Comment by R0b0t1
4 years ago
They are amazingly useful in real warfare. Drop nerve gas on a city, walk in a couple days later. WMDs are the only way to really take a country by force, and of all of them, chemical weapons are the most palatable and also the easiest to produce.
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.
That's not how it works, and they're not very useful at all. The amount of actual product you need is non-trivial and at that point you might as well just use modern conventional munitions.
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.
That's not how it works? That's all I get? I'd refer you to the site guidelines, barging into a thread and going "NO U" is not a real conversation.
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.
I'd invite you to read the article I linked: https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch... . Generally speaking, if you need to take a city you're better off using high explosives than chemical weapons. It's well researched and cites sources.
1 reply →
> That's not how it works? That's all I get? I'd refer you to the site guidelines, barging into a thread and going "NO U" is not a real conversation.
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.
They go against the Geneva Protocol, and it's not even allowed to stockpile them so not even useful if you are a terrorist with a death wish because then there are simpler ways to end your problems.
Russia used them extensively in Syria quite recently, so the concerns are valid.
Given that the Syrian war is still ongoing, that seems to debunk the idea that it's as easy as "Drop nerve gas on a city, walk in a couple days later."
What?! This is not true! I've never heard anyone claiming russia did it. The mainstream consensus is that the syrian government did it, while a minority thinks it was either old stock getting released by accident or the rebels doing it.
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.
The allegations by OPCW are politicised[0] and based on theoretical chemistry, i.e hexamine as an acid scavenger.
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/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermobaric_weapon
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOS-1
4 replies →