The Neuroscience of War

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http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/08/the-neuroscience-of-war/279242/


Understanding chemical weapons as the U.S. talks red lines and convenient morality




That's an update from Sarah Palin's Facebook page yesterday. One could find it confusing, as she is quoting herself. The answers to Palin's questions, respectively, seem to be no and yes. I won't touch the invocation of Allah.

In the discussion of the significance of chemical warfare and the importance of the U.S. red line, Atlantic National Correspondent James Fallows remains unconvinced that military intervention in Syria is advisable. As do most Americans. Fallows noted today, "The United States has not acted previously as if chemical-weapons use was an end-of-history, line-drawing occasion," referring to the 1988 use of nerve gas on civilians by Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war. As he put it, "Nerve gas was hideous then. Chemical weapons are hideous now."

President Obama called on the U.S. Congress today to authorize a strike against the Assad regime. While as a nation we wait for that, let's talk about hideousness—what John Kerry yesterday called "moral obscenity." The United Nations estimates that more than 100,000 people have died in the Syrian civil war. Chemical attacks have been estimated to involve something on the order of 355 to 1400 of those deaths. As Dominic Tierney wrote for The Atlantic in December 2012, "Blowing your people up with high explosives is allowable, as is shooting them, or torturing them. But woe betide the Syrian regime if it even thinks about using chemical weapons! A woman and her child under fire in Aleppo might miss this distinction."

In May I wrote about the physiology of nerve gas, which I'll excerpt in the following paragraphs (like Palin, quoting myself), because it's worth being on the same page about what nerve agents are, as context for why many consider it defensible to land a bullet in someone's spine or to force-feed detainees, but not to gas. There are a few compounds that are lumped together as "nerve agents," "nerve gas," or "chemical weapons," like sarin, soman, and taubun. Based on the symptoms reported in Syria, the leading suspect is sarin. All are banned by a 189-country international convention.