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Patroklos
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Back home in good ole Norfolk VA
Dec 2001
time: 05:36
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It is useless for those of you trying to reframe the meaning of WMD as people much smarter than you and much more important (yes, by inference you are not) have long ago applied the label of WMD to specific weapons which has become the defacto nomenclature virtually world wide.
So go somewhere else and argue why checkers can't use red squares. It is just as useless and won't bog down everyone else’s discourse. Unless of course you would like to abandon the childish misnomers and focus on the points that might be valid hidden underneath your childish rhetoric.
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The difference between conventional and unconventional weapons stems primarily from the physical operation of the weapons, or rather their venue of dealing death. The WWII nukes were such a departure in technology and scale (especially with a marked lack in intermediate scale weapons) that it was and still is indeed, unconventional. The term was used before nukes (Great War gas), but was not popular until after.
It is not too hard to grasp. For hundreds of years the force of destruction for weapons was based in fire and metal, or a combination of the two. The operation of a gas that kills the lining of your lungs, or splitting an atom to unleash atomic force (which is not explosive, though the later effects are) were significant departures. Explosiveness is a chemical reaction to release force in the form of kinetic and heat energy. Chemical (no energy) and nuclear weapons (no chemicals), and especially biological do neither and are thus unconventional. This isn't the first time such a drastic distinction between weapons has been made. Read a few histories about the introduction of gunpowder on warfare.
As for the classification of WMD, that is not so hard to grasp. Chemical weapons upon their first design we made specifically to be used in large areas, no smaller than square miles. Even today the best purely chemical explosive conventional weapons can be destructive in no more than a 1-mile radius and that’s pushing it. Despite how much some of you worship "daisy cutters" they can't hold a candle to a WMD used as designed. Back then the most destructive weapon was a giant trench mortar, and that was effective for a few hundred yards and only locally against hardened targets. Enter a chemical weapons attack that is released from two miles of trench line to envelope 6 square miles of front (such scale was necessary due to the weapons very design, need for winds and saturation levels) it was death on a scale no artillery shell could master.
Enter nukes, in a time where the most destructive weapon was a 1000lb bomb, we unleash a few kilotons. Care to argue over that distinction?
Them comes bioweapons. You may laugh it off now because the backyard grown anthrax is a nuisance, relative. But ask a post WWI factory worker about Influenza, or an Indian about Smallpox. Terrorist biological weapons are THE LEAST EFFECTIVE FORM of the threat. God forbid a powerful state ever decides to use their high-grade bugs. And then there is delivery. Want to guess what the scale of infection a state like the US or Russia could inflict on a population vice Habib so-and-so?
Delivery. Terrorists can deliver nukes quite effectively. Not very hard. But chemical and biological weapons are different animals. Suffice to say powder-laden envelopes are not the designed way to unleash such a weapon. They are designed to be used a certain way, and that way is scale. Chemical weapons doctrine calls for release of thousands or gallons over hundreds of square miles, delivered specifically through various mediums (water, crops, etc.). Biological weapons also call for the same in its own way.
Because Al-aba-nobody used one artillery shell in the way not intended does not make it any less a WMD than if an Iraq artillery battalion saturated a few square miles with several thousand rounds. It is not the knife's fault if a dumb ass stabs someone with the hilt, it is still a knife.
And you can't let the intermediate examples muddle the true potential of the weapons. As the strength of "conventional weapons" has increased (ie cluster bombs, napalm, etc.) the strength of "unconventional weapons" has indeed grown by leaps and bounds. I would hazard to guess the relative destruction from a WWII thousand pounder and napalm compared to that of Fat boy and a Russian "Satan" is not proportional. If anything the distinction of bio/chem/nuke weapons as a distinct and separate category is more prevalent than ever. And of course the closest comparisons of the two categories are again not due to breakthroughs in conventional weapons, but rather the dumbing down of WMD. We had to work backwards from Fat boy to make smaller nukes for tactical use, we worked backwards from mustard gas to CX, and we worked backwards from cholera/typhoid/small pox to a whole host of minor incapacitating but non-lethal bugs.
And yes Iraq obviously had illegal long range missiles, as one crashed into a Kuwaiti shopping mall during the first days of the war.
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20-05-2004 17:33
It's too bad they didn't drop Fat Man and Little Boy with the intention of killing musquitos - they could've avoided an atrocity. 
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