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Comment by watwut | Hacker News Reader

> this needs to reach a religious level of fervor, so that it would be unthinkable to put men and machinery into pristine natural environments as part of a strategy of human conflict.

It should be unthinkable to target civilians, destroy houses and people, rape and torture. And here we are, in modern wars.

It would be nice to make it unthinkable to have large organizations of soldiers all about killing, but here we are.

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Bret Devereaux is of the opinion that chemical weapons are not in use anymore simply because they're ineffective next to simple explosives.

https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch...

Maybe the simplest way to save the environment is to invent more deadly, cost effective weapons that don't harm the land as a side effect?

> chemical weapons are not in use anymore

That’s got to be the most caveated statement in a blog post ever.

For anyone reading casually, I really hope you’re aware Russia deployed a chemical weapon against the UK in anger as recently as 2018.

Chemical weapons are used for assassination, but not for large scale warfare. More like terror weapons on civilians (Syria?) and guerilla fighters with limited resources and few alliances.

Someone will still decide to salt the earth with depleted uranium out of spite (see iraq) even if an effective alternative exists

Amount of depleted uranium used in the gulf war: 290 tonnes.

Amount of uranium (twice as radioactive as depleted uranium) in the top 1 meter of the soil of Iraq: ~2.6 million tonnes.

If you own a house with a yard, the soil probably contains multiple kilograms of uranium. It's not that uncommon an element.

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