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Comment by funAtParties | Hacker News Reader

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.

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The 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.

I'll argue that the surviving people on the pointy end of the stick haven't thoroughly considered how pointy conventional aerial bombardment gets.

People 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.

  There'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.

I’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.

What I really come away from the impression veterans and civilians of the time give of, is simply that it was unsporting, undignified, and unfair.

That, much more than it was punishingly cruel, in excess of death and dismemberment by other means.

They say, yeah, it's okay to zip a supersonic bullet through soft tissue such that it shreds with cavitation, and smash it through bone that splinters and explodes, so people lose whole limbs. And that's okay. It's like a deer hunt.

But hey, you don't hunt animals by mutilating their lings with bug spray. That's no fair. You wouldn't consume an elk carcass tainted with persistent organic pollutants. No fair. We can't even bury our dead.

But, you know what? You aren't going to bury your dead, when they're incinerated by high explosives.

And hey, what's fair about war at all? What's fair about several hundred planes unloading kilotons of conventional munitions, indiscriminately, to break an apparatus of geopolitics.

Gee, unfair, undignified, unsportsmanlike, in the pain, injury and slow death (leaving a contaminated corpse) department.

When you piece those explicit details together, the real problem is that it deals a degree of harm to the perception of gallantry, duty and honor of service. It's pretty much impossible to pat a chemical burn on the back, and say "there, there, thanks for defending the country" but, you can still pull that off, when sharing the room with an amputee that lost a limb to ballistics.

Exchanging chemical weapons for aerial bombardment exhibits "differences" but nothing that makes me say "wow, one is okay, and the other isn't."

Both are essentially equally bad, and neither is remotely good, or an improvement over the other.

People have their preferences, but in the same way that they rationalize the side effect of rampant smog and pollution as bad, but millions of fatal car accidents as normal, and a calculated risk.

The real choice being put on the table though, is: Would you choose between an air war that includes both regular explosions and chemical attacks, or just a regular air war only?

At that point, the choice becomes more rational. We say: "Hmmm, well, at least I can take some of the destruction out of the equation. I get to make one kind of misery go away. I can choose X = A as an alternative to X = (A + B + C). A never goes away, and nothing can be done about that, but at least I don't have to think about B and C anymore."

So, it's not about incediaries and high explosives being okay. Or aerial bombardment being different, and better. It's just that they can't be taken off the table, under any circumstances, no matter whatever else gets negotiated. I guess it's just a fundamental characteristic of destruction, that if destroying things is on the table, the basics of destruction get to keep their scalar qualities. You can limit the method of destruction but not the quantity.

The reason is not complex, it’s just rarely discussed. The first time Chlorine was used it killed a lot of soldiers, because nobody had a clue what was going on and no one was equipped or trained to deal with it. By the end of the same war, chemical weapons killed very very few soldiers, because they had training, and masks. What a chemical weapon does really well is kill civilians. In particular it kills the young and old who can’t get away, who are weakest. Chemical weapons can render an area uninhabitable, one thing they’re terrible at is killing soldiers. They have MOPP suits, and training, and vehicles with filters and overpressure seals, and autoinjectors with reversal agents.

So why are chemical weapons banned? Well the talking heads like to say “they don’t work, they’re just as likely to blow back on your own troops, they’re cruel.” Really though, they do work on non-combatants. Intentionally targeting non-combatants is what’s actually illegal and discouraged. Dropping bombs to destroy a city or AA batttery while knowing that you’ll massacre civilians is seen as tacitly kosher, but just gassing the populace to the exclusion of armed manpower and armaments is very much a taboo. At least, legally and officially, although countries find ways to skirt that with defoliants, pyrophorics, nuclear weapons, etc.

It'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.

Who 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.

The 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.

It’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.

There'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?

Rommel, 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.

> 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

My bad, you’re right, i was thinking the idle times spent in Dresden.

Quite 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

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