For more than 30 years, the United States has worked tirelessly to eliminate our chemical weapons stockpile. Today, I am proud to announce that the United States has safely destroyed the final munition in that stockpile—bringing us one step closer to a world free from the horrors of chemical weapons. Successive administrations have determined that these…
Why do I feel like some has gotten lost over the years and we’re just gonna “find” it if we ever get into another world war? Or we got rid of the weapons, but it was juuuust long enough to make sure we stored the info on how to make them?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m super happy if we did get rid of them, I’m just skeptical.
We absolutely still know how to make them and in fact still have small stockpiles of them.
What we have kept are far below international agreements and are used to test PPE for soldiers who may find themselves being attacked with these bio/chem threats.
Isn’t that a little bit charitable for the country that blackbagged and drugged criminal and non-criminal civilians with LSD, deliberately circulated drugs both inside and outside our own borders, taught animals with bombs strapped to them to seek out rival personnel and infrastructure, infiltrated and assassinated members of social justice movements, deliberately exported indiscriminate murder to countries that looked like they might be starting to think about not being the right kind of democratic, used guns to back corporations quashing striking workers, poisoned the earth in Vietnam with agent orange, and far, far more, all in violation of our own Democratic process, the trust of our people, or the nations we interact with?
We can’t move forward if we can’t get past the past. You have brought nothing to this conversation except being a troll. Nobody is saying that the USA is without fault.
Do you want things to improve or do you want to stay right?
You can’t have both.
Chemical weapons are pretty strategically bad for how the US engages in warfare. Chemical weapons are great for driving up civilian body count. The US doesn’t really do that as a strategic goal. On the battlefield they have a really high chance of killing and/or permanently disabling your own soldiers. It’s really more of a guerilla’s/terrorist’s class of weapon because it’s good for area denial and wreaking havoc on soft targets.
Uhhh, Agent Orange, White Phosphorous, Depleted Uranium. Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Iraq… The US absolutely engages in driving civilian casualties in a way that can only be described as strategic. The number of civilians they kill even with conventional weapons is so high. Agent Orange poisoned generations of people, reducing birth rates and increasing mortality for an entire country. And then after they figured that out, they still decided to develop and deploy DU rounds that leave radioactive waste pulverized over vast stretches of land that can effectively never be cleaned up. Almost like it’s a deliberate strategy…
Meanwhile, we never see terrorists use anything even close to what the US has done and continues to do.
that makes sense, what with the US being a country of over 300 million people
not that the use of chemical weapons in terrorist attacks is particularly unheard of
We had (literal) tons of chemical weapons during WW2 and never resorted to them.
Truth be told, chemical weapons are generally actually pretty shit. They’re hard to control (which creates potential for both civilian AND friendly casualties), they don’t kill or otherwise put enemies hors de combat particularly reliably, and if both sides end up using them, all that ends up with is a lot of infantry in NBC gear being miserable and not actually increasing the ability of offensives or defensives in any meaningful way.
Anyway, there’s no need to store the info on how to make them because it’s quite literally public knowledge for the most useful and widely used/stored chemical weapons.
US did not use chemical weapons since WW I. Why would we start using them in future wars?
What are you talking about?!
Agent Orange, White Phosphorous, crowd control conpounds (like tear gas, “pepper” munitions, etc). Napalm was used in Iraq and Kuwait.
What you’re talking about is the US not using a very specific list of very specific weapons that are effective due to their chemical properties and the way those chemicals interact with human bodies. It is by no means a comprehensive list of munitions with similar chemical properties.
And it is a classic imperialist move to make a list of some chemical weapons, call the list The List Of Chemical Weapons and they develop new chemical weapons that aren’t on the list and say “These aren’t chemical weapons because they aren’t on the list”.
