generalspeaking

Imagining The Unthinkable

"We respond in a very emotional way, in a subjective way. They couldn't smell it, see it coming and 'wham', next thing you know they're in convulsions, frothing at the mouth and they're dead. It's terrible -- but no more terrible than all the other wars."
Charles Blair, Federation of American Scientists

"They have become weapons of terror. You put yourself in a position where you're in your neighbourhood and suddenly, without knowing anything, without smelling anything, seeing anything, people's eyes bug out, they start gasping for breath and hyper-ventilating, going into convulsions. You don't know what the hell's going on."
Michael Luhan, Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons

"When it came along towards us it turned green, a greeny-yellow colour. Two fellows, one on my right and one on my left dropped and eventually they got them to hospital but they both died", testified a Canadian infantryman of his experience with chlorine gas use by the German army during the First World War, outside the Belgian town of Ypres. British war poet Wilfred Owen describes a chlorine-gassed soldier, blood "gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs".

Chemical weapons were used by the Germans, the most famous being mustard gas that burns skin and lungs, inspiring the Allies to respond in kind. Japanese, Italian and Egyptian forces made use of Chemical agents from 1930 to 1960. And they made their appearance on the war field during the long and deadly Iran-Iraq war. And famously used in 1998 by Saddam Hussein to gas five thousand Kurdish civilians in Halabja, an atrocity for which he became understandably infamous.

Now, the Chemical Weapons Convention bans their use. Signed by most of the countries of the world in 1997 with the notable exception of Syria and six other countries. And the world retains a "hard-wired" disgust and fear of a weapon that can kill in minutes with the victim neither hearing, seeing, feeling or smelling what it is that will consume his life. Chemical agents represent "a particularly horrible way of killing people", Gavin Cameron, a political scientist and expert on such weapons declared.

"Turn the leaf over in the newspaper and you see a bomb blast in central Baghdad and it kills fifty people and injures dozens more. That is equally as abhorrent, but I think we've become used to that kind of thing... because we see so much of blasts and bombing and shell fire and bullets", says Stan Brown, a chemistry professor and chemical weapons expert at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, who disputes the purported horror of chemical agents over conventional means of death-delivery.

And how's this for a sardonically cynical expression of thought: "Powerful countries like the United States cultivate a taboo against using [weapons of mass destruction] party because they have a vast advantage in conventional arms", according to political scientist Dominic Tierney. On the other hand, there is a compelling reason to consider chemical warfare as abhorrent and impermissible; large volumes of sarin or other nerve agents dispersed in enclosed spaces have the potential to cause "massive" casualties.

And if they reach the hands of terrorists or other rogue states, who can predict what horrors could befall the world even beyond current imagination?

Labels: Chemical Weapons, Conflict, Intervention, Terrorists

posted by Pieface @ Monday, September 02, 2013