Well, some of them are. Nuclear weapons are Very Destructive Indeed. Even a tiny one, detonated in the middle of a major city, would probably kill hundreds of thousands. A medium-sized nuke could kill millions. The biggest would wipe a small country off the map in one go.Chemical and biological weapons, on the other hand, while hardly nice, are just not on the same scale.
Sure, there are nightmare scenarios - a genetically engineered supervirus that kills a billion people - but they're hypothetical. If someone does design such a virus, then we can worry. As it is, biological weapons have never proven very useful. The 2001 US anthrax letters killed 5 people. Jared Loughner killed 6 with a gun he bought from a chain store.
Chemical weapons are little better. They were used heavily in WW1 and the Iran-Iraq War against military targets and killed many but never achieved a decisive victory, and the vast majority of deaths in these wars were caused by plain old bullets and bombs. Iraq's use of chemical weapons against Kurds in Halabja killed perhaps 5,000 - but this was a full-scale assault by an advanced air force, lasting several hours, on a defenceless population.
When a state-of-the-art nerve agent was used in the Tokyo subway attack, after much preparation by the cult responsible, who had professional chemists and advanced labs, 13 people died. In London on the 7th July 2005, terrorists killed 52 people with explosives made from haircare products.
Nuclear weapons aside, the best way to cause mass destruction is just to make an explosion, the bigger the better; yet conventional explosives, no matter how big, are not "WMDs", while chemical and biological weapons are.
So it seems to me that the term and the concept of "WMDs" is fundamentally unhelpful. It lumps together the apocalyptically powerful with the much less destructive. If you have to discuss everything except guns and explosives in one category, terms like "Unconventional weapons" are better as they avoid the misleading implication that all of these weapons are very, and equivalently, deadly; but grouping them together at all is risky.
That's WMDs. But there are plenty of other unhelpful concepts out there, some of which I've discussed previously. Take the concept of "major depressive disorder", for example. At least as the term is currently used, it lumps together extremely serious cases requiring hospitalization with mild "symptoms" which 40% of people experience by age 32.
8 comments:
Weapons of Mass Deception!
But seriously all generalisations have limited usefulness.
Even a tiny one, detonated in the middle of a major city, would probably kill hundreds of thousands. A medium-sized nuke could kill millions. The biggest would wipe a small country off the map in one go.
That's not entirely true. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings killed tens of thousands, but that was in part because of a lack of medical facilities and anti-fire action.
Nukes actually don't increase with effectiveness the bigger they are - i.e., a 50 Megaton Nuclear weapon is not 1000 times more devastating than a 50 kiloton nuclear weapon. In fact, it's actually better to have a bunch of smaller nuclear weapons detonated in a certain pattern to cause maximum damage (so to destroy NYC, you'd want 20 devices in the 50-150 kiloton range deployed very carefully).
Wise Bass: That's all true but I think what I said is accurate.
A bomb the size of the Hiroshima one - tiny by today's standards - would do much more damage than it did in Hiroshima simply because people are packed more densely today.
The bomb destroyed all buildings within a 1 mile radius and the rubble became a firestorm. Though I read somewhere that the casualities would have been similar even if there'd been no explosion, purely through radiation... not sure about that.
Either way if that happened in central London or even worse New York during working hours it would kill hundreds of thousands because that's the population density.
Outside working hours though it would be a lot less.
For example before 9/11, on a normal working day, the WTC alone contained 50,000 people according to Wikipedia (but only about 15,000 when 9/11 happened because it was early morning and also a local election day.)
Modern buildings might stand up better than the ones in Hiroshima but on the other hand they're taller so more vulnerable to being blown down. I would guess. Plus, even if the building's still standing, that's not much use for the people in it when it's on fire.
As for destruction not scaling with bomb yield, that's certainly true & lots of small bombs are better but the 50 Megaton Tsar Bomba still destroyed buildings 50 km away, and could have caused 3rd degree burns 100 km away. Plus, had the Russians not specifically damped it, to prevent fallout, it would have been 100 MT and more importantly the radiation would have been horrendous.
WMD is a threat when a nation-state invests in nuclear technology. It isn't the ballistic missiles themselves like nuclear warheads for instance, but the technology to launch it. That's why airbases are pivotal. Places like Egypt, Iraq and Afghanistan are peppered with strategic US airbases to launch offensives if need be and assert geopolitical stability in the region, also its proximity to Israel. WMD may've been a strategy to amass popular support to combat terrorism, but the underlying agenda is to retain US hegemony by geopolitically positioning themselves in a strategic way. Because of the current configuration pertaining to the doctrine of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction), if a country did manage to launch a nuclear offensive, it'll be fast counteracted.
As a result what we have are small wars. Instead of exhausting nations into full-blown carnage or the complete annihilation of the human species, there are two types of wars at the moment. One is terrorism: militia warfare strategically targeting economic strongholds sponsored by countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran, America. The other is economically raping a poor country using strategies like 'economic shock therapy' through "natural" disasters, IMF, protests, NGOs, aid, elections, when powerful countries compete inside a poor country. Some call this neoimperialism: they might distribute light arms, engage in weapons embargo, oust a popularly elected public official, assassinations, civil war, genocide.
I'm of the impression a new silent war has emerged. That is biowarfare or bioterrorism. The worst of them all. Worse than a nuclear war because there's no political model to keep the checks and balances. In places like China, cancers have skyrocketed, flus, disorders, these patterns can't be conventionally mapped out like the other wars. Ebola testing in places like Kenya, horrendous medical experiments in Israel, it's so easy to cover up the evidence. Someone, anyone could spill TB in a water system, they could easily add alternative substituents in meds, up the nitrogen in the air for depression. Private firms could be killing us through foods, meds, bypassing FDA regulations and we wouldn't even know. The sad thing is the people who know how to use a gun to fight these wars are scientists. It's their creations that are being used as a weapon or an antidote. Somewhere here I'd say a pattern is emerging and hopefully a framework for stability will emerge in the future.
up the nitrogen in the air for depression
veri! Off your meds again?
Under U.S. federal law, a conventional bomb or grenade of any size is also deemed to be a "weapon of mass destruction". See:
TITLE 18 > PART I > CHAPTER 113B > § 2332a. Use of weapons of mass destruction. (c)(2)(A) "...any destructive device as defined in section 921 of this title..."
TITLE 18 > PART I > CHAPTER 44 > § 921. Definitions. (a)(4)(A),(i) and (ii).
Link 1:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/uscode18/usc_sec_18_00002332---a000-.html
Link 2:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode18/usc_sec_18_00000921----000-.html
Ah so that would explain why this guy, who seems to have been attempting to make entirely conventional bombs, has been accused of trying to use a "WMD".
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