WMDs: doubt about their devastating magnitude
Elizabeth Jeenx
http://www.spiked-online.com/articles/0000000CA694.htm
by Brendan O'Neill -- 'Believe it or not, what we refer to as "weapons
of mass destruction" are actually not very destructive.'
David C Rapoport, professor of political science at University of
California, Los Angeles and editor of the Journal of Terrorism and
Political Violence, has examined what he calls 'easily available
evidence' relating to the historic use of chemical and biological
weapons.
He found something surprising - such weapons do not cause mass
destruction. Indeed, whether used by states, terror groups or
dispersed in industrial accidents, they tend to be far less
destructive than conventional weapons. 'If we stopped speculating
about things that might happen in the future and looked instead at
what has happened in the past, we'd see that our fears about WMD are
misplaced', he says.
Yet such fears remain widespread. Post-9/11, American and British
leaders have issued dire warnings about terrorists getting hold of WMD
and causing mass murder and mayhem. President George W Bush has spoken
of terrorists who, 'if they ever gained weapons of mass destruction',
would 'kill hundreds of thousands, without hesitation and without
mercy' (1).
The British government has spent £28million on stockpiling millions of
smallpox vaccines, even though there's no evidence that terrorists
have got access to smallpox, which was eradicated as a natural disease
in the 1970s and now exists only in two high-security labs in America
and Russia (2). In 2002, British nurses became the first in the world
to get training in how to deal with the victims of bioterrorism (3).
The UK Home Office's 22-page pamphlet on how to survive a terror
attack, published last month, included tips on what to do in the event
of a 'chemical, biological or radiological attack' ('Move away from
the immediate source of danger', it usefully advised). Spine-chilling
books such as Plague Wars: A True Story of Biological Warfare, The New
Face of Terrorism: Threats From Weapons of Mass Destruction and The
Survival Guide: What to Do in a Biological, Chemical or Nuclear
Emergency speculate over what kind of horrors WMD might wreak. TV
docudramas, meanwhile, explore how Britain might cope with a smallpox
assault and what would happen if London were 'dirty nuked' (4).
The term 'weapons of mass destruction' refers to three types of
weapons: nuclear, chemical and biological. A chemical weapon is any
weapon that uses a manufactured chemical, such as sarin, mustard gas
or hydrogen cyanide, to kill or injure. A biological weapon uses
bacteria or viruses, such as smallpox or anthrax, to cause destruction
- inducing sickness and disease as a means of undermining enemy forces
or inflicting civilian casualties. We find such weapons repulsive,
because of the horrible way in which the victims convulse and die -
but they appear to be less 'destructive' than conventional weapons.
'We know that nukes are massively destructive, there is a lot of
evidence for that', says Rapoport. But when it comes to chemical and
biological weapons, 'the evidence suggests that we should call them
"weapons of minimum destruction", not mass destruction', he says.
Chemical weapons have most commonly been used by states, in military
warfare. Rapoport explored various state uses of chemicals over the
past hundred years: both sides used them in the First World War; Italy
deployed chemicals against the Ethiopians in the 1930s; the Japanese
used chemicals against the Chinese in the 1930s and again in the
Second World War; Egypt and Libya used them in the Yemen and Chad in
the postwar period; most recently, Saddam Hussein's Iraq used chemical
weapons, first in the war against Iran (1980-1988) and then against
its own Kurdish population at the tail-end of the Iran-Iraq war.
In each instance, says Rapoport, chemical weapons were used more in
desperation than from a position of strength or a desire to cause mass
destruction. 'The evidence is that states rarely use them even when
they have them', he has written. 'Only when a military stalemate has
developed, which belligerents who have become desperate want to break,
are they used.' (5) As to whether such use of chemicals was effective,
Rapoport says that at best it blunted an offensive - but this very
rarely, if ever, translated into a decisive strategic shift in the
war, because the original stalemate continued after the chemical
weapons had been deployed.
He points to the example of Iraq. The Baathists used chemicals against
Iran when that nasty trench-fought war had reached yet another
stalemate. As Efraim Karsh argues in his paper 'The Iran-Iraq War: A
Military Analysis': 'Iraq employed [chemical weapons] only in vital
segments of the front and only when it saw no other way to check
Iranian offensives. Chemical weapons had a negligible impact on the
war, limited to tactical rather than strategic [effects].' (6)
According to Rapoport, this 'negligible' impact of chemical weapons on
the direction of a war is reflected in the disparity between the
numbers of casualties caused by chemicals and the numbers caused by
conventional weapons. It is estimated that the use of gas in the
Iran-Iraq war killed 5,000 - but the Iranian side suffered around
600,000 dead in total, meaning that gas killed less than one per cent.
The deadliest use of gas occurred in the First World War but, as
Rapoport points out, it still only accounted for five per cent of
casualties. Studying the amount of gas used by both sides from
1914-1918 relative to the number of fatalities gas caused, Rapoport
has written: 'It took a ton of gas in that war to achieve a single
enemy fatality. Wind and sun regularly dissipated the lethality of the
gases. Furthermore, those gassed were 10 to 12 times as likely to
recover than those casualties produced by traditional weapons.' (7)
Indeed, Rapoport discovered that some earlier documenters of the First
World War had a vastly different assessment of chemical weapons than
we have today - they considered the use of such weapons to be
preferable to bombs and guns, because chemicals caused fewer
fatalities. One wrote: 'Instead of being the most horrible form of
warfare, it is the most humane, because it disables far more than it
kills, ie, it has a low fatality ratio.' (8) 'Imagine that', says
Rapoport, 'WMD being referred to as more humane'. He says that the
contrast between such assessments and today's fears shows that
actually looking at the evidence has benefits, allowing 'you to see
things more rationally'.
According to Rapoport, even Saddam's use of gas against the Kurds of
Halabja in 1988 - the most recent use by a state of chemical weapons
and the most commonly cited as evidence of the dangers of 'rogue
states' getting their hands on WMD - does not show that unconventional
weapons are more destructive than conventional ones. Of course the
attack on Halabja was horrific, but he points out that the
circumstances surrounding the assault remain unclear.
'The estimates of how many were killed vary greatly', he tells me.
'Some say 400, others say 5,000, others say more than 5,000. The
fighter planes that attacked the civilians used conventional as well
as unconventional weapons; I have seen no study which explores how
many were killed by chemicals and how many were killed by firepower.
We all find these attacks repulsive, but the death toll may actually
have been greater if conventional bombs only were used. We know that
conventional weapons can be more destructive.'
Rapoport says that terrorist use of chemical and biological weapons is
similar to state use - in that it is rare and, in terms of causing
mass destruction, not very effective. He cites the work of journalist
and author John Parachini, who says that over the past 25 years only
four significant attempts by terrorists to use WMD have been recorded.
The most effective WMD-attack by a non-state group, from a military
perspective, was carried out by the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka in 1990.
They used chlorine gas against Sri Lankan soldiers guarding a fort,
injuring over 60 soldiers but killing none.
The Tamil Tigers' use of chemicals angered their support base, when
some of the chlorine drifted back into Tamil territory - confirming
Rapoport's view that one problem with using unpredictable and unwieldy
chemical and biological weapons over conventional weapons is that the
cost can be as great 'to the attacker as to the attacked'. The Tigers
have not used WMD since.
The most infamous use of WMD by terrorists was in March 1995, when 10
members of Aum Shinryko, the strange Japanese religious cult, released
sarin gas on the Tokyo Underground. The homemade gas was placed in
plastic bags wrapped in newspapers. The cult members started the
attack by puncturing the bags with umbrellas. Twelve people were
killed; over 1,000 were hospitalised, 40 of whom were seriously
injured.
The Tokyo gas attack is seen as the most audacious use of WMD by
terrorists to date; it is often namechecked as an example of what
might happen if al-Qaeda types were to use WMD on the London
Underground or on the New York Subway.
Yet, as Rapoport points out, while the Aum Shinryko attack certainly
had tragic consequences, it also showed up the limitations of WMD
attacks in terms of causing casualties or destruction. He says that
even though Aum Shinryko had 'extraordinary cover for a long time' -
meaning that the Japanese authorities were nervous about monitoring
the group on the grounds that it was a religious outfit - and despite
the fact that it had '20 members with graduate degrees in science,
significant laboratories and assets of over a billion dollars', it
still did not succeed in its aim of taking hundreds or thousands of
casualties, of causing mass destruction. For Rapoport this shows that
such weapons are far from easy to use, especially when the groups
using them must move around quickly, 'as all terrorists must do'.
According to Rapoport, the most striking thing about the Aum Shinryko
attack is that no one died from inhaling the sarin gas itself - in
every fatal case, the individual had made contact with the liquid. He
cites Parachini again, who says that the individuals killed by Aum
Shinryko are the only people to have lost their lives as a result of a
WMD attack by a terrorist group over the past 25 years. (There were
also five deaths as a result of anthrax attacks post-9/11, but
Parachini doesn't include those because the individual responsible and
the motivation for those attacks remain unknown.)
'When you think that fewer than 15 people have been killed by known
terrorist use of chemical and biological weapons, and contrast that to
the thousands who were killed on 9/11 and in conventional bombings in
Madrid or Bali or Istanbul, it's quite remarkable that we are so
obsessed with WMD', says Rapoport.
So why are we so obsessed with WMD? Why do we continue to fret over
weapons which, by all accounts, do not cause as much mass destruction
as conventional weapons, which have only rarely been used by
terrorists (and not very successfully at that), and which we're not
even certain that today's terrorists, specifically al-Qaeda, have got
access to? Rapoport says that's a good question - but a difficult one
to answer. He thinks the reasons are complex; he argues that it isn't
only government and media who have ratcheted up fear about WMD, but
that 'economic interests' have, too - those in business, government
and research institutions who stand to make financial gain from public
concern about WMD and from public demands for more protective measures
against such weapons.
No doubt there is some truth in that. But the disparity between the
facts about WMD and our fears of WMD also reveals something more about
today's terror-obsession. It shows up the gap between the reality of
terrorism - which over the past three years has largely consisted of
scrappy bomb attacks by small nihilistic groups - and the fear of
terrorism as something that might bring down civilisation as we know
it, or, in the words of President Bush, inflict 'hundreds of thousands
of casualties'. It suggests that our concern about terrorism is not
entirely shaped by the real threat posed by terrorism, but by a
broader sense of fear and insecurity at home. That might explain why
so much of the terror discussion, particularly in relation to WMD, is
anticipatory and speculative, always conjuring up worst-case scenarios
- because it comes from within, from our own nightmares and
imaginations, rather than from without.
In this sense, chemical and biological weapons - the nightmare notion
of silent, invisible killer poisons being released into our water
systems or on to crowded public transport - are the perfect metaphor
for the West's own sense of vulnerability. What we could really do
with is a heavy dose of reality.
Read on: spiked-issue: War on terror
(1) President Bush: Libya Pledges to Dismantle WMD Programmes, The
White House, 19 December 2003
(2) See Creating the enemy, by Brendan O'Neill
(3) See Creating the enemy, by Brendan O'Neill
(4) BBC drama to depict 'dirty bomb' in London, Guardian, 28 July 2004
(5) 'Terrorism and Weapons of the Apocalypse 2', David C Rapoport
(6) 'The Iran-Iraq War: A Military Analysis', Efriam Karsh, Adelphi
Papers, ISSS, 1987
(7) Terrorism and Weapons of the Apocalypse 2', David C Rapoport
(8) 'Terrorism and Weapons of the Apocalypse 2', David C Rapoport
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