Why Don’t We Use Chemical Weapons Anymore?
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acoup.blog
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling, Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time; But someone still was yelling out and stumbling And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime... Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light, As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin; If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,— My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.
Regarding the article: it seems to miss the obvious points, and sounds almost sociopathic in its use of literary lyricism to suggest that chemical weapons should be regarded as a viable weapon, if only it weren't for the military weaknesses it produces.
> the narrative I got was fairly clear: we didn’t use chemical weapons because after World War I the nations of the world got together and decided that chemical weapons were just too horrible and banned them, and that this was a sign of something called ‘progress.’
The use of chemical weapons, as parent's comment writes, is indiscriminate in who and what it affects, whether it be enemy or own soldiers, or innocents: women, children, animals and even fauna. To have your skin melt, or your lungs liquified because some monster on the other side cooked up a recipe shows how inhumane and lacking in compassion people can be.
I recall being told why modern military don't use high calibre rifles anymore (303 or 762): because a lower calibre tends to wound the enemy, which means that 2 or more enemy soldiers are needed to help their comrade out... Hence 1 smaller & lighter bullet can take out 2 or more of the enemy. That is, modern warfare is about incapacitating an enemy's ability to fight back. This is why sanctions, targetting infrastructure, stealth attack, etc, is what you see on the news all the time.
If you want to be all proper and sciency about it you should probably compare guns that are on the same general platform (M4/AR10, AK/PSL, G3/G33, list goes on).
This is a retroactive justification, and it was never an official one - boot camp stories, more or less.
All it takes to disprove it is to look at the history of M16, since that was the platform that introduced the first small-impulse infantry rifle cartridge, 5.56mm. It was originally developed as the outcome of Project SALVO research, which concluded that two close hits with a small-caliber round are significantly deadlier than a single hit with a (then-standard) large rifle round - and therefore the new weapon should be capable of controlled, accurate burst fire. Then, early M16 tests showed that even a single 5.56 bullet would routinely do more damage than then-standard 7.62 NATO ball ammo, because it would fragment due to higher velocities, producing massive tearing - the early reports are practically gushing about this. In comparison, 7.62 ball, and similar WW2-era rounds, would just produce a straight, narrow wound channel.
The other aspect is logistics. You can make fragmenting 7.62 ammo, after all, and it's deadlier still. But lighter ammo means that soldiers can carry a lot more. And most shots are fired in modern warfare for suppression purposes; all else being equal, the side that can suppress its opponents for longer - and thus outmaneuver them - wins. Thus, more lethal but heavier ammo comes with a considerable overhead.
Not even Nazi Germany or Stalin wanted to recreate those battlefields, even at Stalingrad and when the Nazis were on the run from the Russians. Whoever reintroduces these weapons is stepping in front of some real monsters in the history books
Life lies in a grave
Silent death rides high above
On the wings of revelation
Multi death from chemicals
Arrogance has won
Annihilation must be swift
Destroy without destruction
Gods on the throne must be watching from hell
Awaiting the mass genocide
Soldiers defeated by death from a smell
Bodies lie dormant no life
Rising new souls on the lands where they fell
Demons not ready to die
Nothing to see where the sleeping souls lie
We do quite a lot of training to protect against chemical attacks and also the protective respiration devices are included for every soldiers. The most probable attack against us will begin with spreading chemical gas on air to crush the first defense line in the borderline.
If situation become really bad and raw - killing all the civilians - chemical weapon would still be a very effective weapon I think.
The article argues pretty convincingly that this is not actually true, since they are just not as effective as high explosives at killing people.
They are possibly more effective at terrorizing the population into surrendering.
This reminded me of two quotes:
"There is no better feeling than having someone shoot at you and miss!" - Winston Churchill
"Combat isn't where you might die -- though that does happen -- it's where you find out whether you get to keep on living. Don't underestimate the power of that revelation. Don't underestimate the things young men will wager in order to play that game one more time." -Sebastian Junger
This will probably also lead to a wave of euphoria once COVID-19 has passed on.
This is asymmetrical warfare in a nutshell
There’s only one example I can comfortably talk about: I don’t believe Devolution and the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland would have come about if it weren’t for the shadow of the IRA looming over Westminster.
"This isn’t a value question, but a value-against-replacement question – why maintain, issue, store, and shoot expensive chemical munitions if cheap, easier to store, easier to manufacture high explosive munitions are both more obtainable and also better? When you add the geopolitical and morale impact on top of that – you sacrifice diplomatic capital using such weapons and potentially demoralize your own soldiers, who don’t want to see themselves as delivering inhumane weapons – it’s pretty clear why would wouldn’t bother."
Chemical weapons are not very useful on a tactical level, and modernly nuclear weapons are superior on the strategic level. But for a brief period between 1915 and 1945, they were an attractive solution for mass death on a strategic level. A 1,000 pound explosive bomb, with WW2 level targeting, is very unlikely to hit its target and will likely explode some random unpopulated building. A 1,000 ton mustard gas bomb, though it won't hit its target (because WW2 era bombing accuracy), will still have its payload disperse over a wide area and is utterly horrific to deal with. As the article notes, the 1995 sarin attack in Japan injured over 1,000 people. Chemical weapons may not be good for winning a battle, but they're perfect as a terror weapon meant to go after civilians.
In a sense, chemical weapons are a kind of 'poor man's nuke'. Russia and America are standing down their chemical weapons because they have actual nukes, and don't need to also have 2nd rate knock offs.
The article tries to point to WW2 as an example of nations being in existential peril, and still not using chemical weapons, and concluding this means they were ineffective even as terror weapons. But I think that doesn't hold water upon closer analysis - the moment a single German soldier's boot stepped foot on the British isles, which is to say the UK actually faced imminent threat of conquest, Churchill planned to quote "drench [Germany] in gas".
Later on in the war chemical weapons were avoided not for fear of retaliation in itself, but for fear of how one's own people would respond to said retaliation. If you are Great Britain, and public morale for the war is hanging on by a thread, do you want to roll the dice and gas attack Germany - thereby causing Germany to gas attack your civilians - and risk support for the war collapsing? In 1944 Churchill asked for a 'cold blooded analysis' about gassing Germany, and the response that came back was basically "We're already winning the war, and mass gas deployment would be needlessly taking chances. Do not do it!". Churchill famously disagreed with this analysis, but didn't push the matter any further.
Sure, but an equivalent conventional high explosive would have likely killed all those 1,000 people, wouldn't it have?
> In a sense, chemical weapons are a kind of 'poor man's nuke'. Russia and America are standing down their chemical weapons because they have actual nukes, and don't need to also have 2nd rate knock offs.
The article explicitly notes this as well, that chemical weapons are only really used by weaker, less-monied, static-system militaries. And even then, they're only effective against similar adversaries, not against more modern enemies.
But "poor man's nuke" isn't even really a great characterization from the perspective of the US or Russia: with a modern military, chemical weapons do less damage than a cheaper, lighter, easier-to-deploy explosive. They're not a "poor man's nuke", they're just a poor man's weapon, period.
Looking it up on wikipedia, most suicide bomber vests weigh roughly as much (5 kg) or up to 4 times as much (20 kg) as all the sarin used in this attack (5.45 kg). I've never heard of a single suicide bomber, using a vest, injuring 1,000 people. So I am inclined to think the chemical approach is more efficacious.
In fact that's another little nitpick I have with the article - it's high explosives that heavily benefit from tightly packed situations, as they're a one-and-done sort of deal. The sarin gas though was able to be spread all along a tube system, and cause problems for huge amounts of people.
Bullshit.
Procuring sarin is nontrivial organic synthesis. Procuring ANFO is just a question of ordering some diesel and fertilizer.
5 kg of explosives? Definitely not.
For the costs they went with for the gas they could have toppled half a dozen skyscrapers in Tokyo.
They were insane.
A 1,000 lb bomb falling on an apartment building, however, would definitely have a significant death toll.
Keep in mind that the total civilian casualty count on the British side during the Battle of Britain was 43k dead and 139k wounded, all from conventional explosives. Those are substantial figures. It's not clear how chemical weapons could have ever remotely killed as many, because after the first few successful attacks the gas masks would be emphasized even more, and everyone would be carrying theirs with them everywhere they went, ready to don at a moment's notice. As the article points out, you can armor even a civilian populace against chemical weapons relatively easily, but you can't armor a city against high explosives.
In closed spaces. In closed spaces, chemical weapons are pretty effective, cf. "gas chamber", but in open spaces they are much less deadly.
Remote and automated warfare, coupled with more and more controlled/closed borders (we'll have these after COVID + economic crises) lowers the perceived cost and increases the benefits of using chem and bio weapons. Paradoxically, the better you'll be "prepared for a pandemic virus", the more in-control and confident you'll feel about indirectly using such weapons.
That's why we have to keep the world open and connected! And don't do the stupid thing of over-investing in surveillance and control that will only create dangerous illusions of being able to "safely" play with such "toys"!
In a war characterised by:
* Bombing of civilian populations, by both sides
* Penal battalions charging across minefields without guns and getting shot by their own side if they retreat.
* First and second uses of nuclear weapons
* Literally the holocaust
The idea that chemical weapons weren't used because they were "morally repugnant" isn't the most obvious conclusion IMHO.
War is, almost by definition and nature, not a moral-friendly activity.
Years ago a co-worker of mine at the phone company had to go to military base in Terre Haute to work on some high speed circuits that weren't working properly. The network room was in the basement of a warehouse that stored VX nerve agents - rows and rows of it. When he got to the base he had to watch some training video on nerve agents, get issued a gas mask and the atropine shot then escorted to the facility. He said during the whole time he was incredibly nervous as the evacuation route involved running back up into the warehouse then through an exit.
I don't really buy this one. I mean, I agree it's dangerous, but the major powers maintained large stocks throughout the Cold War without apparently worrying about it too much. More recently it's become a somewhat expensive disposal problem, but in terms of cost it's not really significant next to the cost of maintaining, say, aircraft carriers, or nuclear warheads.
Leaks happen and have happened, etc.
Holy Cow!
But I will offer my own answer. Grooups generally don't use chemical weapons because such use is too obvious too unsettling to viewers/supporters. They want the outcome, whatever it may be, but they don't want to look like they are greedy or insensitive or anti(or counter)-religious [generally speaking, they don't want to appear overtly confrontational].
Things must be done just slightly less aggressively than will upset the general population/supporters who fund the endeavors.
In Earth-time, this discussion is mostly academic. The horrors which we inflict upon each other is far less than the likely destruction we invite upon ourselves as a species through our collective behaviors (environmentally speaking). The human existence on this planet is probably (in the mathematical sense) very short.
I suspect the real concern is that we or someone we know may suffer some extended period of pain because of chemical or other non-instant-death conflict. People think they are afraid of dying, but usually it is more that they are afraid of a slow death which includes pain and anguish.
Images of the bombing and napalm in Vietnam generated an incredible backlash so the pentagon and their friends in the media conglomerates have been very circumspect.
This is not in any way to condone the use of gas, far from it. It is to condemn the actions of the US military and the strategic planners for using human rights as a cudgel when our own crimes are so stark.
Note that the US provided Saddam with chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq trench warfare of the 1980s. We later invaded Iraq to retrieve weapons we gave him.
"This isn’t a value question, but a value-against-replacement question – why maintain, issue, store, and shoot expensive chemical munitions if cheap, easier to store, easier to manufacture high explosive munitions are both more obtainable and also better? When you add the geopolitical and morale impact on top of that – you sacrifice diplomatic capital using such weapons and potentially demoralize your own soldiers, who don’t want to see themselves as delivering inhumane weapons – it’s pretty clear why would wouldn’t bother."
Human existence on this planet isn't going to end any time soon. Even if the planet heats up. Even if there is trash in the oceans. But there might be a whole lot less of us and life might be a lot less pleasant.
It might seem weird, but death is considered better than suffering by lots of people. I give an example. In the series Chernobyl - soldiers are employed to kill dogs because they might spread radiation. The senior soldier instructs that when you see a dog - keep shooting, till it dies.
In old times, slow killing was considered to be much worse as compared to sudden death. So maybe this is why we don't use chemical weapons.
> the narrative I got was fairly clear: we didn’t use chemical weapons because after World War I the nations of the world got together and decided that chemical weapons were just too horrible and banned them, and that this was a sign of something called ‘progress.’
That point is even further iterated on in the conclusion when comparing them to cluster munitions which as you put, "cause multi generation effects" due to remaining active years after the conflict.
Chemical, biological and radiological weapons (not nukes) are effective as defensive weapons. They dramatically slow down down area access and advance of the enemy. Troops fighting in full NBC suit move very slowly. They have to periodically retreat, decontaminate and rest.
Just like land- and sea mines they are defensive weapons that attacking armies dislike. The rationalization is the long term damage for the civilians or society (can be true), but mines and chemical weapons allow for smaller armies slow down the advance of the enemy.
VX is more a surface coating than a gas. "minefields" of VX could be laid very rapidly and randomly which would be a bane to mobile troops. If saddam actually had a VX supply and laid it down in key areas, the US soldiers would have suffered many times more KIA (and there's no effective treatment -- gallons of atropine per patient simply isn't viable).
Also another technology banned because it don't work is the hollow point bullet.
Apparently killing a solider outright is not as destructive as driving him long term onto the medical system. This is also one of the reasons caliber has generally been dropped over time. The 1950s move to the 223 round is pretty explicit on this.
1. Hollow point bullets aren't banned. The US Army just adopted them recently - M1153.
2. Hollow point bullets are very effective compared to ball ammo. There is plenty of research that's been done on this (see Martin Fackler). However, pistols are much less effective than rifles.
> Apparently killing a solider outright is not as destructive as driving him long term onto the medical system. This is also one of the reasons caliber has generally been dropped over time. The 1950s move to the 223 round is pretty explicit on this.
1. This is a pervasive myth. There is absolutely no evidence of this from primary sources. The goal of shooting people is and has always been to kill them.
2. The reason calibers have dropped over time has nothing to do with making them less lethal. It's because they're lighter and smaller (easier to carry more of them), and they shoot flatter and faster (easier to hit targets).
There was actually a big argument in the past over match grade rounds that have a dimpled front and a hollowed core, which keeps the weight toward the back of the round. They aren’t effective in hunting for the same reason they aren’t considered a hollow point by the military.
You're wrong.
I don't know what the effect would be of USA participation in a NATO action using expanding small arms ammunition.
Seems kinda odd to me anyway, though I suppose limiting the damage a combatant receives while fighting isn’t a bad thing. Coming up with a stance makes you have to mentally address the concept of good vs bad guys, and I suppose I don’t see enemy fighters as bad people, just people fighting for differing ideals. That makes me tend to agree with rules that limit fatalities and excessive injury.
In a military context that is actually required by law, which I think is the fourth Geneva Convention. Combat forces are required to eliminate the enemy with minimal unnecessary suffering, which means the intention is always to kill and not injure.
Also, does not apply; the US is not a signatory.
While that's true, the hollow point doesn't make a difference. Essentially all pistol ammo is bad at penetrating armor. What does make a (small) difference is velocity; you can see this by looking at ratings for NIJ level IIa and IIIa armor.
This is why pistol ammo that's designed to penetrate soft armor like 5.7mm is so small and light weight - it needs to be really fast. I'm sure the pointed shape helps a bit, but it's the speed that really does the job. That's also why it's garbage compared to normal ammo against unarmored targets.
They work just fine in inducing fragmentation and thus producing greater terminal effects. It's just that armies found out that they can induce fragmentation just fine using a different mechanism that does not have a Hague convention rule against it, and so are using that instead.
Almost all modern military rounds make use of yaw-induced fragmentation, where they are designed to fly stable in air but not in flesh, and so very rapidly yaw in tissue until they are going sideways, in which direction the bullet does not have sufficient structural strength to stay intact, and so fragments. This has essentially the same effect on the target as using hollow points.
> The 1950s move to the 223 round is pretty explicit on this.
This is false. Because of better yaw characteristics, the 5.56 as adopted had similar lethality as the rounds it replaced, at the expected combat ranges. The problems with 5.56 lethality that have been reported were that the M4 carbines adopted later had too short barrels for the rounds the military was using, and the lower muzzle velocity achieved resulted in impacts where the bullets failed to fragment properly.
Unneeded force wastes effort. We don't use napalm either. White phosphorus is used. Sadly. As is depleted uranium which wreaks havoc with dust. Weapons with chemical consequence abound.
Teargas was used for bunker clearing. The Russians have used sleeping gases in Chechen hostage rescues and people died from side effects. Nothing is simple with gases.
Old mustard gas is heavy liquid, bad juju. These old school simple chemical weapons were a giant toxic chemical love canal disaster. Belgium and France still heavily contaminated around the trenches.
Binary weapons safer but still pretty bad. "Safe" to handle is very qualified when field treatment is "hit it with a hammer" maintenance.
Ask yourself if the neutron bomb is still a part of rational war planning. Three days later, it's all usable as is. No electromagnetic spike damage, just smelly dead bodies to bury. Hmm. Bit niffy. Menthol up the nostrils is said to work by forensics staff.
https://www.opcw.org/our-work/what-chemical-weapon
So yes, any of the above chemicals if they were to be used to cause harm via their toxic properties, would be chemical weapons according to OPCW.
Tear gas is _clearly_ a chemical weapon (or a class of chemical weapons, really), and its use is banned in warfare by international treaty. Many countries do allow its use on civilians outside the context of warfare.
Though probably any other country using it like they used it in Fallujah would have suffered consequences (note we're not talking about WP as used for lighthing and gun laying. Allegedly (I'm not sure what the evidence status), US used it for shake & bake on civilian population)
> on 15 November 2005, US Department of Defence spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Barry Venable confirmed to the BBC that US forces had used white phosphorus as an incendiary weapon there
US shaked and baked children in Fallujah, but they were conveniently redefined from children to enemy combatants at the time.
The first chemical weapon attacks in WWI were quite deadly. However, chlorine, phosgene, mustard gas, etc. didn't remain effective after troops on both sides came to expect them. Once everyone had gas masks and the training to put them on quickly, chemical weapons became a mainly psychological threat. There are plentiful horror stories about gas attacks precisely because so many people survived them.
Chemical weapons and surprise are, together, a deadly combination. What might be combined with surprise in the future?
From what you say, a chemical weapon would be pretty surprising today.
Historian see WWI as the war of chemists.
And WWII as the war of physicists.
During WWI a biplane or two was able to fly over Paris and drop a grenade. It caused quite a scandal with some Navy high ups condemning the concept of aerial bombardment altogether. By the end of the inter-war period there was a strong stigma against it. The concept of using bombs on civilian centers was pretty much unthinkable. Until of course the war began and it wasn't. Throughout the war taboos were approach and broken one after another.
When the U.S. joined the war, there was a major row between U.S. and British airforce commanders about using bombers at night. The U.S. thought it unethical, especially since they had invested in a supposedly superior bomb sight which was rendered essentially useless at night. The British, facing an existential threat were not so scrupulous. Of course the night raids soon began.
So by war's end there was virtually no size of bomb nor target that was much unacceptable even though the idea of aerial bombing of even soldiers had been distasteful at its start.
Give this, the only reason I could think that chemical weapons had not followed the same slippery slope was that they were far less useful.
I got an A- on the paper, my teacher said it was good but too fringey. I couldn't dig up the paper but I found the bibliography. If you're interested in the subject give some of these sources a try. I especially enjoyed the biography of Doolittle, "I Could Never Be So Lucky Again".
"The Bombing of Berlin in World War II." Wikipedia.org. Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia, 7 April 2012. Web. 10 April. 2012.
"The Bombing of Germany." American Experience. Writ. Zvi Dor-ner. Dir. Zvi Dor-ner. PBS, 2010. Streaming.
"Bombing of Tokyo." Wikipedia.org. Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia, 3 April 2012. Web. 6 April. 2012.
Carlin, Dan. ”Logical Insanity.” Harcore History. dancarlin.com, 31 March 2012. Podcast. 6 April 2012.
Cheek, Dennis W. "Hiroshima and Nagasaki." Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Ethics. Ed. Carl Mitcham. Vol. 2. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2005. 921-924. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 16 Apr. 2012.
Doolittle. Gen. James H. and Carroll V. Glines. I Could Never Be So Lucky Again. 1991. New York: Bantam Books, 2009. e-book.
"Firestorm." Wikipedia.org. Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia, 13 April 2012. Web. 14 April. 2012.
Hansen, Randall. Fire and Fury: The Allied Bombing of Germany 1942-1945. New York: New American Library, 2009. e-book.
Truman, Harry S. "Harry S. Truman, Diary, July 25, 1945." Atomic Bomb: Decision. n.d. Web. 10 Apr. 2012.
It wasn't really new. Bombs have been dropped from balloons before then, and that caused enough of a scandal that the Hague Conventions of 1899 included "Declaration on the Launching of Projectiles and Explosives from Balloons". It was only in effect for 5 years, though.
Poisonous gases were also banned in Hague, and that prohibition didn't have an expiration date, so it was already a war crime in WW1.
Not mustard gas, no, but mace, pepper spray, tear gas, all of which can kill or injure vulnerable people.
What I'd really like to see is an analysis from a military historian's perspective of why biological weapons are even more useless, with specific reference to current events. The tl;dr there is that they're tactically nonexistent, and strategically worse than merely ineffective because you can't control either their spread or your borders well enough to avoid them blowing back on you.
Of course, I'm not so naïve as to imagine such a thing would convince anyone who needs convincing. It'd be a fun read if Mr. Devereaux did it, but I suspect it would serve neither tactical nor strategic goals in the battle against misinformation.
That's only true if all nations are identical. Which is another way of saying that it's never true. Unless it's a global extinction biological weapon, there would be winners and losers when it's over.
It could be acceptable to use (risk vs reward) if you believed your nation would endure far better than your rivals. If you believed you could get back up faster; that it weakens your rivals long enough, and substantially enough, to give you a path to hegemony. If you believed you could lock your society down better to protect it while the rivals were ravaged.
The US for example had that manner of booster path after WW2. It's not that the US didn't suffer in WW2, it suffered quite a bit, but far less than other major powers, particularly in terms of post war domestic conditions (vast manufacturing and export capabilities ready to go). It helped catapult the US to primary superpower status. Historically speaking, what major nations haven't wanted that position? Some even have cultural beliefs, like manifest destiny, that motivate the culture toward it.
Temporarily denying an area doesn't work with a mobile army, you might deny yourself an opening or you might not even know where your units are.
But poorly trained armies, with no independent command because of the coup potential can kind of use them as they get into 'static' fights, and have done, i.e. Iraq and Syria.
It really is an excellent article, though long, I would recommend reading it.
And it really drives the point home that the idea we got civilized and banned them is a fuzzy PR lie we tell ourselves.
From a tactical perspective, the minefield is easy to clear.
In terms of long-term effects, the mines are definitely worse. We are still finding mines from World War II all over Europe, and it’s a huge problem in Korea as well.
It hasn't been exclusively some guys burying them one by one by hand since WW1.
But I agree many things might go wrong with such a scheme. More of a plot device for bond movies...
Source: https://fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm100-2-1.pdf Page 186, section 16-3
Many senior non US NATO staffers are believed to have agreed they'd disarm Americans who even looked like latching up the missiles btw..
Seriously: if you wanted one thing to help defuse a world looking to CBW then a president confident enough to repudiate first strike would have done it in the 1950s and 1960s (my school navy cadet handbook in the seventies explained CBW cleandown for ships in graphic detail at the back)
All manner of WMD would be used absent a credible deterrent. Just ask the residents of Aleppo or Halabja.
Granted, it's as much of its time as were the men I named. But it nonetheless does a good job, albeit implicitly, of pointing up that the best you can do in warfare is to minimize its essential immorality.
When in my view, it's hard for a single person to have a single reason for anything, so when many people are involved...
The argument otherwise rests on the assumption of perfect efficiency in military procurement and decision-making. Does anyone believe the military never uses "useless" technology?
They came up with a rationalisation for building that marginal nuclear bomb to allow the 254th complete destruction of earth. I'm sure they could convince themselves of the necessity of chemical weapons if motivated.
It’s also quite a feat to write about chemical weapons and use the Tokyo Sarin attack as an example, and not Syria. Not only did the latter happen fairly recently. It’s also an actual military using these weapons, not a cult. And if Syria is to fresh and people here are among those doubting the reports, maybe the Iraqi chemical weapons program from the Iran-Iraq war and later the genocidal use against the Kurds is more trusted: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraqi_chemical_weapons_program There, several thousand people were killed.
In the language and framework of this article, I understand why countries with Static armies might feel the need to develop them, but I don't understand why Modern armies which are happy to dispose of chemical weapons aren't equally happy to dispose of nuclear weapons.
Do American and Russian generals think that nuclear weapons will become useful at some point in the future? Do countries like France believe this? The French president hinted that they kept submarines with nuclear weapons configured for terrorist attacks, but the deadliest terror attack in history was carried out with box cutters, so it's hard to imagine how nuclear weapons would help. Nuclear weapons could be useful (if horrific) against a Static opponent, but not a Guerrilla one.
[1]: https://thinkprogress.org/colin-powell-nuclear-weapons-are-u...
This has created a few paradoxical situations. One of them is that their strategic value lies primarily not in their use (which will not achieve any result) but rather the threat of use, which may be sufficient to dissuade leaders from committing to a war (arguably, this happened during the Cuban Missile Crisis--both Kennedy and Khrushchev blanched at the prospect of starting a nuclear war). Another interesting side effect is that this means that the development of counter technologies produces staunch opposition: nuclear war has to be seen as unwinnable for its deterrent value to be effective.
Part of the motivation for nuclear weapons as a strategic (rather than deterrent) option comes from the lineage of people who see strategic bombing as an fast, cheap, easy way to win a war. For a century now, adherents have predicted that once you started bombing a few cities indiscriminately, you'd easily win a war. And people continue to argue this despite the rather thin evidence for this proposition, and mountains of evidence in opposition.
I don't see much value in that article - it's basically just Colin Powell quoted as saying that he doesn't think nuclear weapons are useful and that they should be eliminated. But he's just one person, at one time, and he doesn't say anything about how. That's far, far away from a broad agreement among the entire US military and government. It's more like political propaganda than a reasoned analysis.
An actual modern military force in the field should be significantly less vulnerable. You'd have to be quite close to the detonation to damage armored vehicles and troops in good cover. Actually targeting it well is likely to be hard too. It would be nasty to soft vehicles and buildings and anybody outside of cover, but 5 minutes warning could cut that down pretty well.
But they would be quite effective indeed against more strategic targets, from military bases and logistic areas all the way back to factories and cities.