Hand gun vs Chemical WeaponFollow

Bullsh*t. A smart bomb is a thousand times more lilkely to eliminate only its target when compared to say, releasing a cloud of sarin gas into the open air. Even a lowly machine gun is dramatically less indiscriminate than an artillary shell laced with mustard gas or an airborne agent orange delivery. Any argument to the contrary is born of self-delusion.

A smart bomb is a thousand times more likely to kill an innocent bystander than injecting the target with a nerve toxin. Delivery systems aren't payloads. See the logical fallacy with your argument yet?

Also, don't take this wrong way, but it's hard for me to imagine that anyone values your opinion on this much relative to mine. Now if we were discussing pork rinds or something where you had any education or experience not acquired in the last hour, then maybe. Actually, probably not then either. Forget I brought it up.

One of these requires a close encounter with the target, putting the delivery agent in substantially more danger and is also impractical in too many scenarios to be worthy of serious discussion. I'll let you figure out which.


Yes, that's the point, fuckstick. Now see if you can extrapolate the painfully obvious point you picked up to the comparison of a $20 artillery shell and a $17,000 precision guided munition you made earlier.

I won't hold my breath.

I dunno, having seen a brief VX test footage segment, I think I'll take the bomb robot. That sh*t did not look pleasent.

Neither is being shot. Or stabbed. "visually unappealing to observers" shouldn't be high on the list of how to make decisions about how to kill people.

I don't know. It's kind of hard to take someone seriously when they haven't mastered the relatively simple mechanic of the quote.

Someone just changed the argument mid-stream. I'll let you figure out who.

I didn't change the argument at all. He presented an extremely isolated example of chemical weapon use that contradicted the claim that such weapons are massively indicscriminate when compared with conventional options, and I pointed out the general impracticality of that example. The only counterpoint that followed was "@#%^stick".

No, shitbird, your argument was trivially logically refuted. Thus endeth the lesson. If you want to continue to Gbaji your way through rationalizing an incoherent "ahh chemicals are scary!!" position, be my guest. I'm done with it. Enjoy as many revisions, "clarifications" last word posts, etc as you like.

A traditional explosive doesn't discriminate any better than a canister of gas. You ignored that bit of information. Injection by ricin isn't anymore isolated than gassing by sarin - both are rare, both require some deal of chemistry to pull off.

Getting blowed up by an IED could be just as common as getting blowed up by a sniper bullet.

However you decided to compare the sniper bullet to the canister of sarin.

And if he had a stockpile of daisy cutters that he'd threatened his people with the international community could sleep better at night?








Edited, Dec 7th 2012 7:11pm by Elinda

That was a very long play, Alma.

I get the whole "either way, you're still dead" argument, but even still, those 30 seconds until your foot hits that bucket are really important to you. I mean, If I have to go, sexed to death by a supermodel is probably going to be prefferable to "extreme, excrutiating agony of the worst sort imaginable whilst your organs and eyes liquify into a gelatenous soup" regardless of what any onlookers may think. Though if one is trying to make a point along the lines of "attack us and die horribly or if you don't die, you'll wish you were dead" in a military strategic sense, I suspect one would find that forces under your command would be more willing to face increased firepower than nerve gas. Regardless of the relative cost of delivery method or actual effectiveness, there is definitly a psychological component to chemical warfare that can't be ignored.

While I agree in principle to Smash's earlier point that delivery systems are not payloads, I think that point doesn't really address the issue here. As was also stated earlier in the thread, people (and nations) gravitate to chemical weapons because they are cheap. But their cheapness is mostly because they grant the ability to kill a large number of people when you don't have the means for accurate delivery. The result being that if someone is building chemical weapons to get around the fact that they don't have a large and well trained military, or special forces teams, or pin point accuracy munitions and the air superiority required to use them, or even particularly accurate rockets or artillery, it's a pretty good bet that the use of those chemical weapons will be broad and incredibly indiscriminate.


Lets not kid ourselves here. The reason to focus on chemical weapons is precisely because one knows they can't accurately hit their targets with conventional weapons. I could fire a hundred rockets with explosive payloads at a target and hope I score a hit, or I could fire one identically inaccurate rocket and as long as I hit near the target (and upwind), I'm going to kill it. Of course, I'll also kill everything else in the area as well, not just the unlucky folks who might get hit by a random rocket blast. That's the problem with chemical weapons. The very use case for the weapons virtually ensures that they'll only be used in situations where a large amount of collateral damage is going to occur (and often is the very point of the attack).

Edited, Dec 7th 2012 3:04pm by gbaji

Um...? That's a very "interesting" definition of accurate.

I love this thread so much.