An article by a former bomb disposal officer about the classification of chemical weapons as WMD got me thinking. I don't actually know that much about chemical weapons and they generally do scare me, so I was glad of a bit of debunking by someone who knows what he's talking about.
I'm wondering what people think about the suggestion that chemical weapons shouldn't be classed as WMD. It's something that I was initially quite sceptical about, but the article was persuasive. The comments suggest that they should be classed as such because of their capacity to cause fear in the populace, and their capacity to linger beyond just a single explosion. Ultimately, though, if this article is accurate (and I've got to have that proviso) it seems to me that a fear of chemical weapons has outweighed their actual capacity for causing mass destruction, certainly in any proportion to nuclear weapons.
I'm still afraid of biological weapons, though.
Labels: chemical weapons, fear, wmd
