it - effectiveness, harm, correlation with other things, alternatives, are there countries that don't do this, etc. I didn't see anything yet when I posted my comment above. Maybe too off topic?
EDIT: fixed grammar typos
> The 1925 Geneva Protocol categorized tear gas as a chemical warfare agent and banned its use in war shortly after World War I.
> In 1993, nations could begin signing the U.N.'s Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) that outlawed the use of riot control agents in warfare.
> A database by the International Committee of the Red Cross shows the ban of riot control agents in war went into effect in 1997, but still made it legal for law enforcement use. The Senate approved the CWC in a 74-26 vote on April 25, 1997
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/06/06/fac...
Why do politics when you can just selfishly squeeze what you can before you get kicked out of office? After me, the flood.
A wounded soldier is a greater burden than a dead soldier, so a possible tactic would be to deliberately wound. Some people thought that was especially amoral, so they added a rule against it to what they called international law.
So most police weaponry is illegal under international law, but it's illegal because it's less deadly than the permitted alternative.
I appreciate your comments.
It’s insulting to people who were killed/disabled as a result of chemical weapons.
While those killed by conventional weapons rejoice in heavens. Hypocrisy has no bounds.
See https://www.opcw.org/chemical-weapons-convention/articles/ar... .
Yes, absolutely. Deferring to authority is no excuse for morally abhorrent behaviour. Of course if you’re under threat that’s a different matter. But blind trust in leadership is a poor excuse. It’s not like the nazis had no detractors in Germany.
Does believing it make you a bad person? Of course not. You're only doing what's right and sensible.
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false."
- William Casey, CIA Director 1981
I think the media issue can be resolved by media that is not affiliated with corporations, rich benefactors or government. E.g., MI5 used to vet BBC employees to ensure no one on the left would have any editorial influence (MI5 had veto power over hires). And, the CIA had/has journalists on their payroll at major US publications to ensure "proper" messaging. Advertisers can strongly influence what is reported e.g., an oil company threatens to cancel ad campaign if media outlet reports on their suppression of climate research. A single rich man can set the direction of a media organization-- including having their organizations spread known falsehoods in support of their personal ideologies e.g., Murdoch or Hearst.
A model that mostly[1] works is that of listener support (not the PBS model with government and corporate funding and also begging listeners for money, but rather the Pacifica model which accepts no funds from anyone but listeners.
Pacifica has a few programs that are usually quite good, like "Letters and Politics" (also available as podcasts linked from kpfa.org). They do have their share of dreck, though. And, being a bunch of lefties (the network was founded by pacifists who met while in US prison for protesting a war) they are equally critical of lefties like themselves, the mainly center-right to right "liberals"/Democrats and the far-right to extreme far-right Republicans (left right spectrum here is based on where the policies, of these groups, fit within the spectrum of world politics).
[1]Pacifica's New York station self destructed after the board was taken over by a group of listeners into all manner of woo, so Pacifica's model still has some issues.
My degree is in chemistry. Phosphorus is indeed a chemical, so is lead.
You are either deluded, which is unlikely, or deliberately lying in the hope of winning an argument. The latter is more likely to be the case: therefore, I have contempt for you. We won't interact again.
Where that gets dangerous is when the horror under discussion becomes democratised. TATP is simple to synthesise (though incredibly dangerous when done clandestinely), and so we saw a rise of bombings and attempted bombings using it as that knowledge spread, for example.
So you are fairly safe. You can only fall victim to heroic terrorist attacks.
But not as safe as that sounds. It is about being a hero according to the attackers head cannon, not your head cannon.
Terrorist attacks are down stream from culture. Keep an eye on what movies, novels, religions, and preachers call heroic. The terrorist attacks of 2052 will be distorted versions of what is heroic today.
Batman style "poisoning the water supply" isnt really a viable option due to the complexities of pulling it off successfully.
The total number of terrorists is small, and their ability is limited. But that may not always be the case.
Just go on reddit and you'll see several videos of Ukrainian drone dropping bombs on clearly wounded Russian soldiers and you'll see a whole comment section celebrating the war crime.