Weapons of Mass Distraction

What do people have against chemical weapons anyway? They are bad. They kill. They can cause a great deal of pain and suffering. How is this different from all the good weapons we have and use with impunity?

As an enlightened and civilised species we have banded together and told ourselves and each other that we shall no longer use chemical agents to kill each other. There was even a UN resolution against it. We all know how sacrosanct those resolutions are. Since we are not Godless animals, we should only kill each other with weapons of limited destruction and things that explode.

I do not favour chemical weapons. I think they are as bad as everybody who does not use them says. My concern is how much we legitimise more conventional weapons whenever we try to preach against those weapons of war we despise.

Sarin is horrible and does nothing good to the human body. The same can be said for bullets. They generally only kill one person at a time, unless you get in a very lucky shot, but they kill all the same. Death by bullet can be quick, but it can just as easily cause a very slow and painful death. A tiny bullet can take away parts of your body that you may have wanted to use later.

Bullets are also very unpredictable. A single shot can kill you, simply cause an irritating scratch, or do anything in between. Where you are hit often matters less than how you are hit. John Kennedy died quickly from a bullet to the head. James Brady is still alive 32 years later.

Bullets are perfectly acceptable because they are small and generally only kill one person at a time. Something like sarin can kill hundreds at a time. But how much sarin is there in the world compared to the number of bullets? I have never held any sarin in my hands, but I have handled more than a few bullets. I have some bullets in my house. My future husband has even more. Neither of us keep any sarin in the wardrobe. Not everybody has bullets in their home, but I can safely guarantee that there are more bullets in your community than there are chemical weapons.

We as a species also feel safe with much larger projectiles that can kill far more people at any given time. Rockets, missiles, grenades, bombs and all manner of explosive devices are considered perfectly acceptable ways to kill each other. Is being blown up better than being poisoned? I’ve yet to do either but I would prefer another option. There are many types of missiles that can kill far more people than any sarin attack. Is being set on fire from an explosion better than being gassed?

Some will say that guided missile systems are better precisely because they are guided. Chemicals tend to go wherever they want to go. A missile can be targeted to hit a very specific location. This is all nice in theory, but we have seen time and again how often these surgical strikes kill innocent civilians. It happens so often that somebody even came up with a cute little euphemism for all the children accidentally blown up; collateral damage. Which sounds more benign and abstract, “more dead children than anticipated” or “collateral damage”?

Then there are nuclear weapons. In what universe is a nuclear warhead less destructive than any chemical agent? How can the US, Russia, China, UK, India, Pakistan, France, North Korea, Iran very soon, Saudi Arabia soon, Israel maybe or maybe not, ever complain about anybody using chemical weapons when they are all or soon will be capable of launching the most destructive attack the world has ever seen. Even a French nuclear warhead of today is one thousand times more destructive than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. What happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki is small by today’s nuclear standards yet each of those cities suffered more casualties than the world’s largest chemical attack. More people died in each city than in all of the chemical attacks of World War I combined.

The next nuclear warhead to hit a city will probably kill millions of people. In such an attack, nobody is collateral damage.