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Thread: Are chemical weapons really that bad?

  1. #1

    Default Are chemical weapons really that bad?

    The title of this post is intentionally provocative, but hear me out. The recent chemical attack by Syria is interesting for a number of reasons, but there's a meta-narrative that stands out for me. During the last several years of this civil war, many thousands of Syrian civilians have been brutally killed by all sides, with the Assad regime chief among the perpetrators. The regime methods of killing have involved conventional (but inaccurate) munitions delivery by aircraft or artillery, attacks by ground forces, and widespread torture and execution by regime security forces. A tiny fraction of these deaths have come about from chemical attacks - likely no more than a few thousand - but these attacks have caused by far the greatest consternation internationally and have been the impetus for actual or planned strikes against the regime.

    The obvious explanation for this seeming incongruity is that the world doesn't really care about Syrian children so much as they care about the norms prohibiting the use of chemical weapons in war. Though I have no doubt that the uproar might have been a bit more muted if the chemical weapons had been deployed only against rebel fighters and not civilians, it seems clear that the concern is focused on the weapon and not the target.

    There is a long history of the revulsion attached to the use of chemical weapons; successive agreements from the Hague Convention in 1899 to the modern Chemical Weapons Convention in 1993 have all outlawed the use of said weapons, and current agreements also outlaw their production or stockpiling. This has not kept countries from using them; obviously they were used quite a bit in WWI, and the only thing that limited their use in WWII appears to have been deterrence and German concerns about damage to their horse-based logistics system. The US has used defoliants extensively in Southeast Asia, which may or may not constitute technical violations of existing agreements but certainly appear to be chemical warfare.

    My question, however, is why these weapons are seen as beyond the pale. Other so-called WMDs make sense for why they are not used: biological weapons have the very real issue of potentially causing a pandemic (e.g. a weaponized super-flu or hemorrhagic fever or whatever), and nuclear weapons have the associated concern with fallout and long-term radiological hazard. Yet there are chemical weapons that have limited dispersal and relatively modest long-term environmental effects (e.g. sarin), so peripheral concerns about their use seem unwarranted. (Some weapons, such as VX, can indeed persist in the environment for a long time, and a strong case can be made for banning them on environmental grounds.)

    The only logic I can see for banning them is more psychological than logical: we somehow think it's not sporting to kill enemy troops with chemical weapons. This smacks of hypocrisy; is a thermobaric weapon really any more humane than a nerve agent? What about incendiary weapons, both big and small? For that matter, I'm not really convinced that the person dying has a preference for being blown up or shot even by more standard conventional weapons like high explosive munitions or bullets.

    It is not clear to me that chemical weapons are particularly good weapons - modern NBC protections mean most troops in a sophisticated military would not be terribly inconvenienced by a chemical attack. So there's reason to argue that chemical weapons nowadays are primarily intended to be employed against civilians, and as such should be illegal. But it's not at all obvious to me that this makes sense from a historical perspective - the revulsion attached to chemical weapons goes back quite far, even when substantial military advantage was seen with their deployment, and stockpiles appeared to be maintained until recently specifically as deterrents against other military forces.

    So, what do you think? Does this specific ban make any sense? It seems to me that we should be spending more time worrying about the targets of attacks rather than the method involved in killing them, presuming that said methods do not have long term consequences to e.g. the environment.
    Last edited by wiggin; 04-07-2017 at 04:49 PM.
    "When I meet God, I am going to ask him two questions: Why relativity? And why turbulence? I really believe he will have an answer for the first." - Werner Heisenberg (maybe)

  2. #2
    The only logic I can see for banning them is more psychological than logical: we somehow think it's not sporting to kill enemy troops with chemical weapons.
    Sporting? Like, as in fair play? I don't think that's the psychological component. It's more of a very deep visceral fear -- an invisible gas that kills you horribly, that you don't know has been deployed against you, perhaps, until your unit starts feeling the effects or some detector goes off. And if you're in a fortified bunker you have few(er) worries of a conventional weapon killing you, but gas would just seep right in... Yeah, good question, is it more horrible than napalm or white phosphorous, or whatever? Probably not... but it's more feared anyway.


    It is not clear to me that chemical weapons are particularly good weapons - modern NBC protections mean most troops in a sophisticated military would not be terribly inconvenienced by a chemical attack.
    This equipment exists for sure, but do you really think fighting in moon suits, to say nothing of the logistics of getting them available and maintaining them, is only a minor inconvenience?
    Last edited by EyeKhan; 04-07-2017 at 06:24 PM.
    The Rules
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  3. #3
    Khan, formatting, fix it.
    Last edited by Ominous Gamer; 04-07-2017 at 06:32 PM.
    "In a field where an overlooked bug could cost millions, you want people who will speak their minds, even if they’re sometimes obnoxious about it."

  4. #4
    There is no doubt that they're the "little sister" of the WMD trio.

    I think a lot the reaction to them is because they're a silent killer. You might not even know you or people around you have been subjected to an attack until you're already dying.
    Last night as I lay in bed, looking up at the stars, I thought, “Where the hell is my ceiling?"

  5. #5
    Quote Originally Posted by Ominous Gamer View Post
    Khan, formatting, fit it.
    sry
    The Rules
    Copper- behave toward others to elicit treatment you would like (the manipulative rule)
    Gold- treat others how you would like them to treat you (the self regard rule)
    Platinum - treat others the way they would like to be treated (the PC rule)

  6. #6
    Quote Originally Posted by EyeKhan View Post
    Sporting? Like, as in fair play? I don't think that's the psychological component. It's more of a very deep visceral fear -- an invisible gas that kills you horribly, that you don't know has been deployed against you, perhaps, until your unit starts feeling the effects or some detector goes off. And if you're in a fortified bunker you have few(er) worries of a conventional weapon killing you, but gas would just seep right in... Yeah, good question, is it more horrible than napalm or white phosphorous, or whatever? Probably not... but it's more feared anyway.
    Yeah, so I don't get this. I'm pretty damned scared of daisy cutters, and blockbusters, and incendiaries. And for most of these, you don't see them coming, either, until they blow up in your face. Maybe you'd get a few seconds of warning, but delivery systems for chemical weapons aren't silent either.

    This equipment exists for sure, but do you really think fighting in moon suits, to say nothing of the logistics of getting them available and maintaining them, is only a minor inconvenience?
    Obviously I exaggerated there, it's an inconvenience. But compared to the same delivery system hitting you with, say, a fuel-air explosive or a salvo from the grid square removal system (aka the M270) and I'd take the chemical attack any day. It's possible to protect against many of them with gas masks (rather than 'moon suits'), and most of our vehicles nowadays have NBC protection systems (especially the heavier armor). It would be annoying, yes, and probably some people would die. But it wouldn't be such a great weapon compared to more conventional attacks. Also remember that many chemical weapons are pretty unstable so storing and producing them is a huge headache. If I was making a shopping list of weapons with which to outfit an army, chemical weapons would be pretty far down the list.

    Quote Originally Posted by LittleFuzzy View Post
    There is no doubt that they're the "little sister" of the WMD trio.

    I think a lot the reaction to them is because they're a silent killer. You might not even know you or people around you have been subjected to an attack until you're already dying.
    See above.


    I guess my issue is that we've not seen real biological weapons deployed (unless you count the occasional anthrax letter), and after Hiroshima/Nagasaki we haven't seen nukes used. But chemical weapons are used all the time, even if their use is frowned upon. They're hard to control because they're relatively easy to produce and hide, and they are generally not all that good at the 'mass destruction' part of the WMD moniker. Why are we so hell-bent on condemning their use? IMO the utter hypocrisy shown by the world in Syria is absolutely astonishing. Nearly half a million people are dead, mostly civilians, and we're worried about a thousand or so just because of the specific manner in which they were killed. I find it mind-boggling.
    "When I meet God, I am going to ask him two questions: Why relativity? And why turbulence? I really believe he will have an answer for the first." - Werner Heisenberg (maybe)

  7. #7
    The fact that they have very little military effectiveness is why people are so outraged at their use (same reason a lot of people were outraged at the used of landmines by the US). They are a classical malum in se weapon: a lot of suffering, little military utility.
    Hope is the denial of reality

  8. #8
    I'm not sure I follow. Just because a weapon is crappy in a lot of circumstances doesn't mean it doesn't have some valuable niche uses. I don't know, maybe it would be useful to have a chemical weapon that could hit hardened bunkers without NBC protection (Iranian nuclear facilities?). Or maybe it would be useful to have plausible deniability on the cause of death of some Taliban warlord in a cave somewhere - bomb craters are hard to hide, but these guys are rarely autopsied. Or perhaps they could be used to slow/stop human wave attacks by numerous by technologically unsophisticated enemies, especially in difficult terrain (NK?). I think chemical weapons are relatively useless when fighting a near-peer adversary, but I can see potential niche uses for them in other contexts.

    For that matter, i could make the same argument about landmines. They're often super useless, but they can be pretty damned important for area denial in tense borders (e.g. the 38th parallel). I think cluster munitions could also fit this rubric. My point is that all weapons cause suffering, sometimes a lot of suffering. The trick is to use weapons in a manner that fits the rules of war - proportional to the expected military advantage, and using all efforts to distinguish between combatants and noncombatants. This is true of every weapons system on the planet, and chemical weapons (or cluster munitions, or mines, or any other niche system) should be used with care and only when they satisfy those two basic conditions. But why the wholesale ban? Is there no military logic to use them, ever? I find that hard to believe.
    "When I meet God, I am going to ask him two questions: Why relativity? And why turbulence? I really believe he will have an answer for the first." - Werner Heisenberg (maybe)

  9. #9
    Quote Originally Posted by wiggin View Post
    Yeah, so I don't get this. I'm pretty damned scared of daisy cutters, and blockbusters, and incendiaries. And for most of these, you don't see them coming, either, until they blow up in your face. Maybe you'd get a few seconds of warning, but delivery systems for chemical weapons aren't silent either.
    But chemical weapons don't actually propagate their effects as fast as an explosion. You see the delivery mechanism but it appears to have not affected you. And with something like a daisycutter, you have options *maybe not good ones, but you at leas have an illusion of agency). I would like to point out, Wiggin, neither Choobs nor I said it was rational. But you asked "why," not "should," and the irrational can answer that just as easily or perhaps even more easily than a strictly logical line of reasoning will.
    Last night as I lay in bed, looking up at the stars, I thought, “Where the hell is my ceiling?"

  10. #10
    I think that traditional projectiles are a necessary evil in war. You have to have a way of killing your opponents and they do it in a reasonable manner. Quick and it's over with. In theory, or course in practice people are more likely to be injured and chicken bleed out etc but that is not the design.

    Helical weapons effects are quite torturous. It is a painful, gruesome death and is effectively designed that way. So like torture they are banned.

    It is one thing to accidentally torture someone as part of collateral damage. It is another to do so deliberately and maliciously.
    Quote Originally Posted by Ominous Gamer View Post
    ℬeing upset is understandable, but be upset at yourself for poor planning, not at the world by acting like a spoiled bitch during an interview.

  11. #11
    Hope is the denial of reality

  12. #12
    Pretty standard partisan behaviour.
    Quote Originally Posted by Ominous Gamer View Post
    ℬeing upset is understandable, but be upset at yourself for poor planning, not at the world by acting like a spoiled bitch during an interview.

  13. #13
    One-sided.
    Hope is the denial of reality

  14. #14
    Partisans act like partisans on every side. It is not news.
    Quote Originally Posted by Ominous Gamer View Post
    ℬeing upset is understandable, but be upset at yourself for poor planning, not at the world by acting like a spoiled bitch during an interview.

  15. #15
    Except they didn't on this issue. Democratic support is the same. There's also recent research that Republicans are far more likely to succumb to motivated reasoning. It's one of the reasons Republicans fell for fake news, while there was no real Democratic equivalent.
    Hope is the denial of reality

  16. #16
    Quote Originally Posted by Loki View Post
    Except they didn't on this issue. Democratic support is the same. There's also recent research that Republicans are far more likely to succumb to motivated reasoning. It's one of the reasons Republicans fell for fake news, while there was no real Democratic equivalent.
    *Cough* Rolling Stone *Cough* Duke Lacross *Cough* Bunch of fake hate crimes *Cough*

  17. #17
    Or hell for that matter OJ Simpson trial...

  18. #18
    Quote Originally Posted by RandBlade View Post
    Partisans act like partisans on every side. It is not news.
    Support for the two strikes was similar in both years among both Democrats and independents. It's possible that 60% of current Republicans didn't exist at the time of the previous poll I guess. The GOP voter base seems to have changed somewhat. Nevertheless, the difference is striking and there is no equivalence between the three groups at least on this specific issue.
    "One day, we shall die. All the other days, we shall live."

  19. #19
    Quote Originally Posted by LittleFuzzy View Post
    But chemical weapons don't actually propagate their effects as fast as an explosion. You see the delivery mechanism but it appears to have not affected you. And with something like a daisycutter, you have options *maybe not good ones, but you at leas have an illusion of agency). I would like to point out, Wiggin, neither Choobs nor I said it was rational. But you asked "why," not "should," and the irrational can answer that just as easily or perhaps even more easily than a strictly logical line of reasoning will.
    Fair enough. Not sure that should rise to the level of a global ban on their production, stockpile, and use, but I guess I get it.

    Quote Originally Posted by RandBlade View Post
    I think that traditional projectiles are a necessary evil in war. You have to have a way of killing your opponents and they do it in a reasonable manner. Quick and it's over with. In theory, or course in practice people are more likely to be injured and chicken bleed out etc but that is not the design.

    Helical weapons effects are quite torturous. It is a painful, gruesome death and is effectively designed that way. So like torture they are banned.

    It is one thing to accidentally torture someone as part of collateral damage. It is another to do so deliberately and maliciously.
    I think this is incorrect (also, assuming 'helical' weapons are autocorrected 'chemical' weapons). If you look at the development of chemical weapons, they were not developed with a specific intent to torture. It just so happens that most methods of killing someone are painful (chemical or conventional), yes, but I'm not convinced that dying by, say, sarin is really any worse than being hit by napalm. Mostly weapons are designed with an eye to killing or incapacitating an enemy, and any pain along the way is generally of incidental importance. Despite claims that certain weapons are designed to wound and not kill (e.g. certain types of ammunition), I think it's hard to support this; in fact, a lot of the time new weapons are redesigned to improve their 'stopping power' specifically because they weren't doing a good enough job killing in the first place.

    An interesting piece put out by the Red Cross back in 1973 had some discussion of these issues: https://www.loc.gov/rr/frd/Military_...RC-Weapons.pdf

    Anyways, I think it's entirely possible to articulate a logic that lots of modern weapons are pretty awful and leave lots of people in substantial pain - modern bullets that fragment and ricochet inside the body, antipersonnel rounds containing e.g. flechettes or high fragmentation casings, all sorts of incendiaries, etc. We have generally not outlawed these weapons despite the substantial pain involved in their deployment; I would even argue that the ban on hollow point bullets is an anachronism and its supporting logic has generally been ignored in subsequent weapon developments.

    I would certainly agree that someone using the wrong weapon for a given military objective in order to produce more 'pain' would indeed be violating the laws of war. But using chemical weapons as appropriate - for the niche cases where they might be valuable - seems no worse than using other niche weapons for their intended purposes.

    I guess my broader point is that we should be appalled at the slaughter in Syria and should have been moved to do something long before Assad used chemical weapons to kill a bunch of civilians again. There is nothing intrinsically horrific about chemical weapons that isn't also pretty damned awful about, say, barrel bombs.
    "When I meet God, I am going to ask him two questions: Why relativity? And why turbulence? I really believe he will have an answer for the first." - Werner Heisenberg (maybe)

  20. #20
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    I have the idea the key to answering the question doesn't lie in the victims killed but the lasting damage in surviving ones.
    Congratulations America

  21. #21
    Quote Originally Posted by wiggin View Post
    (also, assuming 'helical' weapons are autocorrected 'chemical' weapons)
    You're right. I see three weird autocorrects in that message, I wasn't intending to use the word chicken either for instance
    Quote Originally Posted by Ominous Gamer View Post
    ℬeing upset is understandable, but be upset at yourself for poor planning, not at the world by acting like a spoiled bitch during an interview.

  22. #22
    Quote Originally Posted by RandBlade View Post
    You're right. I see three weird autocorrects in that message, I wasn't intending to use the word chicken either for instance
    I'd just assumed "chicken bleed" was some quaint English farm-country term.
    Last night as I lay in bed, looking up at the stars, I thought, “Where the hell is my ceiling?"

  23. #23
    LOL no! I don't know how or why autocorrect did it but the sentence was supposed to read: In theory, [of] course in practice people are more likely to be injured and [then] bleed out etc but that is not the design.
    Quote Originally Posted by Ominous Gamer View Post
    ℬeing upset is understandable, but be upset at yourself for poor planning, not at the world by acting like a spoiled bitch during an interview.

  24. #24
    Quote Originally Posted by wiggin View Post
    Fair enough. Not sure that should rise to the level of a global ban on their production, stockpile, and use, but I guess I get it.
    It's quite possible it shouldn't. OTOH, I don't see any particular problem with such a ban either.
    Last night as I lay in bed, looking up at the stars, I thought, “Where the hell is my ceiling?"

  25. #25
    Quote Originally Posted by Hazir View Post
    I have the idea the key to answering the question doesn't lie in the victims killed but the lasting damage in surviving ones.
    One only needs to look at the wounds suffered by US veterans to understand why this is a silly argument. There's lasting - and pretty awful - damage from most weapons.
    "When I meet God, I am going to ask him two questions: Why relativity? And why turbulence? I really believe he will have an answer for the first." - Werner Heisenberg (maybe)

  26. #26
    Quote Originally Posted by wiggin View Post
    One only needs to look at the wounds suffered by US veterans to understand why this is a silly argument. There's lasting - and pretty awful - damage from most weapons.
    Not quite as lasting as being blown to pieces, a viable alternative to chemical weapons.
    Hope is the denial of reality

  27. #27
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    Quote Originally Posted by wiggin View Post
    One only needs to look at the wounds suffered by US veterans to understand why this is a silly argument. There's lasting - and pretty awful - damage from most weapons.
    If you think a little bit more about that you'll know that's not true. Not all lasting damage to the human body is the same in its effect on your ability to live a life which leaves you with a semblance of dignity.

    Just for fun try the difference between breathing through a damp cloth for a while and not using your dominant hand for half an hour.
    Congratulations America

  28. #28
    Quote Originally Posted by Loki View Post
    Not quite as lasting as being blown to pieces, a viable alternative to chemical weapons.
    I'm not quite sure - are you agreeing with me?

    Quote Originally Posted by Hazir View Post
    If you think a little bit more about that you'll know that's not true. Not all lasting damage to the human body is the same in its effect on your ability to live a life which leaves you with a semblance of dignity.

    Just for fun try the difference between breathing through a damp cloth for a while and not using your dominant hand for half an hour.
    I think it's very hard to quantify this. The military and economist types try, of course, typically using QALYs and percentage disability and the like, but it's awfully hard. What I can say is that the range of injuries from 'conventional' weapons - including massive burns, traumatic amputations, all sorts of TBIs and associated issues, lung issues from particulates/incendiaries/etc., blindness, loss of hearing, and a whole host of other fun problems - are quite comprehensive, and I would imagine that at least some of them are just as bad or worse than typical injuries suffered by those who survive chemical attacks.

    The position you're taking is hard to support: essentially, that one weapon is so uniquely bad in the types of survivable injuries it leaves behind that it should be banned. The problem is proving the uniqueness, which I think is quite challenging.
    "When I meet God, I am going to ask him two questions: Why relativity? And why turbulence? I really believe he will have an answer for the first." - Werner Heisenberg (maybe)

  29. #29
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    I don't have to prove anything; the perception has been established well over a hundred years ago. I hope you don't suggest we put it to the test for real with present day weapons.
    Congratulations America

  30. #30
    We have plenty of 'tests' - Iraqi use of chemical weapons in the 80s and 90s, Syrian usage lately, etc. And more than enough data on the long term injuries suffered from various conventional weapons. I'm arguing that the perception of 100 years ago (if indeed that was the logic for its ban) might in fact be irrelevant with today's conventional weapons (cf the discussion of hollow point ammunition compared to modern bullets/firearms that are pretty much as bad).
    "When I meet God, I am going to ask him two questions: Why relativity? And why turbulence? I really believe he will have an answer for the first." - Werner Heisenberg (maybe)

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