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 stockpileābringing us one step closer to a world free from the horrors of chemical weapons.Ā Successive administrations have determined that theseā¦
Why do I feel like some has gotten lost over the years and weāre just gonna āfindā 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?
Donāt get me wrong, Iām super happy if we did get rid of them, Iām just skeptical.
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 doesnāt 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. Itās really more of a guerillaās/terroristās class of weapon because itās good for area denial and wreaking havoc on soft targets.
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.
We had (literal) tons of chemical weapons during WW2 and never resorted to them.
Truth be told, chemical weapons are generally actually pretty shit. Theyāre hard to control (which creates potential for both civilian AND friendly casualties), they donāt 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, thereās no need to store the info on how to make them because itās quite literally public knowledge for the most useful and widely used/stored chemical weapons.
We got rid of the āfinished and assembledā chemical weapons. The precursors are all ready to be mixed.
Why would we need a long time to store info on how to make them?
US did not use chemical weapons since WW I. Why would we start using them in future wars?