[fintstone]

Originally Posted by tshore

My point is that it's misleading to lump chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons together as "WMD", implying that their lethality is of similar order. It is not. The concept of "WMD" is a flawed and misleading one. Nuclear weapons are WMD. The others are not - the possible exception being a smallpox weapon, which no one ever claimed Iraq had.

For example, there was a "WMD" attack in Japan in 1994, carried out by the cult Aum Shinrikyo using sarin gas in a subway. The attack killed 7 and injured 200. Bad, yes, but fewer people killed than in Columbine, and only 7 times as many as died in Ted Kennedy's car... Hardly the "mass destruction" implied by the term WMD.

Under "perfect storm" conditions, maybe a chemcial attack on a single city using many dozens of warheads could kill thousands, but then, under "ideal" conditions, so could attacks with warheads of conventional design. Or passnger airplanes.

There really is only one weapon of mass destruction: nuclear weapons. The widespread use of the term WMD, including weapons not remotely of the same destructive power, is done largely for propaganda purposes to justify actions the administration wants.

When the Bush administration...or any other person who knows the definition of WMD...they refer to any or all of the three: chemical, biological, or nuclear. Your example in Japan is only due to scale...a few drops of chemical agent obnviously are not the equivalent to a nuclear detonation...but when employed on a large scale...just as deadly...and much simpler to make and use. The artillery scales discussed above are really some of the the simplest and least effective ways to dispense chem or bio weapons and were only used in the example becvause that those are the weapons that we found. Used appropriately, one could just as easily kill millions with chemical weapons...even worse with bioweapons. Chemical and biological weapons are the perfect weapon for the terrorist...