Good to see this posted again. I see a concurring example in aerial bombardment policy of the US and the UK throughout WWII. I even wrote a paper regarding it in college.
Both the US and the UK wanted to target the war making capacity of the Germans. The Americans sought to achieve this with strategic precision bombing. The UK sought to do so with mass bombing campaigns targeting industrial workers. The disparity for example manifested in the reluctance of the US to fly bombing missions at night which for obvious reasons was preferred by the British.
Near the end of 1944 however, Allied High Command became concerned that the war might stretch into autumn 1945 and they were hoping the Soviet winter campaign could end the war early. So they initiated their own indiscriminant bombing campaign. In his autobiography, James Doolittle wrote that he opposed the bombing campaign of Berlin because it would , “...violate the basic American principle of precision bombing of targets of strictly military significance...”. In the end, the US adopted the UK's bombing regime and would pursue similar and even more liberal approaches later in the Cold War.
And it is not as if urban bombing wasn't a subject of moral discussion. In WWI the dropping of a grenade upon Paris by a pilot had made it clear that aerial bombardment would probably become a thing. There was a great deal of discussion through the interwar period. In the end though, it seems practicality will triumph over ideals given enough stress and time.
I think in principle there is a difference, or could be. They might prioritize neighborhoods with the greatest concentration of workers in strategic industries, rather than the neighborhoods with the largest populations.
But... is that really what they were doing?
> In the raid, major industrial areas in the suburbs, which stretched for miles, were not targeted.[10] According to historian Donald Miller, "the economic disruption would have been far greater had Bomber Command targeted the suburban areas where most of Dresden's manufacturing might was concentrated".[48]
See, now there you go, giving in to the same logic you're trying to make fun of in the first sentence. Saying all Germans is like saying all Ukrainians welcome being annexed by Russia. Some probably went along because it seemed at the time the easiest way from receiving bullets into parts of their anatomy even if they didn't actually like it.
If we trust our leaders. And our leaders feed us a bunch of bullshit. And then, motivated by that bullshit, we nazi up. Does that make us bad people?
This stuff has been researched deeply. Something like 96% of the population. Nice people. Not idiots. Will swallow absolutely anything that the leader feeds them.
It may be unfixable. Or maybe the only way to fix it is to destroy all forms of mass media.
Don’t forget the firebombings of Japan that caused even more destruction than the two atomic bombs.
> The full fury of firebombing and napalm was unleashed on the night of March 9-10, 1945 when LeMay sent 334 B-29s low over Tokyo from the Marianas.5 In contrast to earlier US tactical bombing strategies emphasizing military targets, their mission was to reduce much of the city to rubble, kill its citizens, force survivors to flee, and instill terror in the survivors.
> Overall, by Sahr Conway-Lanz’s calculation, the US firebombing campaign destroyed 180 square miles of 67 cities, killed more than 300,000 people and injured an additional 400,000, figures that exclude the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki which took 140,000 lives by the end of 1945.13 Cary Karacas and Bret Fisk conclude that the firebombing raids “destroyed a significant percentage of most of Japan’s cities, wiped out a quarter of all housing in the country, made nine million people homeless, and killed at least 187,000 civilians, and injured 214,000 more,” while suggesting that the actual figures are likely higher.14
> The Americans sought to achieve this with strategic precision bombing. The UK sought to do so with mass bombing campaigns targeting industrial workers.
Note also that the British had been subjected to night bombing raids themselves
There’s a “slight” difference between tear gas and chemical weapons. Ones cause temporary (but very strong) inconvenience (of course there maybe some one off complications), others are designed to kill you, as efficiently as possible.
The biggest difference is political: when someone the media doesn't like does it, it's a chemical weapon. When someone the media likes does it, it's nothing.
It's disingenuous to pretend that the chemical weapons of the WW's and the massive cold war stockpiles of VX or sarin are in the same class as deliberately nonlethal lachrymator agents used in riot control. The fact that chemical weapons treaties technically ban pepper spray in the same manner as nerve gas doesn't mean it's a massive evil of police overreach -- there's plenty of low-hanging fruit on that topic without needing to make ridiculous arguments.
GP isn't wrong though. Tear gas of the type used by civilian police forces against the general population is illegal to use in war. It is a war crime to use it.
Tear gas was developed by France and used on the battle field in WWI before being used for "crowd control".
"Riot control agents, including tear gas and other gases which have debilitating but non-permanent effects as a means of warfare, is prohibited in armed conflict under the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention."
And, if a government's leaders feel they need to gas, assault with sound cannons / water cannons / pepper spray, use flash bang grenades, beat with clubs, and/or fire rubber coated steel bullets at their population, it might be taken as a hint that the government involved has lost the consent of the governed.
> Now, I want to leave aside, for the purpose of this essay, the use of lethal chemical agents in genocide, the use of non-lethal chemical agents entirely, as well as the use of things like defoliants that were not intended to cause casualties (even if they did). Those things are all important, but if we get into talking about them, we will never get anywhere. Instead, we’re focusing on the battlefield use of lethal chemical agents against either opposing combatants or civilian populations.
Obviously different laws apply to different groups. The police can also do things (arrest people) that would usually be a crime for soldiers to do. Tear gas use by police is either right or wrong, useful or not useful, justifiable or not justifiable, but it's not really related to why chemical warfare is banned in war. We also don't justify the ability and legality of police to kill based on the legality of killing enemy combatants in war, either.
We can compare them and see that the police force oversteps its civilian role. Your point about the requirements to kill enemy combatants strenghtens that arguement.
This makes me think of an observation from (I think) the web-serial Worm. Being a super hero who shoots fire is very tough. Either your opponent is someone who is vulnerable to fire, in which case your power would burn them to death (which is not very heroic) or your opponent is not vulnerable to fire, in which case your powers are useless.
Similar thinking seems to apply here. Either your target is a modern, mobile, equipped army of professionals who will take minimal damage from chemical weapons, or they are a vulnerable population of civilians who will be massacred horribly if you use them.
War isn't like superhero/kaiju duels, though. Duels are generally about the opponent themselves — you can only win by disabling them. But a large part of war is about the logistics of moving soldiers and supplies around and through places; and so it can be critical (even war-winning) to deny your enemy the use of territory.
A "superhero that shoots fire" (i.e. a guy with a flamethrower) — or a rolling cloud of nerve gas — isn't there to actually harm anybody; it's there to be a thing your enemy sees and stays well clear of. It's an https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_denial_weapon. The threat of it prevents your opponent from coming within range of it; and thereby locks them out of the area it threatens.
And, as it happens, a flamethrower is a much safer area-denial weapon than a cloud of nerve gas — as, whenever the enemy isn't around, you can immediately shut the flamethrower off, and use the area yourself.
Because they're not really useful. It's very difficult to keep chemical weapons contained so that they only damage your target and not your own soldiers or your allies or a bunch of civilians whose gruesome deaths will not play well in the media.
In general, conventional weaponry is more effective at accomplishing military objectives.
I see you’ve read the blog post by noted military historian Bret Devereaux and boiled the whole thing down to three sentences for everyone, but you’ve missed some of the nuance that makes him so fascinating to read.
I recommend everyone else ignore this summary and give the link a click, acoup.blog’s always a delight.
It's not even that. The purpose of mustard gas, for example, is principally to force unmasked troops to vacate the trenches. As a rule we don't do much trench warfare anymore. (Yes, yes, I know... Ukraine enters the chat) With most warfare over the last century having been wars of maneuver, urban conflict, aerial bombardment, or artillery duels... there's just not much use for chemical weapons. They're only useful for clearing people out of confined spaces... hence why tear gas continues to be used for crowd control in cities.
Mustard isn't like tear gas; it's persistent. It's not really a gas at all; it's actually a mist of liquid droplets. The mist then condenses on everything in the area and contaminates it for weeks. Anybody who comes into contact with it without protective gear (more than a gas mask) will suffer debilitating injuries. If you get it on your skin, your skin will fall off. This makes mustard generally useful for area denial, particularly against opponents that aren't ready to suit up and decontaminate everything. Drop a lot of mustard on a supply depot, command post, etc, and all of that equipment now needs to be decontaminated before it can be used again.
Also because of a lack of imagination. Imagine using these puppies in large cities. The world lacks a better class of terrorists. Saudi Arabia used to do some wild stuff with planes back in 2001, prompting the United States to kill a million people in completely unrelated countries, but now we are back to car bombs and incels running with guns when we have a whole spectrum of biological, chemical and radioactive agents waiting to be unleashed.
Its funny how the modern social commentiary associates "incels" with the classes of people they disagree with. It is evident that these people do reproduce.
There's still a number of prominent examples of chemical terrorist attacks, but they're mostly arranged by larger groups rather than 2 angry 4channers. Aum Shinrikyo injured hundreds in their sarin gas attacks, and the Rajneeshee bioterror attack left hundreds sick and dozens hospitalized.
The reason we don't see more of this is pretty straightforward. Although we have active imaginations, the majority of people carrying out these attacks are not Walter White. It takes organizational power to pull off an attack like that.
It's probably more because of the horrific effects it has mainly on non-military targets and the fact that people tend to be held accountable afterwards. As happened to e.g. Chemical Ali, a general in the Iraqi regime famous for his use of chemical weapons on civilians, who was hanged in 2010 for his actions. Likewise the mere hint of such weapons being used in Syria, caused them to be isolated further.
So, most modern military would be keenly aware that the use of such weapons might have long term consequences for them personally and hands the moral high ground to their opponent almost automatically almost immediately. This has mostly negative consequences short term and it's probably counter productive. If that was not the case, we'd be seeing those weapons used in e.g. the Ukraine right now by the Russians. And they seem to have no reservations about targeting civilians otherwise. But it's hard to spin gassing civilians as heroic or patriotic. Even in Russia. Kind of destroys their de-nazificaton pitch.
Even the Nazis did not go there during WWII. Aside of course from committing genocide as part of the holocaust. They did actually develop chemical weapons but they never deployed them on the battle field: https://www.history.com/news/the-nazis-developed-sarin-gas-b...
0. For chemical and biological weapons, there's in inverse relationship between dispersal characteristics and ease of force protection. For example, oily liquids such as VX disperse well, but personnel can be projected with simple charcoal lined protective clothes and gas mask filters. On the other hand, viruses and microtoxins are difficult to protect against, but they also have poor dispersal characteristics from bombs and projectiles.
1. The armed forces of major countries spend a lot of effort to LOOK as if they are prepared to operate under chemical and biological conditions. This includes large stockpiles of protective gear and regular exercises that include chemical weapons scenarios.
2. Chemical and biological weapons aren't used militarily because there's little reason to think that they would be effective.
2.
The US did quite a bit of experimentation in dispersal of biological weapons.
The US Navy dispersed a microbe off the coast of SF to test natural wind dispersal of biological warfare agents. The microbe was harmless to healthy people, but hospitals contain unhealthy people-- some of whom the navy managed to kill.
In the midst of an international mosquito eradication effort that (temporarily) rid much of the Americas from disease carrying mosquitoes, the US Army was breeding and releasing mosquitoes within the US. The Army was testing mosquitoes as a vector for spreading weaponized biological pathogens. I'm not sure if this was a "success" i.e., proved it would have killed a lot of people or not.
When I was in university, there was a physics professor at UC Berkely who was trying to call attention to the UC system getting 1/3 of their funding from the military. Some of that funding was probably accounted for by the University of California being the entity that manged the national labs developing nuclear weapons. But, some of that funding was going into research into creating new strains of pathogens e.g., gain of function research which seems pretty much exactly the kind of research you would do when developing a biological warfare agent.
I guess <adjusts tin foil hat>, I'm not 100% convinced the US abandoned biological weapons. While I'm not convinced that they didn't abandon them either the US has invested a lot into them, and that gain of function research funded by the military was not that long ago.
And, non-nuclear states can more easily get the precursors for chemical and biological weapons than nukes. E.g., Iraq's chemical weapons program (mainly used against Iran) used some production equipment sourced from the US, and precursor chemicals sourced from Germany and the UK. And, the, apparently believable, cover story was that they were manufacturing pesticides. I'd be surprised if a lot of militaristic smaller countries didn't have this sort of weapons program.
Yes, good points. I would make a distinction between military weapons that target troops in the field versus weapons that target civilian populations, although that is probably not the reality of the world today. Biological weapons have a lot of undesirable properties for military use such as long incubation periods, although the Soviet Union invested heavily in microtoxins as an alternative that addressed some of these shortcomings.
The UK planned on using them if Germany ever tried landing on their shores in WWII. Basically just dumping chlorine and mustard gas off the top of cliffs and watching it sink down hill. Anyone on the beaches would've been trapped between that and the ocean.
> The other large-scale use has been in the Syrian Civil War, by the Assad regime against both military and civilian targets (but mostly civilian targets).
False propaganda unfortunately according to the OPCW inspectors who actually went to Syria, including the director of the OPCW. But you can ignore them and take the CIA's word for it instead like the author of this article did.
>Quite frankly, we don’t use chemical weapons for the same reason we don’t use war-zeppelin-bombers: they don’t work, at least within our modern tactical systems.
Also false, we used white phosphorus extensively in Iraq and elsewhere.
Scientists and chemists around the world are going to be stunned to hear that phosphorus isn't a chemical.
>White phosphorus munitions are weapons that use one of the common allotropes of the chemical element phosphorus.
>In munitions, white phosphorus burns readily with flames of 800 °C (1,472 °F).[74][75] Incandescent particles from weapons using powdered white phosphorus as their payload produce extensive partial- and full-thickness burns, as will any attempt to handle burning submunitions without protective equipment. Phosphorus burns carry an increased risk of mortality due to the absorption of phosphorus into the body through the burned area with prolonged contact, which can result in liver, heart and kidney damage, and in some cases multiple organ failure.[76] White phosphorus particles continue to burn until completely consumed or starved of oxygen. In the case of weapons using felt-impregnated submunitions, incomplete combustion may occur resulting in up to 15% of the WP content remaining unburned. Such submunitions can prove hazardous as they are capable of spontaneous re-ignition if crushed by personnel or vehicles.[77] In some cases, injury is limited to areas of exposed skin because the smaller WP particles do not burn completely through personal clothing before being consumed.
>Due to the pyrophoric nature of WP, penetrating injuries are immediately treated by smothering the wound using water, damp cloth or mud, isolating it from oxygen until fragments can be removed: military forces will typically do so using a bayonet or knife where able. Bicarbonate solution is applied to the wound to neutralise any build-up of phosphoric acid, followed by removal of any remaining visible fragments: these are easily observed as they are luminescent in dark surroundings. Surgical debridement around the wound is used to avoid fragments too small to detect causing later systemic failure, with further treatment proceeding as with a thermal burn.[77]
Readit News
Both the US and the UK wanted to target the war making capacity of the Germans. The Americans sought to achieve this with strategic precision bombing. The UK sought to do so with mass bombing campaigns targeting industrial workers. The disparity for example manifested in the reluctance of the US to fly bombing missions at night which for obvious reasons was preferred by the British.
Near the end of 1944 however, Allied High Command became concerned that the war might stretch into autumn 1945 and they were hoping the Soviet winter campaign could end the war early. So they initiated their own indiscriminant bombing campaign. In his autobiography, James Doolittle wrote that he opposed the bombing campaign of Berlin because it would , “...violate the basic American principle of precision bombing of targets of strictly military significance...”. In the end, the US adopted the UK's bombing regime and would pursue similar and even more liberal approaches later in the Cold War.
And it is not as if urban bombing wasn't a subject of moral discussion. In WWI the dropping of a grenade upon Paris by a pilot had made it clear that aerial bombardment would probably become a thing. There was a great deal of discussion through the interwar period. In the end though, it seems practicality will triumph over ideals given enough stress and time.
Don't get me wrong, the Germans had it coming, but let's stop lying to ourselves, shall we?
But... is that really what they were doing?
> In the raid, major industrial areas in the suburbs, which stretched for miles, were not targeted.[10] According to historian Donald Miller, "the economic disruption would have been far greater had Bomber Command targeted the suburban areas where most of Dresden's manufacturing might was concentrated".[48]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_Wa...
See, now there you go, giving in to the same logic you're trying to make fun of in the first sentence. Saying all Germans is like saying all Ukrainians welcome being annexed by Russia. Some probably went along because it seemed at the time the easiest way from receiving bullets into parts of their anatomy even if they didn't actually like it.
This stuff has been researched deeply. Something like 96% of the population. Nice people. Not idiots. Will swallow absolutely anything that the leader feeds them.
It may be unfixable. Or maybe the only way to fix it is to destroy all forms of mass media.
> The full fury of firebombing and napalm was unleashed on the night of March 9-10, 1945 when LeMay sent 334 B-29s low over Tokyo from the Marianas.5 In contrast to earlier US tactical bombing strategies emphasizing military targets, their mission was to reduce much of the city to rubble, kill its citizens, force survivors to flee, and instill terror in the survivors.
> Overall, by Sahr Conway-Lanz’s calculation, the US firebombing campaign destroyed 180 square miles of 67 cities, killed more than 300,000 people and injured an additional 400,000, figures that exclude the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki which took 140,000 lives by the end of 1945.13 Cary Karacas and Bret Fisk conclude that the firebombing raids “destroyed a significant percentage of most of Japan’s cities, wiped out a quarter of all housing in the country, made nine million people homeless, and killed at least 187,000 civilians, and injured 214,000 more,” while suggesting that the actual figures are likely higher.14
https://apjjf.org/2016/23/Selden.html
Note also that the British had been subjected to night bombing raids themselves
See: https://www.salon.com/2020/06/02/trump-may-have-broken-inter...
vs
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/21/us/protests-portland-seat...
The fact that it seemed to be impacting women’s menstrual cycles in my city makes me concerned about long term issues related to exposure (fertility among them): https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/01/us/period-tear-gas-study-...
Clearly this needs some study.
It’s certainly true that the people exposed to this gas are not currently dead, I’ll give you that.
Tear gas was developed by France and used on the battle field in WWI before being used for "crowd control".
https://www.kumc.edu/school-of-medicine/academics/department....
"Riot control agents, including tear gas and other gases which have debilitating but non-permanent effects as a means of warfare, is prohibited in armed conflict under the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention."
https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/customary-ihl/eng/docs/v2_rul...
And, if a government's leaders feel they need to gas, assault with sound cannons / water cannons / pepper spray, use flash bang grenades, beat with clubs, and/or fire rubber coated steel bullets at their population, it might be taken as a hint that the government involved has lost the consent of the governed.
> Now, I want to leave aside, for the purpose of this essay, the use of lethal chemical agents in genocide, the use of non-lethal chemical agents entirely, as well as the use of things like defoliants that were not intended to cause casualties (even if they did). Those things are all important, but if we get into talking about them, we will never get anywhere. Instead, we’re focusing on the battlefield use of lethal chemical agents against either opposing combatants or civilian populations.
My impression is the first order of business is declaring an official emergency.
Similar thinking seems to apply here. Either your target is a modern, mobile, equipped army of professionals who will take minimal damage from chemical weapons, or they are a vulnerable population of civilians who will be massacred horribly if you use them.
A "superhero that shoots fire" (i.e. a guy with a flamethrower) — or a rolling cloud of nerve gas — isn't there to actually harm anybody; it's there to be a thing your enemy sees and stays well clear of. It's an https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_denial_weapon. The threat of it prevents your opponent from coming within range of it; and thereby locks them out of the area it threatens.
And, as it happens, a flamethrower is a much safer area-denial weapon than a cloud of nerve gas — as, whenever the enemy isn't around, you can immediately shut the flamethrower off, and use the area yourself.
In general, conventional weaponry is more effective at accomplishing military objectives.
I recommend everyone else ignore this summary and give the link a click, acoup.blog’s always a delight.
The reason we don't see more of this is pretty straightforward. Although we have active imaginations, the majority of people carrying out these attacks are not Walter White. It takes organizational power to pull off an attack like that.
So, most modern military would be keenly aware that the use of such weapons might have long term consequences for them personally and hands the moral high ground to their opponent almost automatically almost immediately. This has mostly negative consequences short term and it's probably counter productive. If that was not the case, we'd be seeing those weapons used in e.g. the Ukraine right now by the Russians. And they seem to have no reservations about targeting civilians otherwise. But it's hard to spin gassing civilians as heroic or patriotic. Even in Russia. Kind of destroys their de-nazificaton pitch.
Even the Nazis did not go there during WWII. Aside of course from committing genocide as part of the holocaust. They did actually develop chemical weapons but they never deployed them on the battle field: https://www.history.com/news/the-nazis-developed-sarin-gas-b...
1. The armed forces of major countries spend a lot of effort to LOOK as if they are prepared to operate under chemical and biological conditions. This includes large stockpiles of protective gear and regular exercises that include chemical weapons scenarios.
2. Chemical and biological weapons aren't used militarily because there's little reason to think that they would be effective. 2.
The US Navy dispersed a microbe off the coast of SF to test natural wind dispersal of biological warfare agents. The microbe was harmless to healthy people, but hospitals contain unhealthy people-- some of whom the navy managed to kill.
In the midst of an international mosquito eradication effort that (temporarily) rid much of the Americas from disease carrying mosquitoes, the US Army was breeding and releasing mosquitoes within the US. The Army was testing mosquitoes as a vector for spreading weaponized biological pathogens. I'm not sure if this was a "success" i.e., proved it would have killed a lot of people or not.
When I was in university, there was a physics professor at UC Berkely who was trying to call attention to the UC system getting 1/3 of their funding from the military. Some of that funding was probably accounted for by the University of California being the entity that manged the national labs developing nuclear weapons. But, some of that funding was going into research into creating new strains of pathogens e.g., gain of function research which seems pretty much exactly the kind of research you would do when developing a biological warfare agent.
I guess <adjusts tin foil hat>, I'm not 100% convinced the US abandoned biological weapons. While I'm not convinced that they didn't abandon them either the US has invested a lot into them, and that gain of function research funded by the military was not that long ago.
And, non-nuclear states can more easily get the precursors for chemical and biological weapons than nukes. E.g., Iraq's chemical weapons program (mainly used against Iran) used some production equipment sourced from the US, and precursor chemicals sourced from Germany and the UK. And, the, apparently believable, cover story was that they were manufacturing pesticides. I'd be surprised if a lot of militaristic smaller countries didn't have this sort of weapons program.
False propaganda unfortunately according to the OPCW inspectors who actually went to Syria, including the director of the OPCW. But you can ignore them and take the CIA's word for it instead like the author of this article did.
https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2020/02/a-and-b-resp...
>Quite frankly, we don’t use chemical weapons for the same reason we don’t use war-zeppelin-bombers: they don’t work, at least within our modern tactical systems.
Also false, we used white phosphorus extensively in Iraq and elsewhere.
Not sure which one you were under the misapprehension that it was. It's neither.
>White phosphorus munitions are weapons that use one of the common allotropes of the chemical element phosphorus.
>In munitions, white phosphorus burns readily with flames of 800 °C (1,472 °F).[74][75] Incandescent particles from weapons using powdered white phosphorus as their payload produce extensive partial- and full-thickness burns, as will any attempt to handle burning submunitions without protective equipment. Phosphorus burns carry an increased risk of mortality due to the absorption of phosphorus into the body through the burned area with prolonged contact, which can result in liver, heart and kidney damage, and in some cases multiple organ failure.[76] White phosphorus particles continue to burn until completely consumed or starved of oxygen. In the case of weapons using felt-impregnated submunitions, incomplete combustion may occur resulting in up to 15% of the WP content remaining unburned. Such submunitions can prove hazardous as they are capable of spontaneous re-ignition if crushed by personnel or vehicles.[77] In some cases, injury is limited to areas of exposed skin because the smaller WP particles do not burn completely through personal clothing before being consumed.
>Due to the pyrophoric nature of WP, penetrating injuries are immediately treated by smothering the wound using water, damp cloth or mud, isolating it from oxygen until fragments can be removed: military forces will typically do so using a bayonet or knife where able. Bicarbonate solution is applied to the wound to neutralise any build-up of phosphoric acid, followed by removal of any remaining visible fragments: these are easily observed as they are luminescent in dark surroundings. Surgical debridement around the wound is used to avoid fragments too small to detect causing later systemic failure, with further treatment proceeding as with a thermal burn.[77]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_phosphorus_munitions#Bur...
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment