Why countries hate chemical warfare?

[kentuck]

In all honesty, they are not any more cruel or inhumane than blowing bodies to smithereens with bombs and missiles. However, they are more difficult to locate and to destroy. They are much easier to make and much easier to smuggle into other countries. In other words, they are impossible to control by the more powerful countries.

With our modern warfare technology, we are able to pinpoint weapons of our enemies and to destroy them. That is to our advantage. It is not to our advantage if another country has chemical weapons, such as poison gas. We simply cannot trust them not to use these chemical weapons anymore than they can trust us not to use "conventional" weapons, such as cruise missiles.

Basically, it is not as much about the horror of chemical weapons as much as it is about the military advantage. It is better to control something than to not control it. Chemical weapons minimize the advantage of heavily armed militaristic countries.

[Warpy]

1. They were banned after WWI

for two reasons: too many people survived them with horrific injuries and they were too subject to changes in the breeze and you just never knew where they would be blown.

However, they returned as the poor country's nuke, a deterrent to other expansionist countries.

The US has no legal or moral leg to stand on in this. We maintain a huge arsenal of the things.

Banning weapons just never works.

[sarisataka]

2. Same reason people hate nukes

they have too many uncontrollable side effects. As awful as a bomb is, the damage is only a limited area, Cold comfort to the people who live next door, but at least it doesn't kill/maim the whole neighborhood.

[loyalsister]

3. The lasting effects are pretty miserable

My dad has spent a large portion of his life acquiring one illness after another associated with the agent orange he came in contact with 40 + years ago. I know it wasn't a weapon designed to kill people. But, is non lethal contact with chemical weapons similar?

[sarisataka]

5. It depends on the chemical weapon

some are likely to have no ill effects, if you survive, others can be crippling for life. Others still, like Agent Orange, will not have huge obvious effects but clearly affect quality of life until you die.

CW is an extra-nasty facet of a nasty business.

[cthulu2016]

4. The WWI gases were high injury, low death, and were thus too

expensive. They burdened a side with the care of those affected... a weapon of economic attrition. Subsequent development of deadlier gases changes that formula somewhat, but back in WWI the gas interfered with any hope of a "proper" war.

(When Churchill advocated chemical warfare in WWII his hope was not killing all the Germans, but rather filling their hospitals to overflowing until they were too burdened wage war.

[PlanetaryOrbit]

6. I've wondered the same question.

Isn't an innocent civilian who is killed by an AK-47 just as dead as an innocent civilian who is killed by poison gas?