Another fact lost in the fog: chem and bio agents are NOT WMDs.

[karlschneider]

They can be very nasty but are not effective against large populations, are hard to make/store/weaponize, have short shelf lives and are as dangerous to the deployers as to their targets. The only true WMDs are nuclear.

[TXlib]

1. Not true

I agree that chemical weapons are not terribly effective against large populations.

I assume you mean that they are not strategic (i.e. -- used against population/industrial base), but rather tactical (i.e. -- used on the battlefield against troops) weapons.

Even there, you are not really correct. Chemical weapons lack the destructiveness to be strategic in nature, but biological weapons can be devastatingly effective against populations. Think, for example, of the use of smallpox-infected blankets given by the British to the Native Americans.

Some biological weapons, in fact, are far more devastating than nuclear (when considering a handful of nukes versus a handful of biological ground-zeros). You are correct in that bioweapons are potentially as dangerous to the deployers as to the target. However, it is cheaper and easier to develop a devastating bioweapons program than a nuclear program.

I am more worried about the release of biological weapons than I am about nuclear.

The classification of them as WMD is ultimately a legal definition.

[bryant69]

3. Plus

you 100% have to consider the psychological damage--what would happen, for example, if you had credible proof that a biological weapon had been used in in midtown manhattan--you might lose 1,000 people to disease and another couple thousand to panic.

This is why the term Terror Weapon is very descriptive.

Bryant
Check it out --> http://politicalcomment.blogspot.com

[rman]

4. agents is not weapons

no wmd unless you have a delivery system, with some range i'd say.

[TXlib]

8. See post #5

Although your point is well-taken WRT Iraq. They didn't have a reliable delivery system.

[Dudley_DUright]

2. I would agree

except for a biological weapon like smallpox (or worse some nasty genetically engineered bug) that would be communicable. That would truly be a weapon of mass destruction. Anthrax on the other hand, while nasty stuff, is not a weapon of mass destruction in the league of a nuke.

[TXlib]

5. The Soviets had

(and probably still have) strains of antibiotic-resistant anthrax, and ICBM-based delivery systems that could easily cause hundreds of thousands to millions of deaths in a single attack alone.

I'd call that mass destruction, even if not communicable.

[damnraddem]

9. But tons of anthrax can be a WMD ...

much more so than an equivalent weight of explosive.

[northzax]

6. you are right, technically

they are weapons of mass death, not neccesarily destruction. but I think that's splitting hairs, honestly.

[damnraddem]

7. It's historical:

after WWI, chemical weapons were looked on with horror -- while those that had blasted millions apart were not.

Biological weapons could potentially escape control and destroy masses of the world's population. They may be engineered for control by the party using them; but nature can evolve around what we engineer in.

The issue isn't why chem and bio weapons are called WMDs, it's why so many other weapons are not -- e.g.: cluster bombs, daisy cutters and MOABs, massive bombing raids, incendiary devices, and so on.

[southernfried]

10. I believe that this WMD distinction was given by the UN

I'm sure I saw it written up in the Blix report and they (the purported barrels of nasty juice) are referred to every time by Blix as WMD that are unaccounted for.

I think that the UN came up with this WMD term and defined it but I don't know where to look to prove that.