Why Don’t We Use Chemical Weapons Anymore?

This has created a few paradoxical situations. One of them is that their strategic value lies primarily not in their use (which will not achieve any result) but rather the threat of use, which may be sufficient to dissuade leaders from committing to a war (arguably, this happened during the Cuban Missile Crisis--both Kennedy and Khrushchev blanched at the prospect of starting a nuclear war). Another interesting side effect is that this means that the development of counter technologies produces staunch opposition: nuclear war has to be seen as unwinnable for its deterrent value to be effective.

Part of the motivation for nuclear weapons as a strategic (rather than deterrent) option comes from the lineage of people who see strategic bombing as an fast, cheap, easy way to win a war. For a century now, adherents have predicted that once you started bombing a few cities indiscriminately, you'd easily win a war. And people continue to argue this despite the rather thin evidence for this proposition, and mountains of evidence in opposition.

While that's true, the hollow point doesn't make a difference. Essentially all pistol ammo is bad at penetrating armor. What does make a (small) difference is velocity; you can see this by looking at ratings for NIJ level IIa and IIIa armor.

This is why pistol ammo that's designed to penetrate soft armor like 5.7mm is so small and light weight - it needs to be really fast. I'm sure the pointed shape helps a bit, but it's the speed that really does the job. That's also why it's garbage compared to normal ammo against unarmored targets.

During WWI a biplane or two was able to fly over Paris and drop a grenade. It caused quite a scandal with some Navy high ups condemning the concept of aerial bombardment altogether. By the end of the inter-war period there was a strong stigma against it. The concept of using bombs on civilian centers was pretty much unthinkable. Until of course the war began and it wasn't. Throughout the war taboos were approach and broken one after another.

When the U.S. joined the war, there was a major row between U.S. and British airforce commanders about using bombers at night. The U.S. thought it unethical, especially since they had invested in a supposedly superior bomb sight which was rendered essentially useless at night. The British, facing an existential threat were not so scrupulous. Of course the night raids soon began.

So by war's end there was virtually no size of bomb nor target that was much unacceptable even though the idea of aerial bombing of even soldiers had been distasteful at its start.

Give this, the only reason I could think that chemical weapons had not followed the same slippery slope was that they were far less useful.

I got an A- on the paper, my teacher said it was good but too fringey. I couldn't dig up the paper but I found the bibliography. If you're interested in the subject give some of these sources a try. I especially enjoyed the biography of Doolittle, "I Could Never Be So Lucky Again".

"The Bombing of Berlin in World War II." Wikipedia.org. Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia, 7 April 2012. Web. 10 April. 2012.

"The Bombing of Germany." American Experience. Writ. Zvi Dor-ner. Dir. Zvi Dor-ner. PBS, 2010. Streaming.

"Bombing of Tokyo." Wikipedia.org. Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia, 3 April 2012. Web. 6 April. 2012.

Carlin, Dan. ”Logical Insanity.” Harcore History. dancarlin.com, 31 March 2012. Podcast. 6 April 2012.

Cheek, Dennis W. "Hiroshima and Nagasaki." Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Ethics. Ed. Carl Mitcham. Vol. 2. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2005. 921-924. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 16 Apr. 2012.

Doolittle. Gen. James H. and Carroll V. Glines. I Could Never Be So Lucky Again. 1991. New York: Bantam Books, 2009. e-book.

"Firestorm." Wikipedia.org. Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia, 13 April 2012. Web. 14 April. 2012.

Hansen, Randall. Fire and Fury: The Allied Bombing of Germany 1942-1945. New York: New American Library, 2009. e-book.

Truman, Harry S. "Harry S. Truman, Diary, July 25, 1945." Atomic Bomb: Decision. n.d. Web. 10 Apr. 2012.

Images of the bombing and napalm in Vietnam generated an incredible backlash so the pentagon and their friends in the media conglomerates have been very circumspect.

This is not in any way to condone the use of gas, far from it. It is to condemn the actions of the US military and the strategic planners for using human rights as a cudgel when our own crimes are so stark.

Note that the US provided Saddam with chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq trench warfare of the 1980s. We later invaded Iraq to retrieve weapons we gave him.