Weapons of piecemeal destruction?
When did nuclear, chemical and bacteriological armaments get classified together as ‘weapons of mass destruction’ – as distinguished perhaps from weapons of individual destruction? It is true that throughout the Cold War, the three things were lumped together under the convenient abbreviations of ABC or NBC, but that was because defence against them shared the same sort of training and the same hideously hot and uncomfortable protective suit. Considerable military advantage would accrue to the belligerent who acted as if he might possibly use ABC weapons, obliging his enemy to suffer the suits just in case.
Given the fact that poison gases have rarely been used in war, and never with much success, while modern biological weapons have (as far as we know!) never been used at all by warring states, it is by no means clear why these should be called ‘weapons of mass destruction’, as opposed, for example, to good old-fashioned high explosives and incendiaries. Which is what the term meant when it was coined, in the Spanish Civil War, back when Terror was something that governments did. In the Second World War the British and Americans each managed to kill around 100,000 civilians in a single day, by careful crafting of firestorms in big cities. Since no nuclear, chemical or biological weapons were involved, modern usage suggests that what happened to Dresden and Tokyo would no longer considered ‘mass destruction’. In the Kuwaiti war, moreover, far more people were buried alive under American earth-moving equipment than have been killed by the ‘mass destruction’ triad since 1945, but I doubt that we will be seeing UN inspections of concealed bulldozers any time soon.
What the ABC triad had in common with one another but not with ordinary high explosives was that they were in various ways reprobated by international law. The Americans could thus have said, with far more logico-linguistic coherence, that they were going to take Saddam’s ‘illegal weapons’ away from him. Why did they not say this? They may have felt that it would render them vulnerable to finger-pointing for their own insistence on deploying such things as cluster munitions, which are also illegal. They may have counted on the ‘creepiness factor’ of weapons that deal invisible death, rather than the visible kind, even though creepiness makes you no deader than otherwise. In this calculation they appear to have been correct. Moreover, most people appear to have forgotten Agent Orange and napalm, which are every bit as much ‘chemical’ weapons as sarin; and napalm or something like it has been in use for centuries. Graham Greene was undoubtedly right when, in ‘Our Man in Havana’, he had the spymaster enthuse that the devices drawn by the vacuum-cleaner salesman would make nuclear weapons look conventional; this was a good thing because ‘no one worries about conventional weapons’.
Likewise protected by popular scientific ignorance are depleted-uranium munitions; if these are considered a form of nuclear weapon, in that they spread radioactive contamination, then the USA has actually fought four nuclear wars in the last couple of decades. Depleted-uranium ordnance did not count as a ‘weapon of mass destruction’, however, either because people are still ignorant of what it does, or more probably because Saddam didn’t have any.
Strictly speaking, then, Hezbollah’s conventional-explosive rockets do not fall into the newly-created WMD category; the Americans need to portray these as a special kind of weapon qualitatively different from the weapons with which Israel kills Lebanese; watch this space. It is therefore probable that the term ‘weapons of mass destruction’ will be expanded to cover all arms deployed by anyone inimical to American interests, down to spears and rocks.
2 Responses to “Weapons of piecemeal destruction?”
Yes. In news reports the failed Times Square car bomb was referred to as a weapon of mass destruction. But then, one expects hysterical inaccuracy from mass media. However, among the charges in the indictment agaist Shahzad are ‘conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction’. A car bomb is a WMD?
Except when it’s American-backed groups who explode them, of course.
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