CBRNs are often referred to as weapons of mass destruction for a legitimate reason. They are less discriminate and far less predictable than most conventional weapons and they are better suited for strikes against civilian enclaves than against armies, which have but to change into the appropriate attire in order to render them useless.
But more importantly–and despite the fact that so many people love to point out that they “just don’t see the difference between death by asphyxiation and death by blast-force dismemberment,” which is as red a herring as there ever was and amounts in the end to the facile tautology that all lethal weapons are lethal–they delineate a path of escalation that moves swiftly and with unsettling ease in the direction of total war.
A combination of psychological and tactical factors play into this, but the more important point is that they lead to places that are best left to the imagination of dystopian fiction. Put simply, more CBRNs in more hands means a higher probability of catastrophic war and/or war that shaves chunks off the already laughably, vanishingly small amount of habitable land in the known universe. It’s easy to forget that every four years we choose a guy (or, perhaps someday, gal) who then chooses a single deputy to help him safe-keep a little briefcase that holds the potential end of life-on-Earth in its belly.
The more I’ve learned about people and their history over the course of my life, the less faith I’ve had in the old, “nah that just wouldn’t happen” safety blanket. I can see, vividly, some ragged band of deformed nomads sitting around a fire in the middle of a barren ashen wasteland, telling their kids about how relatively short the interim was between the day human civilization invented a way to utterly destroy itself and the day it decided to do it.
Which brings me to my opinion of this whole, messy Syria thing. “The strong do what they can and the weak do what they must.” Threaten force and suddenly, “yeah, we do in fact have chemical weapons. Good guess. And what’s more, we’ll give them to you.”
Say this whole thing goes through as we should all be hoping it does. We A] rid a grossly unstable ME country whose fate is highly uncertain and whose hills are increasingly swarming with Jihadists of weapons that could prove seriously useful to Hezbollah or to some sweaty fundamentalist dickhead in Grand Central Terminal someday and B] don’t waste a single Tomahawk or, more importantly, a single American life.
We are getting what we want. This is a good thing. “Putin looks so great right now.” Bullshit. He is the thuggish leader of a shithole with as much a claim to hard-power equivalency with the West as the Melians with Athens.
[Hopefully the US-Athenian analogy falls apart vis-a-vis ultimate outcomes.]
