ARE CHEMICAL WEAPONS REALLY UNIQUELY BAD?

Syria is thought to have at least 1,000 tons of chemical munitions.  They loom large in the debate over whether to launch air strikes against the regime of dictator Bashar Assad.

Larger than they ought to.  Chemical munitions — along with nuclear bombs and biological agents — are classified as "weapons of mass destruction."  This is deceptive. 

To lump poison gas with nukes and bugs is like comparing a high school football team to the Pittsburgh Steelers or the Green Bay Packers.  They don’t really belong in the same league.

The Germans, in the second battle of Ypres in 1915, were the first to use lethal chemical weapons.  They were used extensively by both sides for the remainder of World War I, but hardly ever since.

The sparse use of chemical munitions in the many wars since November 1918 has less to do with humanitarian restraint on the part of the combatants — or fear of retaliation in kind — than it does with the fact that chemical weapons aren’t very effective.  Here’s why:

*You need an awful lot poison gas to cause mass casualties. The Germans used 168 tons of chlorine gas at Ypres.

*Chemical weapons are very difficult to control.  You can’t use them unless the winds are right.  If the winds shift, they can blow back on your own troops.  The Germans couldn’t fully exploit the panic their use of chlorine gas caused among the French colonial troops they gassed at Ypres because their troops wouldn’t advance through the gas cloud.  The battle ended in a bloody draw.

*Troops can be protected against chemical weapons in ways they can’t be from conventional explosives.  If you have gas masks and protective clothing, poison gas is reduced from a mortal threat to something more like an annoyance. That’s why in nearly all of the handful of instances in which chemical weapons have been used since World War I, they’ve been used to terrorize civilians.

Al Qaida has been trying to obtain chemical weapons for years.  Some who support U.S. intervention in the Syrian civil war do so primarily because they fear Bashar Assad’s enormous stockpile of chemical munitions could fall into terrorist hands.

There is evidence the rebels in Syria — who are mostly Sunni Muslim Islamists affiliated with al Qaida — have been using chemical weapons too.  Some think it was they who made the attack in the suburbs of Damascus Aug. 21 which has prompted Barack Hussein Obama to propose military intervention.

I’m kind of relieved al Qaida is putting so much effort into obtaining chemical weapons, because that could mean they’re devoting less effort to getting their hands on stuff that could really hurt us.

Chemical weapons have not been very effective on the battlefield, chiefly because so much is needed to produce mass casualties, I noted above.  This is what makes poison gas an especially poor weapon for terrorists.

The only documented use of a chemical weapon by a terrorist group was when five members of the Japanese religious cult Aum Shinrikyo attacked five trains in the Tokyo subway system during the morning rush hour on March 20, 1995. 

Each terrorist carried about two liters (half a gallon) of liquid sarin in plastic bags, which they punctured before exiting the train.  A drop of sarin the size of a pinhead can kill a person.  The closed environment of the subway cars packed with people was ideal for producing mass casualties.  Aum Shinrikyo expected to kill many more than 13 people.  An additional 6,000 were injured, but only about 50 of these injuries were serious.

The sarin gas used in the attack in Damascus was delivered by rockets and sprayed from helicopters, rebel forces say.  Experts at MIT estimated each rocket contained about 50 liters (13 gallons) of sarin. That’s way more than what Omar from al Qaida can fit into his backpack.  Many rockets would be required to cause the 1,400 fatalities rebels claim.  Poison gas is an effective terror weapon only when it is wielded by a totalitarian government against its own people.

The Obama administration is circulating a gruesome video showing people writhing on the floor and foaming at the mouth after the sarin gas attack to bolster its argument the uniquely horrible nature of chemical weapons is reason enough to justify U.S. military strikes.

Nerve gasses kill quickly.  Why is it so much worse to be gassed than to be shot, blown up, or beheaded? 

The administration has yet to offer an answer.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.