Thinking About "WMDs"

I figured when I saw this in a review of a book on taxes in the latest Business Week (01/19/04) that "WMD" is likely to be retired soon as a military and foreign-policy phrase: "No one could ever find a single family that was forced to sell a farm to pay estate taxes under the law on the books pre-2001. It was the WMD of taxes."

When writers in mainstream business magazines can assume that their readers will know that calling something "the WMD of ..." means that it was something that couldn't be found, it's pretty safe guess that it has become inert as a phrase to be used in war propaganda. And well so. It was always a term used to blur the distinction between chemical and biological weapons, of the one hand, and nuclear weapons on the other. Hawkish nuclear theorists - Dr. Strangelove wasn't just a fiction of some writer's imagination - have always tried to overcome the well-founded notion that nuclear weapons were a qualitative different class of killing devices than "conventional" weapons.

Juan Cole recently observed (No WMD. Nada. Bupkes. 01/09/04):

I think a lot of conceptual unclarity could be undone if we avoided the phrases "weapons of mass destruction" and "war on terror."

Chemical weapons are not weapons of mass destruction. They are battlefield weapons. They have primarily been used in battlefield situations, or against civilian insurgents (as with the RAF in IRaq [sic] in the 1920s or Saddam against the Kurds in the 1980s). The major attempt to use Sarin for terrorism failed, though it killed a handful of people and sickened others to one extent or another (Aum Shinrikyo and the Tokyo subway in 1995). The patterns of urban airflow make them extremely difficult to deliver for small groups lacking a military.

I would certainly not want to minimize the harm that could be done by Texas white supremacists with cyanide bombs or renegade government scientists with weapons-grade anthrax. But, in practice, virtually all terrorist attacks to date have involved some kind of conventional explosive (in the case of 9/11, aircraft used to explosives), not the kind of chemical weapons that the Texas extremists built.