Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!cbnews!military
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Newsgroups: sci.military
Subject: Re: Nerve Gas
Message-ID: <1990Aug31.030843.24342@cbnews.att.com>
Date: 31 Aug 90 03:08:43 GMT
Sender: military@cbnews.att.com (William B. Thacker)
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From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
>From: rwallace@vax1.tcd.ie
>> However, nerve agents are regarded (by those familiar with their effects)
>> as very humane weapons.  For a given degree of incapacitation, nerve agents
>> cause far fewer deaths than conventional weapons.  Among the wounded, a far
>> greater number make a complete recovery...
>As far as I know it's the other way round: the reason nerve gases and other
>chemical weapons are banned by international treaty is that while they cause
>fewer deaths than conventional weapons, if you get hit by nerve gas you don't
>completely recover...

Which weapons are banned by international treaty and which aren't is almost
totally capricious, based more on psychological issues than on considerations
of humaneness.  Napalm and white phosphorus, when used as antipersonnel
weapons, are really ugly to get hit with, and no attempt has ever been made
to ban them.  Actually, there is one discernible trend:  the weapons that
get banned are the ones that are generally agreed to be nearly useless,
or to add very little to an already-effective weapon which is not banned.

I think what we have here is a confusion of old and new chemical weapons.
*Historically*, in pre-nerve-gas days, it was indeed true that chemical
weapons very seldom killed or permanently injured soldiers.  (The tales
you see about people blinded by gas in WWI are basically propaganda; the
actual numbers say that there were only a handful of permanent blindings
due to gas, a drop in the bucket compared to the number of men blinded
by shell splinters and bullets.)  Almost all WWI gas casualties recovered
completely.

Whether this would also apply to nerve agents is much less clear.  There
has been little serious use of them in warfare, and little information
about the cases that have occurred.  Pesticide experience is not very
encouraging, however.

                                         Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
                                          henry@zoo.toronto.edu   utzoo!henry