I'm guessing the problem with these is that, in practice, a country can't use any weapons system that could potentially be used to "safely" deliver a nuclear payload (i.e. to deliver one far-enough away that the attacking country would not, itself, be affected by the fallout) without other countries' anti-nuke defenses activating. After all, you could always say you're shooting ICBMs full of regular explosive payloads, but then slip a nuke in. There is no honor in realpolitik.
So, because of this game-theoretic equilibrium, any use of the stratosphere for ballistic weapons delivery is effectively forbidden — even though nobody's explicitly asking for it to be.
It's interesting to consider how much scarier war could be right now, if we hadn't invented nuclear weapons... random missiles just dropping down from the sky for precision strikes, in countries whose borders have never even been penetrated.
I don't think these are quite as viable as you think. ICBMs are expensive. Probably tens of millions of dollars each, for a single-use item. Cruise missiles cost $1-$2 million to deliver the same payload and have a better chance of surprising the enemy.
ICBMs have longer range, but how often do you need to strike targets more than 1000km past the front line? They're inherently strategic weapons.
An unguided 1000kg "dumb" bomb costs $2,000. A "smart bomb" costs $20,000 to $100,000. A cruise missile costs $1mil to $2mil.
In the scope of any protracted real war, sending out lots of cruise missiles is horribly inefficient. Much much cheaper to send out a few planes to drop 100's of tons of dumb or smart bombs. IOW, you can deliver 10x to 100x more boom if you just use planes and bombs. 1000x more if you use long range artillery. But then, the pilots or soldiers are at risk-- and that is a political calculation.
I don't think you could get an engine capable of getting you hundreds of miles at that speed and altitude, much less the sensors and guidance system.
It will be burnt up by the time it runs out of fuel, though.
For a good one it has to be hydro-formed out of seamless pipe, which is likely hot-stretched (like wire drawing, but using an induction heating coil in place of the die, and independently controlling the feed-rate and the pull-rate) in advance to retain consistent wall thickness in the engine despite being cross-section after hydro-forming. Also probably incremental hydro-forming with grain-structure-fixing re-heating between stages.
The hard part is just that most of the work is in making the hydro-forming dies/tools, not then using them to cheaply produce more engines.
Of course, you can definitely make a BALLISTIC missile with a couple hundred mile range using a solid rocket engine, and probably for fairly cheap (especially if you don't particularly care about accuracy)
Also: Scud missiles are comparable, made outside western cost inflation, and still ~$1M each. So I'm guessing you can't get a ballistic missile anywhere near $10k (at least, not one that isn't more likely to kill its owner).
https://disclose.ngo/en/article/war-in-ukraine-how-france-de...
(An order of magnitude larger helicarrier contract was cancelled eventually.)
That said, you could probably make a glide bomb for pretty cheap. The two examples I gave above are in the hundreds of thousands, but I bet if you sacrificed some of the accuracy and payload, and you were really optimizing for cost, you could get that into the tens of thousands
0: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/jun/04/terrorism.davi...
This sounds similar to the Nth Country Experiment, conducted by the US in the 1960s. The idea was to see if three freshly minted physics PhDs could design a working nuclear weapon using only publicly available information. In less than 3 years, the three succeeded in creating a credible design for an implosion-style bomb.
For sub-launched ICBMs (like the UK's nuclear deterrent) you also need to factor in the through-life costs of the launcher platform, and the fact that once it starts launching, it has given itself away. We only have four subs, not all of which are on patrol, so it would be barking to compromise these to deliver a conventional payload.
Without nuclear weapons, they're kind of pointless - you don't inflict enough damage to warrant the expense. But the first strike is also so much more survivable.
https://www.royalnavy.mod.uk/news-and-latest-activity/operat...
The UK's current deterrent force is currently expected to be replaced by the successor Dreadnought class [0] in the 2030s. They are currently projected to cost £31 billion (likely an underestimate) for four subs, each of which can carry 8 missiles max. Again, these are a horribly expensive way to deliver conventional explosives when we have cruise missiles instead.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreadnought-class_submarine
Don't you need to also consider the vast expense countries (okay, mostly just the United States) spend to essentially extend their "front line" well beyond their own borders?
According to Wikipedia, Minuteman III ICBMs have a 2020 unit cost of $20 million[2], so for the cost of an Iraq invasion, the US could have fired about 6600 missiles. Considering the invasion toppled the Iraqi government, it's pretty unlikely that firing 6600 missiles with conventional payloads would have been anywhere near as effective.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGM-30_Minuteman#Counterforce
In other words, you can't really target a "building-size" target with these (with maybe exceptions like the Pentagon).
For nuclear payloads, a few hundred meters of error is much less of an issue, of course.
It's an infinite range weapon which arrives in 20 minutes to kill a target your spy satellites see. They would be used all the time.
As opensocket points out, there are many shorter range conventional weapons used across borders. The cruise missiles of gulf war 1 or the drones of the post September 11 world.
https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2019/04/21...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Force_Technical_Applicatio...
Why are cruise missiles any less scary? They are indeed used in precision strikes across country borders, and can kill you just the same. The existence of nuclear weapons still allows some countries to use cruise missiles, as we see happen almost every year.
If the possibility of an untraceable, space borne, hypersonic weapon was on the table we might have had a better deterrent than nuclear weapons. The lack of fallout and total deniability makes it almost certain they would have been deployed and quite concisely ended a few conflicts at the onset.
It is alarmingly frightening, moreso even, because the impact could be extremely precise- leaving infrastructure intact.
Interesting. I expected that nuklear weapons made us more docile. It's a huge deterrence for big powers to go to war with each other. I think we are seeing this play out in Ukraine right now. If Russia had no nuclear weapons, I'd expect NATO to have intervened much more directly at this point, especially after seeing that Russia seems much weaker than expected.
There's nothing sudden about it, this has been the reality for decades now. We here in the US were on the other side of the matter in Iraq and arguably Vietnam. This is an old truth.
Imagine how that would have gone -- dropping nukes on the Vietnamese in order to "save" them from Communism.
Thankfully saner minds prevailed.
It's just that until last month it was taken as just posturing to remind the West and the Russians that Russia, as a nuclear power, has to be taken seriously.
/btw, in other discussions i've been too cavalier throwing around the likelihood of nuclear weapon use in Ukraine. I've thought about it much more since those other threads
[0]https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2021/06/23/in-gun...
I'm probably being incredibly naive in saying this, but what about "non-wartime" decapitation strikes — where instead of going to war, you just lob some well-timed hypersonic missiles at your enemy's capitol building / parliament / etc. while all key players are inside; presumably not as a way to leave the enemy nation leaderless, but rather to aid an insurgent faction that favors you to take advantage of the chaos to grab power? I.e., why doesn't the CIA bring ICBMs along to their staged coups?
A key advantage of a hypersonic weapon is the possibility of first-strikes to disable the enemy's retaliation systems before they have the ability to launch more-traditional retaliatory responses. Only submarines are likely to be mostly-immune to them.
https://www.heritage.org/asia/commentary/chinas-new-weapon-j...
There are counters to hypersonic glide weapons beyond shooting them down. If you can detect it early enough then the target ship can change course and try to evade. The sensors on those missiles have very limited field of view so if it's not receiving a real time target track data link for course correction then it can be possibly be dodged (depending on how many are incoming, weather, and other factors). Even if the target can't evade, a bit of advance warning would at least allow for cueing EW countermeasures.
I supposed the point would be to hit the highest priority targets and nothing else. Loss of command and logistics has a profound effect on endurance
Also, ICBMs in their present form would not likely resemble anything deployed in space
However, the existence of nuclear weapons today doesn't seem to have prevented indiscriminate bombing (using whatever weapons: dumb bombs, unguided rockets, cruise missiles) of targets (including cities) in several countries in recent years.
To be fair, if these become a reality, they would likely strike targets in the Pacific Ocean and South China Seas, far away from the US, but the potential to spook nuclear nations is still there.
Equilibriums change, every major US platform was at one point designed to be nuclear capable, i.e. cruise missiles now liberally launched from planes/bombers/ships that are all nuclear capable. There's no a reason nuclear countries who get attacked by any US platforms should assume any incoming ordinance ISN'T nuclear, down to gravity bombs, except for expectation - knowing US has overwhelming conventional capabilities and would rather use it than nukes.
Same will apply as conventional ICBM matures - we haven't seen much of it because ICBMs have not been sufficiently accurate unless carrying nukes where CEP in meters don't matter. For countries with power projection, it was dramatically cheaper to get closer first and deliver less expensive ordinance. Conventional ICBMs seem effectively forbidden because most actors assume they're too inaccurate for anything but nukes and too expensive for anything but nukes.
But that's changing - there are hints that PRC is pursuing rapid global strike i.e. US prompt global strike, because IMO it's the great equalizer in terms of conventional mutually assured destruction precisely because it isn't banned. A lot of articles being seeded on SCMP about PRC hypersonic developments that spells out meter level CEP ICBMs designed to conventionally attack strategic target of depth, aka Prompt Global Strike.
Ergo (IMO) PRC maintaining no first use nuclear policy while conducting massive nuclear build up to setup credible MAD deterrence. This sets up the game theory of accepting that conventional ICBM attacks on homeland from across the globe is possible and that it's best to wait for confirmation unless one wants to trigger nuclear MAD. Entire reason US / USSR and countries that could moved to Nuke triad or survivable nuke subs was because it bought more time than hair trigger / launch on warning posture.
This makes a lot of sense for PRC who doesn't have the carriers, strategic bombers or basing to hit CONUS (or much outside of 2nd island chain). It makes a lot of sense for any nation with enough resources for a ICBM rocket force but not enough for global force projection (basically everyone). World will be very different place if such capabilities proliferate. Imagine any medium size country with ability to hit stationary targets worldwide - fabs, server farms, power stations, carriers being repaired in a drydock.
Who cares if you can blow up one target once? Unless you marshal enough to wipeout enough infrastructure to really cripple your opponent, it won't do you much good anyway; and if you do cripple them, and they're nuclear, congratulations; you just won a nuclear response. You now have bigger problems.
ABM unreliable, require multiple interceptors per incoming - exchange favors attackers who can always saturate. Also expensive, interceptors usually cost close or more than what they're designed intercept. And currently for anyone not US, just getting US to divert 100s of billions to homeland ABM defense is a win as it will take resources from other priorities. This is also assuming ABM works against hypersonics, including all the recent talk about flak/cloud defense. It's purely speculative.
> blow up one target once
For capital assets that takes billions and years to replace like carriers, subs, supply ships, long range bombers, awacs, critical infra nodes all you need to do is blow it up once. It doesn't take a huge pool of hypersonics to essentially dismantle major US force projection capabilities.
> you just won a nuclear response
Why? Primary motive is deterrence, but with conventional forces. And if it comes down to actually exchanging conventional hits, it will follow escalation ladder, no need to cripple, or cripple to point of existential threat that warrants moving to nuclear.
Interesting! SpaceX was hoping to one day use Starship for quick intercontinental flights. I wonder if this unspoken rule would make that prohibitive?
Not remotely worth the complexity of setting up and executing. Maybe worth it against an opponent with extremely limited launch capacity (North Korea?) but that's a pretty niche application.
It might be relevant, but it's an extremely low-value comment. A good chunk of the people reading the comment (and caring about it) will already know it's describing false-flag operations.
A good way to think about good HN comments is "is there a specific point I'm trying to make". Anything that doesn't try to articulate a point is likely to be downvoted.
Why invest a bunch of time and effort making more and more deadly poisons when we've already got a wide variety of them that are cheap to manufacture, well known in how they work, and don't cost a bunch of research money to uncover?
One could optimize for compounds with hard-to-monitor precursors. Compounds that can be transported with low vapor pressure and volatility, so they cannot be easily sniffed out.
Or imagine a lethal compound with a high delay factor. Or something with specifically panic-inducing effects, perhaps hemorrhagic with a side effect of your skin sliding off in great slick sheets. Another interesting high delay factor compound might induce psychosis: have fun tracking where these gibbering maniacs were a week ago.
With a sufficiently dark imagination, "needs" could be identified for all sorts of compounds.
Remember, the goal is to throw a monkey wrench into the gearwork of an opposing civilization, not necessarily to kill. Fear of the unknown is very effective for this.
Errm, maybe They Do.
On the other hand, I used to work in an organic chemistry research lab, and at least within my ex university's context, we could basically order anything we wanted from the standard chemical suppliers without anyone batting an eyelid. Pre-signed but otherwise blank order forms were freely handed out, you just filled in what compounds you wanted and handed it over, two days later it arrived and you collected it from Stores.
I personally ordered a compound for a reaction I was planning and it was only after it arrived - when I read the safety data sheet - that I realised just quite how toxic it was.
I backed carefully away from that particular bottle, and left it in the fridge, still sealed. Then found another - safer - way to do the reaction instead...
Barrels? Based on what the LD50 was / what the data sheet said, the bottle I briefly had in my hands - and yes, they did start shaking - would have done for a good proportion of the residents of a small city had it managed to be spread around in a form that would have been ingested.
Chemistry labs are typically well-stocked with quite a lot of fairly unpleasant things. They're also the places where a lot of genuinely amazing and potentially live-saving work gets done!
Normally we'd do this in the high potency suite but the reaction scale was too big so we did it in the conventional GMP pilot plant. Bunny suits and cyanide meters for all three chemists.
I calculated that dose-wise, it was enough to kill tens of thousands, were it directly delivered, however if it were merely vaporized, it would only kill those in the immediate area, and would hydrolyze quickly. There's a great article linked elsewhere in thread about the ineffectiveness of chemical weapons, I've added it for convenience because it's a great read. Air is big, the distance-cubed law really dilutes any toxic agent beyond dangerous limits quite fast (comparing pound for pound lethality of conventional explosives).
https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch...
Quite possibly!
The previous occupant of my bench area (and hence adjoining fridge space) left some barely-labeled custom radioactive compounds(!!) in the fridge me to find shortly after I took over that space, so I know how that feels.
After consulting suitably-trained personnel, the contents of the vials were then disposed of ... by pouring down a standard sink, with lots of running water.
Those were the days :eek:
The people finding these things have the same skill sets and access to the same handling/disposal facilities as the people leaving these things so it's very much a "oh my former coworker forgot to/didn't have an opportunity to dispose of X before departing, I'll just do it myself in the same manner he would have". Furthermore, these people have lives, they go on vacation and cover each other. The institutional knowledge of how to handles dangerous organic things necessarily exists in the institutions that do so.
They're gonna CC the guy who's office is right beside yours because (surprise surprise) the departments and teams who's work results in them having weird nasty stuff buried in the back of the walk in fridge are the same people who know how to handle it.
EHS is just a coordinator. They don't have subject matter in everything. So they contact the experts. If your biology department fridge with Space AIDS(TM) in it it's because your department is the experts so you'll be getting the call.
I really dislike these sorts of "name drop" comments. They're just equivalent of "F" or "the front fell off" with a high enough brow for HN veneer on top.
Here's a relevant software-related analogy:
I work in a situation where if we receive certain types of data, we have to go through proper procedures (including an official incident response team). It would be very easy for me to say "I've verified that nobody accessed this data, and we can just delete it," instead of going through the proper channels, which are VERY annoying and require a bunch of paperwork, possibly meetings, etc.
Maybe nothing bad happens. But next time this happens, one of my junior colleagues remembers that the 'correct' thing to do was what I did (clean it up myself after verifying nobody accessed the data). Except they screwed up and didn't verify that nobody had accessed the data in question - and now we are in legal hot water over a data privacy breach.
And then people go back through the records, and both the junior engineer and I get fired for bypassing the procedures which we've been trained on, all because I wanted to save some time.
You are assuming rules say what they mean and mean what they say (and are even written where you're looking, and if they are that they're up to date). If it's your first week on the job, by all means, do the most literal and conservative thing. If it's not, well you should know what your organization actually expects of you, was is expected to be reported and what isn't.
There's a fine line to walk between notifying other departments when they need to be notified and wasting their time with spurious reports.
When maintenance discovers their used oil tank is a hair away from being a big leaking problems they just fix it because they are the guys responsible for the used oil and keeping it contained is part of their job.
Your bio lab or explosives closet isn't special. If the material is within your department's purview then that's the end of it.
Not every bug in production needs to be declared an incident.
>Maybe nothing bad happens. But next time this happens, one of my junior colleagues remembers that the 'correct' thing to do was what I did (clean it up myself after verifying nobody accessed the data). Except they screwed up and didn't verify that nobody had accessed the data in question - and now we are in legal hot water over a data privacy breach.
You can sling hypothetical around all you want but for every dumb anecdote about informal process breaking down and causing stuff to blow up I can come up with another about formal process leaving gaps and things blowing up because everyone thought they had done their bit. It's ultimately going to come down to formal codified process vs informal process. Both work, both don't. At the end of the day you get out what you put in.
>The fact that you're posting this as a throwaway indicates that you don't want your HN account associated with these proposals.
This account is how old? Maybe I just use throwaways because I like it.
sadly, after 30 years of training to be a superhacker on ML, my greatest value is actually in dealing with intra-organizational politics.
At the root of researchers' reactions to EH&S are two things:
1) EH&S will frequently be the source of unfunded and unresourced mandates. "You must stop your research until you've properly tidied up all of your electrical cords" is, in the short term, an impediment to forward progress. Researchers frequently under-budget for safety/disposal costs when submitting proposals, leaving nobody with money to foot the bill for expediting the resolution for a safety stoppage.
2) The statistical likelihood of a single accident is greater for a large organization than for a single research group. One group can get away with a lethal practice for a hundred years before the first death. A hundred labs will only get away with a similar practice for a year.
If you find a competent and reasonable EH&S auditor, they are a great resource. They may ding you for some safety violations, but they'll be able to point the way toward safer practices. In the best case, even if they don't have mitigation funds for longstanding problems, their voices carry real weight and can expedite the allocation of scarce resources toward real safety concerns.
Oh yes, and this isn't a new phenomenon, for instance:
"When Cambridge's physicists moved out of the famous Cavendish laboratories in the mid-1970s, they unintentionally left behind a dangerous legacy: a building thoroughly contaminated with mercury. Concern about rising levels of mercury vapour in the air in recent months led university officials to take urine samples from 43 of the social scientists who now have offices in the old Cavendish. The results, announced last week, show that some people have exposure levels comparable to people who work with mercury in industry."[0]
[0] The mercury the physicists left behind https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg12817450-800-the-merc...
I've wondered how manufacturing plants handle this. You back away because you're afraid of touching the stuff - how does a giant factory that produces and ships the stuff handle it?
Although certainly over-confidence can also happen on the other end, e.g. if something that's quite similar to other dangerous things you work with suddenly has an additional trap. And Safety Datasheets are notorious for not necessarily representing actual in-use risks well.
There is plenty of dangerous chemicals made on a huge scale - sulfuric acid, cyanide, explosives, ...
But also a lot of what the GP says doesn't apply, because on the case of terrorism, "They" is either the police or random people, so "They" definitively do not have antidotes or training on how to handle known poisons.
This kind of exists already. BZ gas is the well-known delirium-inducing compound with a delay of several hours: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3-Quinuclidinyl_benzilate#Effe...)
The effects are probably mostly temporary though.
You'll get nuked (or similar WMD) for that.
Imagine a somewhat more realistic set of applications for hot new research chemicals.
How about aircraft or shells or covert actors spray some "thing" that shorts out electrical insulators 1000x more often than normal. Or makes the vegetation underneath power lines 1000x more flammable than normal vegetation. Our power is unreliable causing a major economic hit both directly and via higher electrical bills. If "they" want to invade now the civilians won't have power and be more likely to get out of the way long before the front line troops arrive. I mean you could probably put nano-particles of graphite in a spray can right now, then stand upwind of a power station or substation, but I bet extensive research would do better. A lot of high power electrical "Stuff" relies on plain old varnish being inert for a long time ... what happens if it wasn't? Again you shut down a country they gonna nuke you, but what if electrical power transformers and switching power supplies only last one year on average instead of ten? Thats a huge economic and maybe military strategic advantage but would you get nuked back because some nation's TVs burn out in one year instead of the carefully value engineered ten years?
How about a spray or microbe or whatever that screws up air filters. Who cares, right? Well most troops (and cops) in most countries have gas masks. Zap their masks via whatever new magical method, then drop simple plain old tear gas the next day or until logistics catches up, which will take awhile assuming they even know they're damaged. Normally when hit with CS, they'd mask up and the CS would have no effect on mask wearers other than reduced vision, but now the side that didn't get their masks ruined has a HUGE tactical advantage.
If you make a bioweapon and kill half the population, they gonna be PISSED and you're gonna get nuked. So try something a little more chill. If your vitamin A reserves are gone, your night vision is temporarily essentially gone. Yeah for long term vit A deficiency you'll get long term skin, general growth, and infection risk problems, but if someone sprayed you with some weird compound that made you pee out all your bodies stores of Vit A before tomorrow morning, the only real short term effect would be night blindness, and that would go away in a couple days with a normal-ish diet or by taking a few days of multivitamin pill or a couple supplement vit A pills. So spray the enemy (and/or the civilians) and they can't see in the dark so magical automatic curfew for the civvies and attack the night blind military and absolutely pound them because they're night blind and can't see your guys. If they have NVGs then hit them at dawn/dusk when the NVGs won't work completely correctly but they can't see without them because of night blindness. Its temporary and never hurt no one other than the opfor "owning the night" until the victims figure it out or naturally recover, so at a strategic / diplomatic level would a country nuke another country because they couldn't see at night for a couple days? Naw probably not. And you can imagine the terror attack / psych warfare potential of leaflets explaining, "we turned off your night vision for a couple days, now obey or we shut off cardiac function next time" Either for the government to use against civilians (think Canada vs truckers) or governments to use against each other (China vs Taiwan invasion or similar). Or give them temporary weird fever sweats or turn their pee robins-egg blue or all kinds of fun.
Now the above is all sci fi stuff I made up and AFAIK I'm not violating any secrets act, unless this post magically disappears in a couple hours LOL.
Think of the new non-lethal battlespace like computer virus attacks. Yeah, we could "EMP" Russia to shut off most of their computers and they'd be really pissed off and nuke us right back so thats a non-starter. But release "windoze annoyance virus number 31597902733" and that could have real world effects. Especially if you release 20,30,4000 new zero-days on the same day.
Dropping anti-radar chaff strips is a very good lo-tech way of shorting transformers and power lines. I can't find a link, but IIRC the USAF discovered this accidentally when training missions led to power outages in nearby towns.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Graphite_bombs#/...
Interesting example of how cyber attacks could blow back. Anything you put in a virus can be taken out and used against you.
If you wanted to install fear into a country, I think being attacked by some custom, previously unknown chemical weapon would scarier than sarin.
Who might invent a bunch of time and effort in those areas?
Considering this, defense against them is at least mildly important. A proper defense only exists by considering offense, so they're still developing chemical weapons somewhere. The modern hot topic is viruses and other pathogens.
The reason why it fell out of favour isn't because it's dangerous, it's because it was ineffective outside of TV and film.
A siege of a city is more impractical than it ever has been. In ancient times a siege was conducted out of necessity; it was the only way to kill everyone inside if a population did not desire subjugation. Complete death of those resisting you was typically the goal, with the slow communication of antiquity leaving any resistance might mean coming back to an army the next time you visit. It was easier to depopulate the region and move your descendants in.
We see echoes of this in modern times. We "took" Kabul at extreme expense, but did not really "take" it as asymmetric enemy forces continued to operate throughout the entire country while the US occupied Afghanistan. Taking many cities across a nation with advanced embedded weaponry is going to be impossible. If it came down to it, such a country would resort to area denial, like Russia did in the Chechnya and Syria, leveling the cities instead of sweeping them.
We don't see people deploying chemical WMDs not because they are too expensive but because of political reasons, and after that, because they don't have them due to disarmament treaties. All it takes is someone deciding they really want to win for all of it to change. You can deny a huge area for weeks with a few chemical warheads. You can make a city inhospitable using less materiel than it'd take to flatten it.
> In static-system vs. static-system warfare. Thus, in Syria – where the Syrian Civil War has been waged as a series of starve-or-surrender urban sieges, a hallmark of static vs. static fighting – you see significant use of chemical weapons, especially as a terror tactic against besieged civilians.
The Russians being in a similar situation because they do not have equipment suitable for a highly mobile army (I don't quite expect them to use them for reasons below, but worth pointing out).
There's a lot wrong with his take. A lot of what he is writing is unsourced conjecture. It's like saying man portable missiles are irrelevant when you can have the CIA topple their government and remove their will to fight.
For one, conventional arms are horribly inefficient at killing in the first place! It's thousands of rounds fired for a confirmed kill, and the stat is equally as bad for artillery. Any marginal improvement is a big deal.
He does not convincingly separate their lack of legitimate use from moral concerns. Developed nuclear states don't use them for a lot of reasons, but a huge issue is that chemical weapons are on the escalation ladder. In the US's case it's also that we don't want to kill indiscriminately. He so much as states this at one point:
> In essence, the two big powers of the Cold War (and, as a side note, also the lesser components of the Warsaw Pact and NATO) spent the whole Cold War looking for an effective way to use chemical weapons against each other, and seem to have – by the end – concluded on the balance that there wasn’t one. Either conventional weapons get the job done, or you escalate to nuclear systems.
> But if chemical weapons can still be effective against static system armies, why don’t modern system armies (generally) use chemical weapons against them? Because they don’t need to. Experience has tended to show that static system armies are already so vulnerable to the conventional capability of top-flight modern system armies that chemical munitions offer no benefits beyond what precision-guided munitions (PGMs), rapid maneuver (something the Iraqi army showed a profound inability to cope with in both 1991 and 2003), and the tactics (down to the small unit) of the modern system do.
I take no exception to this, but basically no large army has encountered a case where they need quickly deployed area denial that is different from landmines. A massive retreat into the interior of a country may be such a case, but you run into issues where a decapitation against that state is probably going to be more effective.
For what it's worth, this is why Russia's concern of NATO countries walking up into it is nonsensical. It's just, perhaps, they never realized how nonsensical it was, as their defense planners do not have experience with a highly dynamic army. (But oddly they seem to have some idea of what might happen, as this is what likely led to their development of nuclear/neutron mortars and artillery. But any situation where those would come out is going to be ICBM time anyway.)
There's no point in detailing beyond that. Respectfully, it's like someone suggesting quicksand is a good way to stop tanks because they watched it in a cartoon. I'll add some commentary in good faith but I'm not going to comment beyond this.
The fact of the matter is that the amount of chemical product you need to try to slow down the enemy is so insanely large that it just doesn't make sense to use -- it doesn't make sense to produce, it doesn't make sense to prepare, it doesn't make sense to bother firing.
I invite you to pick your chemical weapons agent of choice (sarin, chlorine, whatever is the one), pick a spacial size you want to attack an enemy in and then do some back of the napkin estimations at how much of that chemical weapon product you would actually need in order to disperse enough in that area to achieve your objective. I don't want you to account for failed launches, or wind, temperature and so on, let's assume that every munition fired will go to the exact spot it needs to be and disperse perfectly.
You'll very quickly realise that chemical payloads are wholly useless. We're talking about in the magnitudes of hundreds or even thousands of rockets to clear out a small area.
Perhaps it made sense in trench warfare 100 years ago, but it doesn't make sense to use against a guerrilla (or even conventional) force in any modern time.
> We don't see people deploying chemical WMDs not because they are too expensive but because of political reasons, and after that, because they don't have them due to disarmament treaties. All it takes is someone deciding they really want to win for all of it to change. You can deny a huge area for weeks with a few chemical warheads. You can make a city inhospitable using less materiel than it'd take to flatten it.
None of this is true. Sorry, but it's just not. And hopefully following the exercise above you'll come to see it that way as well.
Do you have a source? Because even with all the controversy surrounding international investigation and the theories that have spawned around that, russia wasn't even a possible suspect.
That is to say: neither the Syrian government nor Russia have used chemical weapons in Syria. They haven't used them because they are -- for all intents and purposes -- useless. If you want to take down a group of people in flip flops and have access to a thermobaric[1] MLRS[2] you're not going to break international law so you can give one or two of them a scratchy throat with chlorine payloads (if you're lucky).
[0] https://wikileaks.org/opcw-douma/
To your point, some numbers from wikipedia:
The LD50 of sarin is 39 micrograms per kilogram, so 0.0039 grams to kill a 100kg man half the time in theory.
Now consider the worst of the gas attacks in Syria was in Ghouta. Fatality estimates vary considerably, but the highest estimate claims 1729 fatalities. The attack is claimed to have been performed using at least 8 rockets, likely more, each with at least 50 liters of liquid sarin. That's a lower bound of 400 liters of liquid sarin, for an upper bound of 1729 kills. Liquid sarin's density is roughly the same as water, so that works out to more than 230 grams of sarin per person killed. And if you use the lower fatality estimates or the higher rocket count estimates, the numbers are even worse.
Conclusion? The delivery/dispersion of poison gas is incredibly inefficient. In practice you need tens of thousand times more nerve gas than the LD50 figures would have you naively believe.
https://www.bellingcat.com/news/mena/2020/01/15/the-opcw-dou...
For example, that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghouta_chemical_attack happened is not disputed by Russia; they dispute who did it.
But in any case, while yes there is a dispute around who did it... Russia was never claimed to be the responsible by anyone. The two options are either the syrian government or the rebels, and that's true for all the chemical attacks.
So the GP was completely wrong, Russia did not use chemical warfare in syria!
Their biggest target throughout their efforts? Ted Postol, professor emeritus of science at MIT, who they claimed was a Russian disinformation agent for finding the theoretical chemistry ridiculous and not practical.
Not really, having new developments all classified is not helpful to anyone.
It's my understanding that the Soviet army doctrine in the '70s and '80s included the use of chemical weapons. That hypothetical threat put a hell of a lot of friction on NATO in terms of training, supplies, and preparedness.