I’d have to agree that chemical weapons aren’t WMDs, per se. In contemporary times, other than when used as instruments of terror, they remained in military inventories primarily to deter the other guys from using them and, if they were used, to serve as disruptors and inhibitors, not destroyers. Denying areas, routes of march, concentration points, etc. with chemical contamination is a viable use for these things; they were not intended to actually kill large numbers of the enemy. Like minefields, their value was somewhat indirect. Again, this leaves out biologicals, which are a different story.
When used in both WWI and the Iran-Iraq war, chemical agents were not particularly effective in any larger sense. Nasty, yes, but hardly decisive.
I think he only wants weapons that cause massive damage to be called weapons of mass destruction.
As far as I know, nukes are the only thing that qualify. If you do not restrict the definition to something reasonable, then it becomes a meaningless term.
If you want to add more then nukes, where do you draw the line? Clearly the power of a nuke vs the power of the next biggest thing is huge. You do not need to precisely know where the line is, other then between more then a mile and less then 20 or 30 miles.
Let my put it this way, the typical American nuke warhead is at least 20MT, if not 25MT. Its kind of hard to find exact figures on this, I guess the government doesn’t want to advertise these facts.
Anyway, looking at some nuke calculators out there which max out at 4MT (I guess they do not expect any terrorist nations to be able to make a bigger one) a 4MT bomb will vaporize Washington DC. I do not just mean severely damage and knock all the buildings down. I mean the actual area of the ‘bright ball of light’ will consume the city, liquefy all matter (cement, steel, the Potomac river, etc…) and then turn it into vapor. There will not even be rubble left, just scarred land.
That is a WMD.
Chemical weapons are not even remotely close to this. To suggest they are is down-right silly.
Nukes are the only weapons of mass destruction because they’re the only weapons that convert mass into energy, thereby destroying it. QED.
On a more serious note, I agree with those dissing chemical weapons. They’ve been little more than an annoyance in military terms because countermeasures are too effective.
It depends. If your sole criteria is the number of immediate deaths caused, then no, chemical weapons don’t qualify. But to completely discount the number of shortened lifespans caused by exposure to said weapons, as well as completely discount the potential for physical damage, is also ludicrous.
It’s not hard to find figures on this, and you’re off by about an order of magnitude.
25 megaton weapons are the largest nuclear weapon that the US has ever detonated and they were weaponized in the B41 series of bombs. The last one was retired in 1976.
Most of the American nuclear arsenal consists of sub-megaton weapons (500 kilotons for instance) that are MIRVd. It turns out that blowing up 3-4 500 kiloton bombs does more damage than a single 10 megatonner.
I think some sort of engineered bioweapon like Captain Trips would have to count as a WMD. I don’t know how advanced the Soviet and American bioweapons programs were, but something like a super-flu could certainly do more damage than a nuke.
Really, the WMD thing should depend on the weapon itself. A bit of anthrax in a letter isn’t a WMD, but a 747 stuffed full of some effective anthrax delivery system could be. If someone developed a super-effective chemical weapon that basically made huge swaths of land uninhabitable, that would be a WMD, but it woudn’t retroactively make every chlorine-gas artillery shell into a WMD.
Having spent many hours under the blazing sun of a humid North Carolina summer working in full BC gear (no rad protection, but respirators/full body containment/etc.), I know exactly what you’re saying. However, from a military perspective, it’s still just an annoyance. A modern fighting force can reduce casualties from chemical weapons to near zero, whereas conventional explosives will still do damage.
Those are also strategic warhead yields, not tactical.
It’s also really amusing when people link to those sites and ascribe the effects of a multiple megaton airburst as the results of a terrorist nuclear event. While such an event will be Really Really Bad, what would most likely be at most a 10-20kt groundburst isn’t remotely as severe.
Anyway just to add to the geekery: the largest weapon in active service is the B61 bomb, which has a yield of 1.2 megatons.
The HUGE bombs really just aren’t that effective. As yield goes up you hit a point where you inreasingly just send more and more radiant energy into space; you don’t get a proportionately larger blast.
But Linoleum is right. The most likely scenario for a terrorist nuke is something akin to Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Which isn’t to say that’s not horrific, just that the idea that they’ll obliterate a city off the map is ludicrous.
Anyway, the point really is that nukes obviously have the potential to cause massive casualties relative to the effort involved in deploying them - tens of thousands if not more.
The same is true of a biological agent.
It’s just not true of chemical weapons. They don’t kill lots of people. Their effects are horrific sure but they’re just not that bad at the end of the day.
You mean under the guise of a test. However, what was tested vs what was built are completely different things.
The reasons the tests stopped was because the developed the computer hardware capable of running realistic simulated tests. This way we could have the double standard of publicly condemning nuclear tests while we ran our simulated tests in secret.
How about this: would you consider the secondary effects of nuclear weapons (radiation burns, high chance of cancer, etc.) to be equal to the effects of chemical weapons?
