this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2023
59 points (98.4% liked)

United States | News & Politics

8310 readers
244 users here now

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
59
2023, the US Finally Destroyed Its Chemical Weapons (portside.org)
submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
6 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

The United States’s Chemical Warfare Service readied hundreds of thousands of mortar shells and artillery rounds filled with mustard gas in the 1940s. During the Cold War, even more lethal chemical weapons followed: artillery and rockets filled with VX and GB, better known as Sarin, nerve agents that, with as little as a few drops, can be deadly.

These munitions would make up the United States’s chemical weapons arsenal, one of the biggest in the world.

It’s all gone now. This summer, on July 7, at the Blue Grass Chemical Agent-Destruction Pilot Plant in Kentucky, the last M55 rocket, filled with GB, was dismantled. With it went the entirety of the US’s declared chemical munitions stockpile.

read more: https://portside.org/2023-09-30/2023-us-finally-destroyed-its-chemical-weapons

archive: https://archive.ph/94jae

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago (5 children)

Does this just mean that the US secretly has much worse stuff?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Not necessarily. Chemical weapons have been off the table for a long time. They've got all the stigma of nukes but without MAD to justify them. Militaries tend to be conservative about weapons, though - they don't want to throw away a working weapon just in case it's needed.

My guess - the existing weapons are probably outdated and it makes little sense to develop new ones given that it's highly unlikely they'll be used. It's not like we fight the kind of wars where they'd be effective (think WWI here) anymore.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago

"Conventional" weapons can do more damage with more accuracy than chemical ones.

Aside from killing civilian populations, there's no reason to keep them around.

That said, we probably have some particularly nasty "conventional" weapons somewhere to accomplish the same outcome.

load more comments (3 replies)