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Sometimes I think about aerial bombardment, and what that really meant during that period of conflict. When you think about the effort to concoct the compounds
by funAtParties 8y ago
Sometimes I think about aerial bombardment, and what that really meant during that period of conflict.
When you think about the effort to concoct the compounds for the air war, and drop them on cities, with no guidance like lasers or anything, and then you look at the sheer tonnage dropped, and how indiscriminate it really was, you wonder how aerial bombardment is at all distinguishable from chemical weapons.
It really is chemical warfare by another name. The only real difference being the explosive burning. Clean up was still a similar problem, since, as with shells, munitions would hit but not detonate. Couple this with such indiscriminate bombings that cities were engulfed in fire storms, and I think it's splitting hairs, for the most part.
- ElDji 8y agoYeah now we do really better using surgical strikes on afghan weddings. God bless america.
- mc32 8y agoIt’s all well and good to examine these things while we have tjr benefit of having vanquished an enemy or enemies. Twiddling about this and whether we should bomb Hitler or Hirohito would either result in more total deaths or our defeats, neither would have been better alternatives. It’s not as if we’d go to Hitler and Hitohito and say stop killing indiscriminately in your conqured areas and we’ll stop bombing you and while you're listening, be good and surrender to us.
- funAtParties 8y agoThere's another aspect to the sheer insanity of the period that probably would be worth exploring, if only it were possible. People were so mentally numbed and damaged by the carnage of the first world war, that the second world war was put on track by the leadership that had survived the carnage. But looking at engines like this, and knowing that they ran on leaded AvGas, and knowing that leaded mechanization was the norm, you wonder if the psychotic leadership was actually an expression of lead poisoning from environmental factors. Just like all those crime curves that trend according to leaded gasoline bans, what if front line WWI veterans were driven psychotic by frontline exposure to heavy metals through exhaust fumes?
- mc32 8y agoRommel, IIRC, was initilly just one of those kids carrying spades as pretend arms (ok exaggerating a bit). People like him were not near a front during the first war. Hirohito’s men were in some conquest wars, but not heavy wars. So I’m not sure this applies.
- ethelward 8y ago> Rommel, IIRC, was initilly just one of those kids carrying spades as pretend arms I beg your pardon? IIRC is a poor excuse when a ten seconds Wiki search proves you wrong. He was a frontline lieutenant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Rommel#World_War_I https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Rommel#World_War_I
- mc32 8y agoMy bad, you’re right, i was thinking the idle times spent in Dresden.
- willyt 8y agoQuite a large area of France is still so heavily contaminated from WW1 that there is still an exclusion zone in place. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_Rouge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_Rouge
- packet_nerd 8y agoIt's an arbitrary distinction a lot of the time, really. But you have to draw the line somewhere. I just wish we could draw the line at eliminating all war and violence, instead of playing semantic games. It's super bad if some bad guy destroys innocent lives with chemical weapons, but totally fine if we drone strike them. Doesn't make much sense, although in this crazy world things aren't as black and white as we'd like.
- merpnderp 8y agoWho says it is totally fine when we drone strike them? There are reviews and large numbers of staff who do their best to minimize drone striking of innocents. Chemical weapons on the other hand are designed to maximize striking innocents.
- mikeash 8y agoThe taboo against chemical warfare developed after a war that involved mass bombardment with both chemical weapons and explosives. I’m not qualified to discuss the reasons, but the people on the pointy end of the stick seem to have come away thinking that there’s a significant difference.
- funAtParties 8y agoI'll argue that the surviving people on the pointy end of the stick haven't thoroughly considered how pointy conventional aerial bombardment gets.
- mikeash 8y agoPeople who ended up on the pointy end of that stick in the next war still didn't make it taboo, even though they did with the weapon of mass destruction made famous by that war. I see the argument that it ultimately doesn't make much difference how a vast bunch of civilians end up indiscriminately dead, but the people who actually experienced it seem to think differently.
- funAtParties 8y agoThere's obviously a difference because people differentiate. Sorry, but I'm not buying it. In exactly the same way I don't differentiate between being maimed by a flamethrower, versus being maimed by battery acid. The presumptive idea of innate wisdom of the crowd doesn't sway me. Ask most people choose between burning their face off with a chemical or fire, and they'll likely choose fire, but getting your face burned off is categorically bad. Why distinguish.
- mikeash 8y agoI’m not saying they must be right. But they were there, they experienced it, and we did not. They may be wrong, but it would take a really strong argument to convince me of that. I’m going to start from the assumption that the people who experienced these weapons and came away with the belief that they should never be used again had some good reason for that.
- burfog 8y agoThe distinction seems to be based on the level of disability in the survivors. Dead people are not a burden after the war is over, but maimed people are, and a huge part of that is blindness. Old-style chemical weapons tended to blind people. Post-war civilian life doesn't work so well if a significant chunk of the population is blind.