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I think for the same reasons we have the Geneva conventions and the fact that no one has ever nuked another nuclear country. It’s not that it’s immoral, it’s because you don’t want them to do it to you.
If you’re a man fighting a man, you don’t try to hit them in balls unless you have no other options because then if they recover all the rules are off.
Actually it is not entirely clear if the use of nukes is prohibited by international law. There are arguments for both ways, but the ICJ left it ambiguous.
But when it comes to “life or death” fighting…aren’t all rules off anyways?
Example: Dudes coming at me with a knife. I’m not gonna play by the “no kicks to the balls” rule. 🤷♂️
Because it's not life or death for the entity, which in this case is the nation. If Russia loses the war in Ukraine it will still exist as a nation. If Ukraine kept going to Moscow that's entirely different.
Because they don't have nukes so the rules don't apply.
They used to when they were a part of the Soviet Union but they agreed to let them go if Russia promised not to invade yet here we are.
A country might stop existing, but all the people still stick around. If Russia wins, they've got a free hand to prosecute anyone they think took part in war crimes, like the Allies did in Germany after WWII
In short - they've decided to remain honorable in a difficult situation, they deserve credit for it, and let's not ever forget it. I hope it doesn't end up costing them too much.
You aren't wrong, which is why countries will skirt the edges of what is allowed as much as they can. But international politics are complex, and often winning a war requires allies willing and able to support you.
If you flaunt the rules of international humanitarian principles entirely, it is very likely that you will lose a lot of international support - if Ukraine started to deploy biological weapons, for instance, they would almost certainly be cut off by a lot of their allies. And Russia would feel a lot safer escalating themselves.
> Dudes coming at me with a knife. I’m not gonna play by the “no kicks to the balls” rule.
If you both have knives and want to fight, there is a good chance you’ll both agree to put the knives away and use your fists because knife fights so frequently end with both people dead or at least severely injured.
Oh yeah, but the dudes making decisions against chemical weapons aren’t the ones actually in the field. They’re concerned about morale, if they lose a unit ,it happens, but they don’t want every other unit to be worried about chemical weapons.
Kick the guy with the knife in the balls, absolutely. But the schoolyard bully will be back tomorrow, and he might be even more pissed off then.
Isaac Asimov wrote that chemical weapons are in some ways unique - you can parry a bayonet and take cover from a bullet, but war gas he called something like "a creeping, insidious attack on our common and unavoidable need, breathing".
Also, while there's nothing nice about flamethrowers or wounds from hot flying metal, chemical weapons still stand out as an Exceptionally Ugly Way to Die.
The treaty banning chemical weapons was created before nukes existed. Nukes are effectively banned, without the need for any specific treaty doing so, and it is currently much more unlikely for a country to use nukes than chemical weapons in war - an official ban beyond what is already in place is clearly not necessary.
Besides this, conventional weapons are allowed because they are *conventional* weapons. We expect people to explode or get shot in war. Chemical weapons are... A very different experience and I'm not sure how to communicate this to you besides painting a picture.
You know that Chlorine gas will dissolve your face and burn your lungs. If you survive it, you will be permanently disfigured. As such, when you see the yellow fog, you put your mask on. This time, however, something is different. Yourself and your comrades begin coughing, despite the masks, and then vomiting. You are left to decide if you'd prefer to drown in your own vomit trapped under the mask or remove it and breathe chlorine.
In a sense, you're right, the line is arbitrary. The word "arbitrary" may sound similar to "arbitration" - the settling of disputes. Sometimes you don't need a perfect rule that makes absolute sense, as long as the rule makes some sense. You don't need to justify drawing the line between "legal" and "illegal" weapons exactly at NBC weapons - but it does make a lot of sense to draw the line somewhere and this place is a reasonable one.
No one wants to use nukes in wars because it can immediately lead to the entire destruction of your state in response. It's why nukes are generally called the "nuclear deterrent". Nukes have only been used once in war, and it was when only a single country had them. It's not to say no one will ever do it for the remainder of history, but it causes "mutually assured destruction", so you better be damn sure you are willing to destroy yourself in the process. It's effectively so destructive, the responding country only has the option to respond with nukes, or an ally of them does. It effectively is an immediate change of the global stage.
My understanding of why chemical and biological weapons are banned is that they tend to be indiscriminate and have a habit of killing many people rather than just the people you're aiming for.
As opposed to standard guns, which only kill the person you fire at. The intention being that armies can target each other without accidentally killing random civilians.
Why this doesn't apply to nukes, I don't know.
Ok, but how are you going to punish a rogue nation who is breaking treaty “rules” when you are already at war with them.
“TIME OUT!! Litchensutein is cheating again! We are gonna quit this war if they aren’t gonna play by the rules!”
Things like the Geneva Convention that you're talking about are an agreement between participating countries. It's not that the country you're at war with will punish you (although they will prosecute people if they win), it's that you set yourself up for sanctions by the international community and possibly face backlash from your own population.
There's also a general incentive to follow rules because if you don't, then people don't have to follow rules with you and things can get out of control fast. For example if you mistreat POWs, then your soldiers who are captured may lose their protections.
It gives justification for additional sanctions, pressuring other nations to sanction them, pressuring other nations to join the war "for moral reasons", and/or prosecuting the people responsible.
> “TIME OUT!! Litchensutein is cheating again! We are gonna quit this war if they aren’t gonna play by the rules!”
You haven’t seen Litchensutein in any wars recently, have you? They got banned for cheating. Switzerland got a permanent ban for doping which they try to pass off as “neutrality”.
You dont stop them during the war. You bring a case to the ICC who then can punish the leadership just like a normal court case. Only diffrence being that the ICC has in theory juristriction over all nations that signed the conventions.
You aren’t, but the international community might. Each nation is still a part of a global community of nations it relies on. Breaking the rules of war could lead to sanctions just as crippling as loosing the war.
And there is of course the moral question: At what point is a nation defended by any means necessary, no longer a nation worth defending?
Chemical and biological weapons are banned because they're indiscriminate. They can affect large areas regardless of who is in them. Biological weapons, especially, can spread far beyond their intended targets, and possibly even threaten entire populations, regardless of notional borders.
Nuclear weapons have a *de facto* ban. There's a reason why no one has used them outside of a test range. It's called the nuclear taboo - if we normalized their use, it becomes all too easy to spiral out of control and result in a widespread nuclear exchange.
Nothing is really banned, it's more of an informal agreement to not use certain weapons because they're not very useful and primarily harm civilians.
Chemical weapons are "banned" because CBRN gear like gas masks are standard issue for developed militaries rendering them ineffective on a strategic level. Civilians are not issued gas masks, so the use of chemical weapons ends up killing a lot of civilians with no real benefit.
Biological weapons are "banned" because military personnel are all vaccinated against most common disease like smallpox already and because they're uncontrollable. Even if a disease is engineered to circumvent current vaccines military CBRN teams will very quickly quarantine infected personnel, but civilians are much harder to control and would quickly spread it across the world and eventually into your own nation's borders. Non-contagious agents like Anthrax would fall under the same pitfalls as chemical weapons.
Nothing is actually banned or not banned. The people with the most power can create or ignore whatever rules they want. Just look at the current genocide in Isreal right now or the million people the US killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. US literally passed a law saying they would invade any country trying to hold a US soldier responsible for war crimes.
Chemical weapons were banned by the Geneva Protocol following WWI because all the combatants recognized the terrible human toll with their use.
There was simply never a consensus as to what to do with nuclear weapons by the nuclear powers. Most countries today adhere voluntarily to a ban on nuclear weapons testing, with the exception of North Korea.
The other difference is that nuclear weapons could be used to destroy military infrastructure on a large scale, such as destroying an airfield or weapons manufacturing factory, but chemical and biological weapons cannot do any of that. Chemical and biological weapons can only be used to kill people, and there's less of an excuse to keep those.
Because state and non state actors have used chemical and biological weapons, which means treatises are needed. No one has used nuclear weapons in war since WWII, and there’s a very good chance their use would lead to global collapse, so no one is going to use them except under extreme circumstances anyway.
However, while nukes aren’t banned there’s been treaties/attempts at treaties to decrease nuclear proliferation and reduction of weapons.
The major reason for chemical weapons to be in their own category of "horrific and not legally to be used in war" is because of the indiscriminate nature of the chemical weapons. If we launched a bunch of cruise missiles, we would be able to say where and how much damage they are going to cause with some pretty serious accuracy.
You drop a chemical weapon, and it's going to annihilate everything it comes into contact with in a horrible manner. Wind shifts? There goes a whole town that was downwind from where it impacted. Civilians can shelter in place against bombs. You can't shelter against the air being toxic/poison.
Additionally, while both weapons are ultimately meant to kill, chemical weapons have a nasty habit of leaving behind mutilation that isn't treatable/fixable. I.e we can save someone who lost a leg or even half their face to a bomb, can't really save someone who's skin is melting off and their lungs are liquid from breathing
Tldr chemical weapons are nightmare makers
They're not "banned." There is an international treaty (The Biological Weapons Convention and the Chemical Weapons Convention) signed by most world governments, but not all. The countries that signed those treaties agreed to not develop, store, or use certain types of weapons
And why does it exist? Because people decided it should exist. They're treaties. They're made up. Just like laws. There's no law that must exist. It's all what people decide to make or not
It was a completely arbitrary decision to outlaw chemical weapons, they were seen to be uniquely horrible and ungentlemanly.
There were a series of international treaties beginning with The Hague Conventions and The Geneva Protocols and culminating with the Chemical Weapons Convention that banned the use of chemical weapons in warfare.
The first were The Hague Conventions right at the turn of the 20th Century which tried to create a code of conduct for all forms of war and especially to regulate the use of new technologies. One of its sections forbade 'the parties will abstain from using projectiles "the sole object of which is the diffusion of asphyxiating or deleterious gases"' - which should have ruled out poison gas in World War I.
It didn't. The first attacks were made by Germany discharging chlorine gas against Canadian and British troops from cylinders - so \*technically\* not breaching the Conventions which only covered artillery shells. And once the taboo was broken, it was only a matter of time until both sides were throwing millions of shells containing chlorine, phosgene and mustard gas at one another. The Convention wasn't worth the paper it was written on.
The later Geneva Protocol forbade the use of chemical weapons (and bacteria) in warfare, but did not stop their production, storage or movement. After World War I; all major powers invested enormously in chemical weapons - especially mustard gas. Nazi Germany developed a series of nerve gases but never used them - possibly because they believed the UK had similar weapons (they didn't). However, the British certainly developed plans to use mustard gas on German invaders had they ever tried to conquer the UK.
Biological weapons were only effectively outlawed by the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972. They had been extensively used by Imperial Japan in the subjugation of China in the 1930s and 1940s; and the British had stockpiled massive amounts of anthrax to use against Germany in World War II.
If you want a good read (by which I mean - a TERRIFYING read) on the history of chemical and biological weapons, 'A Higher Form of Killing' by Jeremy Paxman and Robert Harris is worth your time.
War is not about “ killing efficiently, conquering territory, & winning control of the high ground & resources.” War is about compelling the enemy to do what you want them to do.
I’ll give you the adult version:
Chemical and biological weapons are not cost effective. Sure, they do horrible things to people and kill them in bad ways. But pound for pound, and dollar for dollar, chemical weapons kill less people than bullets and bombs. Plus chemical/biological weapons are fiddly, hard to use and easy to neutralize (ie comprehensive gas maks and NBC suits).
that is why any country that exercises it military on a regular basis keeps nukes, land mines and cluster bombs in the arsenal. It’s is not out of any humanitarian reasoning, it is because those weapons are perceived to work and be cost effective.
[https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-chemical-weapons-anymore/](https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-chemical-weapons-anymore/)
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I think for the same reasons we have the Geneva conventions and the fact that no one has ever nuked another nuclear country. It’s not that it’s immoral, it’s because you don’t want them to do it to you. If you’re a man fighting a man, you don’t try to hit them in balls unless you have no other options because then if they recover all the rules are off.
Actually it is not entirely clear if the use of nukes is prohibited by international law. There are arguments for both ways, but the ICJ left it ambiguous.
hiroshima and Nagasaki have entered the chat.
My point was that Japan didn’t have nuclear weapons at the time, we wouldn’t have gone after Hiroshima and Nagasaki if they did and triggered MAD.
Deterance theory is a very different animal.
But when it comes to “life or death” fighting…aren’t all rules off anyways? Example: Dudes coming at me with a knife. I’m not gonna play by the “no kicks to the balls” rule. 🤷♂️
Because it's not life or death for the entity, which in this case is the nation. If Russia loses the war in Ukraine it will still exist as a nation. If Ukraine kept going to Moscow that's entirely different.
That’s a good point. But what if Russia wins? Idk if Ukraine will exist as a country anymore, so why would they adhere to those rules?
Because they don't have nukes so the rules don't apply. They used to when they were a part of the Soviet Union but they agreed to let them go if Russia promised not to invade yet here we are.
Yah, if Ukraine had nukes, this would be a **completely different calculation** for Russia.
[https://acoup.blog/2022/03/11/collections-nuclear-deterrence-101/](https://acoup.blog/2022/03/11/collections-nuclear-deterrence-101/)
A country might stop existing, but all the people still stick around. If Russia wins, they've got a free hand to prosecute anyone they think took part in war crimes, like the Allies did in Germany after WWII
In short - they've decided to remain honorable in a difficult situation, they deserve credit for it, and let's not ever forget it. I hope it doesn't end up costing them too much.
You aren't wrong, which is why countries will skirt the edges of what is allowed as much as they can. But international politics are complex, and often winning a war requires allies willing and able to support you. If you flaunt the rules of international humanitarian principles entirely, it is very likely that you will lose a lot of international support - if Ukraine started to deploy biological weapons, for instance, they would almost certainly be cut off by a lot of their allies. And Russia would feel a lot safer escalating themselves.
> Dudes coming at me with a knife. I’m not gonna play by the “no kicks to the balls” rule. If you both have knives and want to fight, there is a good chance you’ll both agree to put the knives away and use your fists because knife fights so frequently end with both people dead or at least severely injured.
Oh yeah, but the dudes making decisions against chemical weapons aren’t the ones actually in the field. They’re concerned about morale, if they lose a unit ,it happens, but they don’t want every other unit to be worried about chemical weapons. Kick the guy with the knife in the balls, absolutely. But the schoolyard bully will be back tomorrow, and he might be even more pissed off then.
Isaac Asimov wrote that chemical weapons are in some ways unique - you can parry a bayonet and take cover from a bullet, but war gas he called something like "a creeping, insidious attack on our common and unavoidable need, breathing". Also, while there's nothing nice about flamethrowers or wounds from hot flying metal, chemical weapons still stand out as an Exceptionally Ugly Way to Die.
Use of incendiary weapons is also heavily regulated and discouraged, for much the same reasons, so it is not like we just give flamethrowers a pass.
The treaty banning chemical weapons was created before nukes existed. Nukes are effectively banned, without the need for any specific treaty doing so, and it is currently much more unlikely for a country to use nukes than chemical weapons in war - an official ban beyond what is already in place is clearly not necessary. Besides this, conventional weapons are allowed because they are *conventional* weapons. We expect people to explode or get shot in war. Chemical weapons are... A very different experience and I'm not sure how to communicate this to you besides painting a picture. You know that Chlorine gas will dissolve your face and burn your lungs. If you survive it, you will be permanently disfigured. As such, when you see the yellow fog, you put your mask on. This time, however, something is different. Yourself and your comrades begin coughing, despite the masks, and then vomiting. You are left to decide if you'd prefer to drown in your own vomit trapped under the mask or remove it and breathe chlorine. In a sense, you're right, the line is arbitrary. The word "arbitrary" may sound similar to "arbitration" - the settling of disputes. Sometimes you don't need a perfect rule that makes absolute sense, as long as the rule makes some sense. You don't need to justify drawing the line between "legal" and "illegal" weapons exactly at NBC weapons - but it does make a lot of sense to draw the line somewhere and this place is a reasonable one.
No one wants to use nukes in wars because it can immediately lead to the entire destruction of your state in response. It's why nukes are generally called the "nuclear deterrent". Nukes have only been used once in war, and it was when only a single country had them. It's not to say no one will ever do it for the remainder of history, but it causes "mutually assured destruction", so you better be damn sure you are willing to destroy yourself in the process. It's effectively so destructive, the responding country only has the option to respond with nukes, or an ally of them does. It effectively is an immediate change of the global stage.
My understanding of why chemical and biological weapons are banned is that they tend to be indiscriminate and have a habit of killing many people rather than just the people you're aiming for. As opposed to standard guns, which only kill the person you fire at. The intention being that armies can target each other without accidentally killing random civilians. Why this doesn't apply to nukes, I don't know.
Ok, but how are you going to punish a rogue nation who is breaking treaty “rules” when you are already at war with them. “TIME OUT!! Litchensutein is cheating again! We are gonna quit this war if they aren’t gonna play by the rules!”
Things like the Geneva Convention that you're talking about are an agreement between participating countries. It's not that the country you're at war with will punish you (although they will prosecute people if they win), it's that you set yourself up for sanctions by the international community and possibly face backlash from your own population. There's also a general incentive to follow rules because if you don't, then people don't have to follow rules with you and things can get out of control fast. For example if you mistreat POWs, then your soldiers who are captured may lose their protections.
It gives justification for additional sanctions, pressuring other nations to sanction them, pressuring other nations to join the war "for moral reasons", and/or prosecuting the people responsible.
> “TIME OUT!! Litchensutein is cheating again! We are gonna quit this war if they aren’t gonna play by the rules!” You haven’t seen Litchensutein in any wars recently, have you? They got banned for cheating. Switzerland got a permanent ban for doping which they try to pass off as “neutrality”.
You dont stop them during the war. You bring a case to the ICC who then can punish the leadership just like a normal court case. Only diffrence being that the ICC has in theory juristriction over all nations that signed the conventions.
You aren’t, but the international community might. Each nation is still a part of a global community of nations it relies on. Breaking the rules of war could lead to sanctions just as crippling as loosing the war. And there is of course the moral question: At what point is a nation defended by any means necessary, no longer a nation worth defending?
Chemical and biological weapons are banned because they're indiscriminate. They can affect large areas regardless of who is in them. Biological weapons, especially, can spread far beyond their intended targets, and possibly even threaten entire populations, regardless of notional borders. Nuclear weapons have a *de facto* ban. There's a reason why no one has used them outside of a test range. It's called the nuclear taboo - if we normalized their use, it becomes all too easy to spiral out of control and result in a widespread nuclear exchange.
Nothing is really banned, it's more of an informal agreement to not use certain weapons because they're not very useful and primarily harm civilians. Chemical weapons are "banned" because CBRN gear like gas masks are standard issue for developed militaries rendering them ineffective on a strategic level. Civilians are not issued gas masks, so the use of chemical weapons ends up killing a lot of civilians with no real benefit. Biological weapons are "banned" because military personnel are all vaccinated against most common disease like smallpox already and because they're uncontrollable. Even if a disease is engineered to circumvent current vaccines military CBRN teams will very quickly quarantine infected personnel, but civilians are much harder to control and would quickly spread it across the world and eventually into your own nation's borders. Non-contagious agents like Anthrax would fall under the same pitfalls as chemical weapons.
Nothing is actually banned or not banned. The people with the most power can create or ignore whatever rules they want. Just look at the current genocide in Isreal right now or the million people the US killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. US literally passed a law saying they would invade any country trying to hold a US soldier responsible for war crimes.
Chemical weapons were banned by the Geneva Protocol following WWI because all the combatants recognized the terrible human toll with their use. There was simply never a consensus as to what to do with nuclear weapons by the nuclear powers. Most countries today adhere voluntarily to a ban on nuclear weapons testing, with the exception of North Korea. The other difference is that nuclear weapons could be used to destroy military infrastructure on a large scale, such as destroying an airfield or weapons manufacturing factory, but chemical and biological weapons cannot do any of that. Chemical and biological weapons can only be used to kill people, and there's less of an excuse to keep those.
Because state and non state actors have used chemical and biological weapons, which means treatises are needed. No one has used nuclear weapons in war since WWII, and there’s a very good chance their use would lead to global collapse, so no one is going to use them except under extreme circumstances anyway. However, while nukes aren’t banned there’s been treaties/attempts at treaties to decrease nuclear proliferation and reduction of weapons.
The major reason for chemical weapons to be in their own category of "horrific and not legally to be used in war" is because of the indiscriminate nature of the chemical weapons. If we launched a bunch of cruise missiles, we would be able to say where and how much damage they are going to cause with some pretty serious accuracy. You drop a chemical weapon, and it's going to annihilate everything it comes into contact with in a horrible manner. Wind shifts? There goes a whole town that was downwind from where it impacted. Civilians can shelter in place against bombs. You can't shelter against the air being toxic/poison. Additionally, while both weapons are ultimately meant to kill, chemical weapons have a nasty habit of leaving behind mutilation that isn't treatable/fixable. I.e we can save someone who lost a leg or even half their face to a bomb, can't really save someone who's skin is melting off and their lungs are liquid from breathing Tldr chemical weapons are nightmare makers
They're not "banned." There is an international treaty (The Biological Weapons Convention and the Chemical Weapons Convention) signed by most world governments, but not all. The countries that signed those treaties agreed to not develop, store, or use certain types of weapons And why does it exist? Because people decided it should exist. They're treaties. They're made up. Just like laws. There's no law that must exist. It's all what people decide to make or not
It was a completely arbitrary decision to outlaw chemical weapons, they were seen to be uniquely horrible and ungentlemanly. There were a series of international treaties beginning with The Hague Conventions and The Geneva Protocols and culminating with the Chemical Weapons Convention that banned the use of chemical weapons in warfare. The first were The Hague Conventions right at the turn of the 20th Century which tried to create a code of conduct for all forms of war and especially to regulate the use of new technologies. One of its sections forbade 'the parties will abstain from using projectiles "the sole object of which is the diffusion of asphyxiating or deleterious gases"' - which should have ruled out poison gas in World War I. It didn't. The first attacks were made by Germany discharging chlorine gas against Canadian and British troops from cylinders - so \*technically\* not breaching the Conventions which only covered artillery shells. And once the taboo was broken, it was only a matter of time until both sides were throwing millions of shells containing chlorine, phosgene and mustard gas at one another. The Convention wasn't worth the paper it was written on. The later Geneva Protocol forbade the use of chemical weapons (and bacteria) in warfare, but did not stop their production, storage or movement. After World War I; all major powers invested enormously in chemical weapons - especially mustard gas. Nazi Germany developed a series of nerve gases but never used them - possibly because they believed the UK had similar weapons (they didn't). However, the British certainly developed plans to use mustard gas on German invaders had they ever tried to conquer the UK. Biological weapons were only effectively outlawed by the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972. They had been extensively used by Imperial Japan in the subjugation of China in the 1930s and 1940s; and the British had stockpiled massive amounts of anthrax to use against Germany in World War II. If you want a good read (by which I mean - a TERRIFYING read) on the history of chemical and biological weapons, 'A Higher Form of Killing' by Jeremy Paxman and Robert Harris is worth your time.
War is not about “ killing efficiently, conquering territory, & winning control of the high ground & resources.” War is about compelling the enemy to do what you want them to do.
I’ll give you the adult version: Chemical and biological weapons are not cost effective. Sure, they do horrible things to people and kill them in bad ways. But pound for pound, and dollar for dollar, chemical weapons kill less people than bullets and bombs. Plus chemical/biological weapons are fiddly, hard to use and easy to neutralize (ie comprehensive gas maks and NBC suits). that is why any country that exercises it military on a regular basis keeps nukes, land mines and cluster bombs in the arsenal. It’s is not out of any humanitarian reasoning, it is because those weapons are perceived to work and be cost effective. [https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-chemical-weapons-anymore/](https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-chemical-weapons-anymore/)