The shockwave from a MOAB would kill people underground very effectively. Likely bury anyone who might survive alive as well.
Now whether it would do it more effectively than a penetrator or a thermobaric weapon, that would probably depend on the target. It was a perfectly viable choice for the target, but probably not an ideal choice.
I started writing up a reply, and then got struck with this incredible sense of deja vu. Turns out that over a decade ago (!) there was a thread about this, and I weighed in with the following:
Looking back a decade later, I think my youthful confidence that Aum was the height of terrorist sophistication may have been overly optimistic. A chemical weapon is of greater concern than a conventional bomb. But there are a lot more bombs out there than there are chemical weapons, and the conventional bombs are easier to use.
There’s something really weird about the notion that a chemical bomb is a “weapon of mass destruction” but the MOAB is just a “conventional” explosive.
True enough. It’s not the weapon itself so much as the context, though. Using nerve gas, which is really only effective against unprotected civilians, and when you already have plenty of conventional weapons, is a deliberate act aimed at, well, terror. It’s pure terrorism. Bombs have killed far, far more people than all the chemical weapons every employed, for sure. But there’s a qualitative difference I think between waging war, however defined, with conventional weapons, or even lobbing bombs and shells at civilians as happens all the time in Syria and elsewhere, and using chemical weapons that 1) carry with them a sense of dread and fear that conventional weapons don’t have, and 2) are only really useful to kill the unprotected and unprepared.
So, yes, I agree it’s disingenuous to give a pass to dropping regular bombs and then castigate some faction for the use of chemical weapons–to a point. I still think that CBW stuff is in a separate category for a variety of reasons, mostly having to do with the psychology and intent of the actions involved.
But in the end, sure, dropping barrel bombs on neighborhoods isn’t any better, not at all.
The French findings, which are based on environmental samples collected in Khan Sheikhoun and blood samples taken from a victim on the day of the attack, bolster claims by the United States, Britain, Turkey, and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons that sarin had been used at Khan Sheikhoun.
But the French account goes further, claiming that the strain of sarin used in the attack on Khan Sheikhoun was identical to sarin samples collected in a previous Syrian government attack on the town of Saraqib on April 29, 2013. Following that attack, France obtained an intact, unexploded grenade containing 100 milliliters of sarin.
The chemical explosive, which was dropped by a helicopter, “was used with certainty by the Syrian regime during the Saraqib attack,” according to the French paper, which was made public in Paris on Wednesday by French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault.
An examination of the grenade showed traces of the chemical hexamine, a key signature of the Syrian chemical weapons program. The Syrian Scientific Studies and Research Center, the regime’s chemical weapons incubator, developed a process to add hexamine to the two key ingredients of sarin, isopropanol and methylphosphonyl difluoride, to stabilize it and improve its effectiveness, according to the French account.
“The sarin present in the munitions used on 4 April was produced using the same manufacturing process as that used during the sarin attack perpetrated by the Syrian regime in Saraqib,” according to the French paper. “Moreover the presence of hexamine indicates that this manufacturing process is that developed by the Scientific Studies and Research Centre for the Syrian Regime.”
Basically the Russians bomb say a hospital or other civilian “target”. Then when rescue workers come out to save people, they bomb the rescue workers.
We should be best friends.
Wasn’t that literally something the bad guys did in The Hunger Games trilogy? Crazy.
Well, in the hunger games, the “good guys” did this but then blamed it on the “bad guys”, which is what ultimately convinced Katniss to say fuck them all and kill the leaders of both groups.
Sorry, I just happened to watch them :-P
Great, I always love getting movie spoilers in the P&R threads…
Our Secretary of Commerce, Wilbur Ross said the recent US strike on Syria was in lieu of “after dinner entertainment,” which didn’t cost Trump a thing. I’m um, well, speechless I suppose. Though I guess I shouldn’t be at this point.
Yep. I both read the books and watched the movies, so I totally remember whose plan it was, how it went down, and how it resulted in Priss’ death. I was simplifying, and trying to avoid spoilers. Sorry, @sillhouette.
The Syrian government has constructed and is using a crematorium inside its notorious Sednaya military prison outside Damascus to clandestinely dispose of thousands of prisoners it continues to execute inside the facility, according to the State Department.
At least 50 prisoners a day are executed in the prison, some in mass hangings, said Stuart Jones, the acting assistant secretary of state for the Middle East. A recent Amnesty International report called Sednaya a “human slaughterhouse” and said that thousands of Syrians have been abducted, detained and “exterminated” there.
The government of President Bashar al-Assad, Jones said, has carried out these atrocities and others “seemingly with the unconditional support from Russia and Iran,” his main backers.
Here’s Stuart Jones’s presentation
https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4669726/stuart-jones-syria-may-15th-2017
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-05-26/putin-burns-his-dead-to-hide-ukraine-aggression
Hence the extreme measures to get rid of the evidence. “The Russians are trying to hide their casualties by taking mobile crematoriums with them,” House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry told me. “They are trying to hide not only from the world but from the Russian people their involvement.”
Thornberry said he had seen evidence of the crematoriums from both U.S. and Ukrainian sources. He said he could not disclose details of classified information, but insisted that he believed the reports. “What we have heard from the Ukrainians, they are largely supported by U.S. intelligence and others,” he said.
Representative Seth Moulton, a former Marine Corps officer and a Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, was with Thornberry on the Ukraine trip in late March. He tweeted about the mobile crematoriums at the time, but didn’t reveal his sources. He told me this week the information didn’t come just from Ukrainian officials, whose record of providing war intelligence to U.S. lawmakers isn’t stellar.
“We heard this from a variety of sources over there, enough that I was confident in the veracity of the information,” Moulton said, also being careful not to disclose classified U.S. intelligence.
This SOB Trump is going to get lots of people killed.
He also going provoke a diplomatic crisis and severely hurt our intelligence services, because he can’t help bragging.
The Republicans on the intelligence committee better scream loud and long over this.
No offense, because I completely agree, but… LOL.
EDIT: That reads as ruder than I meant it. I just have no hope left that any significant number of GOP elected officials will stand up to Trump under any circumstances.
But her emails!
Go Republicans!! No one knew how utterly horrible it would be to elect this guy.