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world war 2 was an existential war for the US despite the fact that neither the Germans nor the Japanese wanted to genocide all Americans
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Oct 10, 2019 16:20
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:world war 2 was an existential war for the US despite the fact that neither the Germans nor the Japanese wanted to genocide all Americans No, then it isn't.
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Oct 10, 2019 16:22
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Iran-Iraq was regarded by both sides as an existential war for their respective regimes. And they both did their damndest to impress that upon their populace. Whoever lost was almost certainly gonna go down in flames.
Polyakov fucked around with this message at 16:32 on Oct 10, 2019 |
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Oct 10, 2019 16:30
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ChubbyChecker posted:I haven't read much about Iraqi milhist. I know that Saddam genocided Kurds, but did he genocide Iranians too, or was he planing to do so if Iraq had won? I don't remember hearing about it, so the idea that that it was an existential war sounds odd. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Whom_God_Should_Not_Have_Created:_Persians,_Jews,_and_Flies
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Oct 10, 2019 16:33
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Previous post. Previous post in the series, chase hyperlinks for the rest Website archive in which this will eventually appear. Chemical weapons in Iran-Iraq Because I am an Extremely Normal Person with Extremely Normal Hobbies, I woke up today and thought I would do a footnote to all of this specifically on the subject of chemical weapons, their production, nature and use in this particular war. I will not be including anything photographic about the kind of wounds they inflict or casualty pictures from the war itself because its not something I want to spring on people without warning. There is a lot of publicly available information on this specific topic for people who want to know more. Also, I have rather sloppily referred to Nerve Gas and indeed Mustard Gas, which is not necessarily accurate as pointed out by Platystemon for reasons I will get into later. A little forewarning, theres some unpleasent descriptors of the effects of chemical weapons in here. Frangiblecover pointed out on discord last night while checking my tank numbers something I hadn’t really internalized, that this was the only war where we really know that nerve agents were employed and sort of how they were employed (Or at least that’s how I remember it, do correct me if I misremember). This isn’t quite the case in that there’s pretty reasonable amounts of evidence that the USSR employed nerve agents in Afghanistan alongside other gas weapons but is substantively so. With the context of chemical weapons more generally there is evidence of the use of some kind of chemical weapons in South East Asia by Laos and Vietnam in the late 70’s. The question of whether Agent Orange and other defoliants was a chemical attack is a hotly contested question but not one I’m going to get into, US use in Vietnam is very well documented and you can all decide for yourselves. Egypt used them in Yemen in the 60’s, the PRC allege that the UN forces used chemical weapons against them in Korea but there is no real reliable evidence of that at all and Japan was known to have used them in the 30’s along with Italy. There is also an active debate over whether it applies to things like CS (tear) gas. However, Iran-Iraq really, I think marks only the second major wide scale employment of chemical weapons in war, and the first subsequent to the Geneva convention of 1925. Their widescale use would spook a lot of the world and do a whole lot to speed the adoption of the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993. A brief disclaimer, I have some education in chemistry, enough to think I understand what I am reading, I’m sure that many people understand it better than I do so please do sing out if I am talking absolute rubbish. Legal Framework. So the only piece of law really relevant to whether nations can use chemical weapons is the 1925 Geneva Protocol. There had been previous statements in the Hague conventions of 1899 and 1907 outlawing the use of chemical agents but WW1 put those pretty much entirely on the bombfire. So a new treaty was drawn up. Broadly speaking the protocol outlaws the first use of chemical and bacteriological weapons in armed conflict with other states. It did not do a few critical things however. It did not outlaw research, storage and development of chemical weapons, it also had no mechanisms for the monitoring of who was up to what. This in conjunction with the fact that if someone uses CW’s on you, you can then use them on them means that it infact de facto encouraged stockpiling and research encase somebody broke the treaty. It also did not cover the use of CW’s within a states own borders against their own people. There had been a separate Bacteriological weapons convention of 1975 which was a much more impressive document in terms of actually limiting the ability to use these things. But it only applied to bacteriological weapons. This is things like anthrax. Iraq would argue, incorrectly, that it did not apply to weapons employed within their own borders as a sort of thin veneer of legality. This whole argument was rendered rather moot when they started lobbing it into Iranian territory in the later years of the war. Both Iran and Iraq would sign the Geneva protocol. Protective gear.  Here im going to refer to a US manual on the use of MOPP (Mission orientated protective postures), basically the US Nuclear, Biological and Chemical protective equipment. As shown in that image, the US has several progressive stages of what you wear in various stages of risk from CW’s. The things that we are mainly concerned with are MOPP levels 3 through Alpha. The basic components of your chemical weapons protective equipment are: 1: Your gas mask/respirator, this exists for two purposes, the first being the obvious, to filter agents out of the air and stop them getting into your lungs. It is important that this has a tight seal against your face and that you know what you are doing with it. This is a particular problem for Iran, for religious reasons many Pasdaran refused to shave their beards down, this meant that there were gaps in their protective equipment through which gas would seep and render the whole shebang a bit pointless. A typical way that this is done is via activated carbon/charcoal in the filter. Active carbon is produced by placing carbon rich material, typically wood, in a furnace and cooking it at very high temperatures (900 or so degrees) until it is reduced to pure carbon, a more accelerated way of how charcoal was produced, this must be done under an inert atmosphere to stop the reactive carbon from bonding to other chemicals, ruining the whole point of creating a highly reactive carbon. It is “activated” by piping oxygen rich gas in while heating the carbon to around 1200 degrees, this causes the oxygen to bond with the carbon and it opens up the microstructure creating a huge surface area to volume ratio increase creating millions of sites within the carbon that can react with gasses that pass over it. It is also possible to do this via chemical processes, but I don’t believe it is frequently used for gas mask carbon because it produces a less pure product. Active carbon is particularly good at adsorbing organic (carbon based) chemicals, adsorption being chemical attraction between particles (very crudely it’s a very low energy or enthalpy cost for compounds to bond with the adsorption site), of which Nerve agents and Mustard gas are examples, it will also react well with chlorine. Its high surface area to volume ratio renders it particularly effective for a given volume at doing so. There are other types of gas mask that do this via chemical reactions which work for specific chemicals but they aren’t really relevant to consider here. There will typically be some doping chemicals added to enhance the carbons ability against certain compounds but I wont get into what specifically does what.  Commercial gas mask showing activated carbon filter. The second purpose of the gas mask is to stop it getting in your eyes, Mustard gas is a particular bugger for this, notoriously so, but so is CS and Nerve agents. The mechanics of why this work are fairly self-evident. 2: Your overgarments, in US issue the uniform cloth itself is chemical resistant neglecting the need for something like a gas cape which were widely employed in Iran-Iraq because they had no such luck. This is there to stop chemical agents from contacting your skin. Things like Sarin and other nerve agents can be absorbed through skin contact which will kill you just as dead as if you had inhaled them. Mustard gas in high enough concentrations will burn and blister your skin, its part of a whole class of agents called Vesicants, or blister agents, which as you may infer are designed to cause your skin to blister which will be a significant impediment to fighting, or doing anything. you may also note the gas hood and footwear covers, when you leave a NBC environment you want to bring nothing with you at all, some agents persist and rather than toss the whole boot you take the cover off and bin it to prevent that happening. There are multiple reports of Iranian soldiers suffering very severe aftereffects from eating contaminated food or from treating soldiers injured by CW’s. Now, as I have alluded to, Iran had very little of any of this, not much training for what they did have which rendered this all very dangerous for them in particular. Particularly early on in the war, Iranian protective equipment is described thusly: “Respirators, thin rubber gloves and plastic laundry bags”, however as the war went on we would start to see Iran obtaining and issuing enough proper equipment to help its soldiers survive. I will go into the likely efficacy of this when I discuss each agent in a bit more detail. An issue Iran had is that the quality of first aid remained poor, partly because a lot of this is going on in the marshes and its quite hard to rush someone to an aid station across a pontoon or via a boat when an Iraqi helicopter is likely to take a shot at you. Often people had to wait until night and be exfiltrated them via chinook or boat and then by truck to a city hospital. Often Iranian troops would take their atropine when exposed to mustard gas which would both put a strain on supplies of atropine and reflected poor training in terms of how to actually respond to a chemical attack. Not that I can blame the soldiers themselves for this reaction. This delay is particularly brutal when it comes to mustard gas, where decontamination is delayed by up to 24 hours, when they sent people to Europe they would often arrive with mustard agent still on their person. The specifics of Chemical Weapons. As pointed out, only some “gas” weapons as we refer to them are actually gaseous, the two most famous examples of weapons that are pure gasses are chlorine and phosgene. Neither of which saw any significant use in Iran-Iraq. CS and Nerve agents are both employed as vapours but mustard is not.  CIA prepared chart on Iraqs various forms of chemical weapons. CS Gas  US Army testing an early CN (predecessor to CS) dispersing mechanism. I’m including this because it did see some use in the war and is probably the one most likely for people to encounter. CS stands for 2-Chlorobenzylidene Malononitrile, it is comprised of a benzene ring, a methylnitride group and a chlorine atom. It has the chemical formula C10H5ClN2. It was initially developed at Porton Down in the UK where its increased stability and decreased toxicity lead to its replacement of the agent used up to that point, which had been Chloroacetophenone (C8H7ClO). Its now being replaced by Capsicum based sprays in some of its applications because its less dangerous, CS can still kill you in high concentrations or if you have respiratory problems. Its worth noting that CS is quite flammable, and its overuse at the 1993 Waco ranch standoff probably contributed to the fire that burned the whole place down. It is typically deployed via dissolving in a solvent which is then vaporized for deployment as a gas. CS has now been banned for use in war along with all other as termed Riot Control Agents since 1997. It has a safety ratio of around 60’000, which means that the average lethal dose of it is that many times higher than the minimum point at which it will incapacitate your standard human. It requires quite a lot of a balls up to kill someone with it. I will point out that these average humans do mean literally that, the LCt50 dose by which that is calculated means that it will kill 50% of humans and the ICt50 is that which will incapacitate 50% of humans. So its actually quite a bit narrower than that in reality given the bell curve of human populations. The way it works is not understood in its totality, the general idea right now is that its main effect works via the production of Hydrochloric acid in mucous membranes, particularly in the nose, lungs and eyes, which causes irritation in those areas leading to the crying effect (hence tear gas). This is backed up by the effect of chemical burns and irritation on skin and its concentration in effect around those sites that have been observed. There are many subreactions which can lead to permanent damage in other areas of the body but I don’t quite trust my chemistry enough to explain them accurately. However the important takeaway is that to protect yourself you cover your eyes and breathing holes, wear gas proof clothing if you can and you will probably be ok. The builders mask pictured previously will provide some protection though you would also need eye protection. There’s a whole host of improvised protective measures you can take but they boil down to stopping it getting to the parts of your body where it does damage. People who die from RCA agent exposure tend to have been exposed to it for a long time and they exhibit severe damage in their airways. CS is generally non-persistent and will typically disperse in open areas within a few minutes, acute symptoms will persist generally for up to an hour after exposure. Mustard agents  Australian and New Zealand troops amid a forest of Iraqi 155mm mustard gas shells. As I mentioned earlier, Mustard agents are part of a generally larger group called vesicants, of which Mustard is the most prominent member. The ones employed in Iran-Iraq were typically Sulfur mustards, though there is also use of lewisite which involves Arsenic. There is a third category of nitrogen mustards that were not seriously used by anyone but were developed. It was the most widely employed gas of the war, with the overwhelming majority being Sulfur mustards with some employment of Lewisite. It’s easy to make and effective at what it does. Sulfur mustards as a family were first discovered in 1860, they were refined and developed until WW1 when they were really very much focused on. Mustard is deployed generally as an aerosol, a suspension of fine liquid droplets in a gas. It was of course famously employed in WW1 by both sides. The chemical composition of Sulfur Mustard is C4H8Cl2S, a sulfur atom with two methylchloride groups either side. Lewisite takes several forms but generally it is a methyl group with an arseno-chloride group and a chlorine atom off that methyl group. A typical formulation could be C2H2ClAsCl2. Mustards are generally oily substances when in liquid form with a high level of persistence because of it, they are not volatile and will generally break down over a period of weeks in the presence of water, they have a low solubility which makes cleaning them up a bit of a pain as you will quite literally get pools of sulphur mustard sitting out on open surfaces after an attack. This makes them fairly ideal as a chemical weapon because they will persist and remain dangerous in an area without cleanup efforts for a reasonable amount of time. They are only respiratorily dangerous while they are in an aerosol form which is usually a function of them being dropped in a bomb. However they will continue to do incredible blistering damage to skin on contact in the pooled form. They are fat soluble, which means they can be absorbed through the skin into the subcutaneous fat layer, they will also be absorbed if you breathe it in and enter the body that way. It will particularly absorb into the eyes area rendering it very dangerous as a blinding agent as was seen in the infamous pictures from WW1. Absorbed into the skin it will blister the affected area quite severely. It will cause internal damage to your respiratory tract if absorbed there and this is largely how its going to kill you. The mode of action by which it does this is quite complicated and again not neccesarily fully discovered. It disrupts the interface between your epidermis and your dermis, causing your skin to separate out and blister causing associated damage. It will also alkylate your DNA, alkylation is the movement of an Alkyl group, a term for any group containing carbon and hydrogen, removing bits of your DNA from the helix causing its structure to break down upon which it can be attacked by your own white blood cells or just stop replicating altogether. It will also attack thiol groups, Sulphur and hydrogen containing groups which are widely relevant in biology, but specifically in this case for maintaining cell homeostasis, which is the separation of your cells from the outside environment and maintenance of the right chemical balance for those cells to do what they are designed to, and disrupting it kills the cells directly. Mustard agents are more potent in the presence of water as that seems to help their absorption, hence their intense effect on your eyes. That is the first area they will affect, generally it will then proceed on to attack your respiratory tract in higher concentrations. The important takeaway is that mustard agents are dangerous if they touch your body in any significant concentration. There is no antidote for them and if you get blistered by them you need to get to a hospital for long term care. It has significant long-term effects for years afterwards with damage tending to be in the lungs with things like bronchitis, asthma and pulmonary fibrosis but can appear anywhere. It also suppresses your immune system long term leaving you more vulnerable to secondary infection. People exposed to mustard gas frequently develop cancer in various forms, possibly due to its attack on DNA. Nerve Agents  US Honest John missile warhead with sarin bomblets, designed for dispersal over a wide area. There are many agents that attack the nervous system, the ones used in Iran Iraq belong to a group called Organophosphate Nerve Agents. Otherwise known as Acetylcholinesterase inhibitors, which betrays their mode of action. They are extremely deadly, if you get caught short in a mustard gas attack you are more likely to be wounded or maimed than killed. If you get caught short by a nerve agent attack you are very likely dead. The relevant ones to this war are Tabun (GA) and Sarin (GB) and Cyclosarin (GF), VX is also part of this family but was never used in the war but is alleged to have been produced. Initially developed by Nazi Germany as a pesticide, they were tested and developed extensively but never employed are all the ones with the G prefix with the letter suffix indicating their order of identification. VX was initially synthesised at Porton Down in the UK in the post war. They were produced in significant quantities by all sides in the cold war as weapons. The chemicals themselves are all liquids and have a high volatility, which means that they will turn into a gas at below their boiling point fairly easily. Hence it is an example of a true poison gas. The fact it is a gas also makes it far less persistent than mustard agents, meaning that its easier to deploy on an enemy position and then move in yourself, because being a gas it will dissipate out into the air over a much shorter time and you don’t need to worry so much about decontaminating the area you are walking into. They have no smell and as a result are difficult to detect an attack from. VX was specifically designed with a low volatility so it is a more persistent area denial weapon, possibly hence why it was not actively pursued as this is of less use to Iraq if they want to have the land they take back be of any use. VX is essentially a nerve agent made to act much like mustard gas in its persistence. Its also extremely deadly. One other nasty trick of nerve agents is that some of them will persist in clothing, in liquid form it can be absorbed through the skin and may spontaneously vaporise from a concentration in clothing. This can lead to secondary exposure at a lower level for medical personnel and there is not neccesarily a sign for, given their odourless nature. Advice is to get your clothes off, dispose of them and get out of the area as quickly as possible. It also may precipitate into water, contaminating it. The mode of action for all of them is pretty similar, they are as mentioned Acetylcholinesterase inhibitors. They prevent the breakdown of Acetylcholine (AChE) in your central nervous system, which is a chemical signal compound used to activate your muscles and control your nervous system in various ways I don’t quite understand. This causes your nervous system to go haywire, causing constant activation or paralysis of various parts of the body resulting in sweating, spasming of the breathing system, slowing of your heartbeat, convulsions, paralysis and by some combination of the above, death. The chemicals will bind permanently to your cholinesterase within minutes of their entry into the body which makes removing them very difficult until they are eventually broken down. If you have received a low enough dose you might survive until that happens. The one bright spot in this otherwise grim affair, is that it is possible to deliver an antidote to nerve agent exposure. In the event of a lethal dose it is important to act very quickly before the point at which the AChE becomes permanently damaged by the nerve agent, atropine blocks the effects of AChE on the musculature which prevents the associated effects of paralysis and spasm. The standard treatment is immediate injection with atropine, which Iran did acquire and distribute en masse later in the war, however there is a limited time in which this is effective. One thing that The Rock did get almost right, though for gods sake don’t stab your own heart. Its still going to be unpleasant but this will probably stop you dieing, you need to afterwards get off the battlefield and into a hospital as quickly as possible. This is another keep it off your respiratory system first, then also eyes and skin situation. Iranian disposal of contaminated clothes was often not done at all, and the clothes themselves were not frequently resistant to chemical attack. This situation would improve as the war went on but never to a really satisfactory state. The history of Iraqi chemical weapons Acquisition   Iraqi chemical weapons establishment after some light bombing in desert storm. As a result of the influx of cash in the mid 70’s, Iraq (at that point not under Saddams direct leadership) would begin its own chemical weapons program. They had ambitions to become the dominant Arab military power and to do that it was only natural that they have a chemical weapons program. This is not necessarily that unusual for nations at this time, many nations were proliferating like absolute buggery. Its not even illegal, it is only illegal to use them on other nations. They started this alongside their nuclear and ballistic weapons programs at the same time. Iraqs CW program would focus around the Muthanna State Establishment, located around 150 km north of Baghdad. It’s initial name was the State Establishment for Pesticide Production. It was built with as I have mentioned previously, significant FRG and DDG expertise. In 1981 it started producing small amounts of mustard gas, but not really any significant quantities. It had significant issues producing the required chemical precursors so it had to import them from abroad. A particularly notable one was thiodiglycol which I will get into more when I discuss mustard gas specifically, however it is a chemical which has uses outside of this particularly specific purpose, particularly in textile dyeing, and was not controlled until the 1993 CWC. They would buy this particular precursor and others largely from Western Europe and the USA as the places which had the most developed chemical industries. They would procure complete mustard gas from the USSR. As the war went on they would become self sufficient in most of their chemical precursors. Their early efforts to try and produce Nerve Agents were frustrated by the refusal of nations to sell them some of the necessary precursors where there was a quiet but active interdiction effort in Europe and the USA. Their chemical weapons program would grow in size and sophistication until they were able to produce large amounts of mustard gas, sarin, tabun and allegedly quantities of VX. Initially international response was pretty muted, in 1983 Iran started circulating graphic pamphlets showing CW victims in western Europe and sent their casualties to Europe for medical treatment, partly to get them better aid, though one suspects who one knew was a large component in deciding who got to go to the plush Geneva hospital, but also to try and generate media attention. They knew this was probably the only recourse they had at the time. However there was very little response to this in the West. Its likely that this particular act of moral lethargy emboldened Saddam to employ them more widely. Iran would complain bitterly that Britain, France and the USSR were all supplying Iraq with chemical weapons and precursors, this is sort of half true, Britain was supplying chemical precursors at this stage, as was France and the USSR was supplying gas. However, in western Europe those two were far from the largest culprits, they were however the traditional Iranian target of the UK and Iraq’s greatest supporter France. The true largest culprit, Germany, was also supplying Iran with critical equipment so I suspect there may have been political considerations in those two particular parties being chosen. My own cynical quibbling aside however this would thankfully lead in part to some action. In 1984 the US congress issued a report stating that Iraq was using CW’s and elements tried to put Iraq back on the terror watchlist. The state department would condemn Iraq for this, and the UK would reverse its earlier position on neutrality and condemned Iraq and took steps to embargo chemical precursors to weapons to both combatants. France would remain sanguine however and said nothing, as would many other nations. But mechanisms within the UN were at last underway and they dispatched an investigative team who concluded there had been use of mustard and nerve agents and issued their report. At this stage the UK, US, France, Japan and Australia all formally banned the sale of any precursor chemicals for the production of those weapons. However, there was not yet universal action.  Wikipedias map of members of the Australia Group as of 2019. Reagan at this time would start the push hard for the creation of what would become the CWC at the UN (an idea that had been kicking around for a while), dispatching HW Bush to do so, however negotiations bogged down in cold war mistrust. Australia had far more success, creating the Australia Group as an informal anti-proliferation organisation for nations to coordinate their attempts to stop the trade of precursor chemicals and dual-purpose production equipment, it was founded including basically Western Europe, the US, Japan and Australia and persists to this day in its function. They developed a list of such which was implemented as export controls in late 1985. The Security Council also finally managed to locate at least one vertebrae of its spine and called on both nations to implement the Geneva Protocol properly. But took no action to enforce that particular statement. Iraq would secure under the table supplies from a Dutch gentleman from 1984-88 after people started properly trying to clamp down on this, Frans van Anraat, a man who has the distinction of being the only Dutchman to appear on the FBI’s most wanted list and who at the time was an employee of the Nu Kraft Mercantile company, based in Brooklynn. He was arrested initially in 1989 by request of the USA in Italy but was released for reasons I cant quite pin down. He fled to Iraq where he lived until 2003 when he decided that facing trial would probably be better for his health than staying there with the Kurds and Iranians after him. He was tried at the Hague for complicity in genocide after his arrest in 2004 and sentenced to 17 years in prison. In 1987 they would find another such bone and issue a direct resolution which included language to prevent the use of chemical weapons, alongside general statements to stop the war completely. Cynically Iraq Immediately accepted it, while Iran continued to reject it, they thought they could still win gains in the war and wouldn’t accept status quo ante bellum as a resolution, they also considered its language on CW’s insufficient. Unfortunately Iraq’s cynicism won in the theatre of international diplomacy, Iran was predominantly perceived as the aggressor and the issue of chemical weapons was somewhat diffused by the fact that Iran was refusing to come to terms which Iraq was repeatedly offering. (Entirely because Iraq thought it was losing, I hasten to add). Iraq’s use of CW’s against the Kurdish town of Halabjah would bring it back up the international agenda, however not that far initially. At this stage the president of the Security council was Algeria, who really didn’t want to get involved in arbitrating this particularly nasty issue between two nonaligned nations with which it shared religious and cultural ties. The permanent members of the security council were having a protracted argument about the implementation of sanctions on Iran so there wasn’t really anyone at the helm. Fortunately, the FRG had finished hiding and hoping nobody noticed what it had been up to, reunited the axis powers of Italy and Japan and put forward a new resolution to the UN and then to the Council which called in the strongest language yet for the cease of use of CW’s and particularly noted Iraq’s use of them against civilian populations. This was adopted in fairly short order by the security council in 1988. Shortly after the end of the war later in 1988 the Security Council passed a new resolution where it stated its intention to end all use of chemical weapons, this would eventually lead to the CWC of 1993. Employment  BM-21 grad of a type that would be employed by Iraq for nerve agent distribution. Throughout the war Iraq would develop the capability to deploy chemical weapons from 88 and 120mm mortars, 130, 152 and 155mm artillery and also from 122mm rockets. They were working on tipping their Scuds with chemical canisters. In the air they had 250 and 500kg bombs as well as various improvised containers that would be pushed out of helicopters, chemical spraying apparatus for their Swiss prop trainers and Soviet and French helicopters and also converted 90mm air to ground rockets to have chemical warheads. They would use these to distribute CW’s about the battlefield in every way imaginable. They did extensive training to get their artillery able to do proper Time on Target between mortars, light artillery and heavy artillery as well as air dropped munitions to achieve a lethal saturation level of chemical weapons in an area. Which is not a trivial problem to solve in terms of training. The rockets in question are of particular benefit as it’s a lot easier to get a saturation attack going with less tubes when you are using a rocket launcher, and that is what you want to achieve with gas, multiple smaller sources saturating an entire area. You want to catch everyone with no warning to take protective measures, and this is the sort of application that MLRS shines in. Initially Iraq would use CS gas in 1982 in several locations as a means of slowing Iranian advances and disrupting their formations, CS gas is not a lethal agent unless you have a very intense dose and have existing respiratory problems. However this would graduate in 1983 to their first employments of Mustard gas in the northern mountainous areas. Their first attempts were not particularly adept as they attempted to use it on a mountain top position, not quite appreciating that mustard gas is heavier than air, leading to the gas flowing off the top of the elevation and rolling down the hill onto the attacking Iraqis. They also had the predictable problems when I say the word wind direction on other occasions. But they learned quickly. In 1984 they became probably the first nation to use nerve gas on the battlefield in the battles around the Hovyizeh marshes. Discussions in Iraqi high command were in a state of panic about dislodging the Iranians from this particular area due to its presence right next to the Baghdad-Basra road. The typical method of delivery of nerve agents early on was essentially via crop duster light aircraft or helicopters. They would however quickly ramp up their production of shells and rockets and bombs. Iraq would develop its tactics in employing these weapons more as the war went on, targeting rear areas which were less likely to be in a state of readiness, using them to isolate forward areas from resupply before attack. They would also at this point develop something called dirty mustard, a development on the mustard gas formula, this was an aerosolized solid silica impregnated with mustard agent which formed a dust storm of mustard agent. This produced much of the same effect as mustard gas would but had significantly less persistence (something I will again get into later). Towards the end of the war Iraq stepped up the tempo of its chemical operations, its production and tactics were now fully mature, they knew what to do and had the capability to do it. They would start to employ it frequently in attacks to retake Al-Faw. Typically they would fire off chemical rounds via artillery en-masse, wait 30 minutes then go in. This widescale use along with the ongoing war of the cities lead to a fear in Iranian population centres, thankfully never realised, that Iraq would fire chemical tipped Scuds at them which lead to a mass exodus from Tehran in 1987 of up to a quarter of the population. The end of the war is when we start to see widescale use of CW’s against the Kurds, they had long employed CS in this role but with an Iranian offensive in 1988 with Kurdish forces in support got very close to the dam at Dukan and the loss of large parts of Iraqi Kurdistan to Iran, Saddam and Chemical Ali would employ CW’s against Kurdish population centres, particularly infamously against Halabjah, which killed at least 5’000 people, including a large amount of Kurdish civillians. Iran would retaliate in some small capacity with its own stockpile of CW’s towards the end of the war (As indeed they were legally entitled to under the 1925 convention because Iraq did it first), the advantages just weren’t there for it to do so. They talked a big game about it being against the principles of Islam, which it absolutely is, but that didn’t stop them developing their nuclear weapons program. Iraq was prepared, equipped and trained to fight in a CW environment far more than Iran was, and it is likely that the agents they had would have obstructed their own mass infantry attacks far more than it would have harmed the Iraqis. However Iran would never have enough to really do anything decisive, it takes a lot of chemicals to effectively do something wide scale. Efficacy and effects The whole sorry affair sort of illustrates the need and use of international bodies, the international law governing chemical weapons ultimately proved completely toothless because there was no legal or other mechanism by which it could be enforced. This meant that we just had a lot of hand wringing and no action for quite some time before people started voluntarily doing so. A lot of what we recognise today as international law really didn’t start coming about in any enforceable way until after the end of the cold war. The International Criminal Court in the Hague wasn’t established until 2002. When people get desperate unless there is something concrete there to stop them, they will break international norms to survive. This applies more generally to all forms of international bodies, peace and general humanity only survives if everyone is abiding by and is subject to and aware of the consequences of breaking the rules. It sounds very simplistic put that way but it really wasn’t a feature of international law back then. The fact that this war was threatening to destabilise the entire middle east if Iran won was a problem, people didn’t necessarily want to come down hard on Iraq and have it lose to Iran and then you have the nutty fundamentalist terrorist state causing the whole area to burst into flame and blowing up the Champs Elysee. On the other hand they didn’t care for Saddam killing thousands in horrific ways but they cannot bring themselves to make a decision. The actual moral calculus on this is something I’m not gonna get into. Purely from a perspective of stopping the usage of chemical weapons, you have to eliminate the possibility of this question being raised at all, people having to make this moral judgement on their own inevitably means that political limitations they are under will slide in to the equation and people will get away with the thing you are trying to prevent. You need to tie people down to hard and fast rules that have defined penalties and recourses for breaching them. With regards to the gases and protective equipment’s the reason I raise my eyebrow at the protective equipment Iraq issued early on is this is the point they are sending people into areas which they have used agents with persistence like mustard in. They aren’t in danger of inhaling it certainly, the Iraqi’s are not stupid, they aren’t going to poison their own soldiers, but the risk of skin exposure is still in my view very high, but I suppose they didn’t view themselves as having much of a choice. As far as what CW use did for Iraq and to Iran, I think they would have been in real trouble without it, especially in the battles of 84 and 85 where they were really starting to get very desperate with how close Iran got to cutting off Basra. I don’t think they necessarily would have lost the war without using them, but it would have been a distinct possibility. It did tremendous damage to Iran, they claim they suffered 60’000 deaths from chemical warfare, about 10% of their total, this is I would suspect artificially inflated to some degree, there are also people to this day who are horrifically maimed and disfigured by CW attacks and an unknown number of people suffering more minor long term effects. However, Iraq’s transgression of international norms did very effectively signal its willingness to do anything to survive and was part of the eventual calculation that lead to Iran agreeing to end the war. The fear of chemical weapons pervaded the nation, even into their urban centres. I don’t believe Saddam would have gone so far as to attack Iranian cities with gas, not out of any compunction but purely because of how it would look. Polyakov fucked around with this message at 16:38 on Oct 10, 2019 |
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Oct 10, 2019 16:35
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Mr Enderby posted:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Whom_God_Should_Not_Have_Created:_Persians,_Jews,_and_Flies Ah, so he was planning on it.
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Oct 10, 2019 16:46
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ChubbyChecker posted:I haven't read much about Iraqi milhist. I know that Saddam genocided Kurds, but did he genocide Iranians too, or was he planing to do so if Iraq had won? I don't remember hearing about it, so the idea that that it was an existential war sounds odd. "Genocide" isn't the only possible framework. "They want to wipe out our way of life, and our identity as a self-determining nationstate" is very relevant too. Look at e.g. Nazi Germany's portrayal of Bolshevism as an existential threat - it was not based on some theory of the communists as being racist against Germans. Fangz fucked around with this message at 16:51 on Oct 10, 2019 |
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Oct 10, 2019 16:46
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Randarkman posted:Wow. I honestly thought that was much longer. I blame Victoria 1 and 2. It was run more autonomously than most territories and had a shadow government of mormon elders up until the railroads allowed vastly more non-Mormon settlers to arrive ChubbyChecker posted:No, then it isn't. Human beings tend to not be motivated by objective facts.
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Oct 10, 2019 16:55
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Randarkman posted:Wow. I honestly thought that was much longer. I blame Victoria 1 and 2. Alternately, you'd been thinking about things like how several states called up military forces against the Mormons' own military forces at various times before they hiked out to what's now Utah. And when the Mormons initially showed up in Utah, it was legally just part of Mexico at the time! Which also cut its time as a potential independent nation down by quite a bit - they hadn't been willing to actually fight the sparse Mexican military presence in the general area. And yet another aspect is that Mormon leadership was keeping up a pretense of "well maybe some day we'll be independent" well into the 1870s so if you read some historical documents you can come away with a mistaken impression of how much that meant in practice. Basically, there's a lot of bs stuff the Mormons got up to and they certainly were pulling nonsense against the established government of the US and several other states for quite some time.
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Oct 10, 2019 17:16
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https://twitter.com/MartinPengelly/status/1182327694786256898 What are some other great navy movies. Caine Mutiny of course. Top Gun counts. Final Countdown 
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Oct 10, 2019 17:16
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zoux posted:What are some other great navy movies. Caine Mutiny of course. Top Gun counts. Final Countdown Battleship 
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Oct 10, 2019 17:22
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zoux posted:What are some other great navy movies. Caine Mutiny of course. Top Gun counts. Final Countdown The Boot.
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Oct 10, 2019 17:24
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Mr Enderby posted:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Whom_God_Should_Not_Have_Created:_Persians,_Jews,_and_Flies This is like comic book level villainy
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Oct 10, 2019 17:25
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:world war 2 was an existential war for the US despite the fact that neither the Germans nor the Japanese wanted to genocide all Americans 'Existential' means 'the US would cease to exist as an independent state in its current form if they lost' and America is about the only country that wasnt true of.
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Oct 10, 2019 17:26
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feedmegin posted:'Existential' means 'the US would cease to exist as an independent state in its current form if they lost' and America is about the only country that wasnt true of. Excuse me I've seen the documentary Wolfenstein: The New Colossus and the US is clearly just a thrall filled with Nazi super science when they lose the war 
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Oct 10, 2019 17:45
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feedmegin posted:'Existential' means 'the US would cease to exist as an independent state in its current form if they lost' and America is about the only country that wasnt true of. Had to see how the US could possibly "lose" WWII without some sort of invasion scenario though.
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Oct 10, 2019 17:59
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:What leads you to this conclusion? Just examining evidence of ancient bedding and having slept on a variety of different thicknesses of mattress and different fillings over the years. Roman mattresses are noticeably far thinner than modern ones and they were often stuffed with hay or reeds rather than soft feathers. I can attest that it’s not fun to have straw poking out of the mattress! Even that is far better than what medieval peasants got, which was often just a blanket and maybe some furs.
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Oct 10, 2019 18:04
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Polyakov posted:The one bright spot in this otherwise grim affair, is that it is possible to deliver an antidote to nerve agent exposure. In the event of a lethal dose it is important to act very quickly before the point at which the AChE becomes permanently damaged by the nerve agent, atropine blocks the effects of AChE on the musculature which prevents the associated effects of paralysis and spasm. The standard treatment is immediate injection with atropine, which Iran did acquire and distribute en masse later in the war, however there is a limited time in which this is effective. One thing that The Rock did get almost right, though for gods sake don’t stab your own heart. Its still going to be unpleasant but this will probably stop you dieing, you need to afterwards get off the battlefield and into a hospital as quickly as possible. In 1991 we were issued a two-part injection antidote for nerve agents. The first injector was atropine, the second pralidoxime, aka 2-pam chloride. These were to be carried in our gas mask carriers, and we were given repeated classes on how to inject ourselves or others if exposed to nerve agents:  Jarheads being jarheads, one Marine in my platoon managed to accidentally inject himself in the face when putting on his gas-mask in the dark. It swelled up badly and he soon passed out as if severely drunk. He was medivaced immediately and didn't return to our unit. No, it didn't look pleasant.
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Oct 10, 2019 18:13
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Well at least the heart thing was fake, that was a real concern for teenage me if I ever got exposed to VX gas
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Oct 10, 2019 18:21
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zoux posted:Well at least the heart thing was fake, that was a real concern for teenage me if I ever got exposed to VX gas We were told to shoot / inject ourselves in the outer thigh.
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Oct 10, 2019 18:24
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Was there any long-term ecological damage from chemical warfare? Seems like if Saddam was trying to get away with using them on iraqi soil at first, it wouldn't do Iraq any favors.
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Oct 10, 2019 18:25
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ChubbyChecker posted:I haven't read much about Iraqi milhist. I know that Saddam genocided Kurds, but did he genocide Iranians too, or was he planing to do so if Iraq had won? I don't remember hearing about it, so the idea that that it was an existential war sounds odd. After the Iraqis took Khorramshahr, the city was looted and destroyed, most of the men were killed and the women raped.
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Oct 10, 2019 18:35
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feedmegin posted:'Existential' means 'the US would cease to exist as an independent state in its current form if they lost' and America is about the only country that wasnt true of. It doesn't have to be an objective matter of literal existence to be existential. All that matters is if the nation perceives the threat as existential and responds to it as such. WW2 wasn't existential even to Soviet Union if we take it literally because Germans could never have conquered Russia, not any more than the Chechnyan wars were existential struggles for Russia.
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Oct 10, 2019 18:56
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Did any nation view WWI as existential? I can't recall if this is a myth or "Asiatic hordes" bullshit, but was it the case that the Iranian military cleared minefields by marching religious zealots across them?
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Oct 10, 2019 18:58
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zoux posted:Did any nation view WWI as existential? I thought they did POWs.
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Oct 10, 2019 19:00
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non-existential wars: consequences of failure are fairly low for regime, populace, territorial integrity etc. possible to "opt out" of participation with minimal consequences. existential wars: consequences of failure are extremely high for regime, populace, etc. inability to "opt out" short of capitulation or concessions that materially harm the regime, populace, territorial integrity, etc note that a war that is non-existential for one party may be existential for the other - eg Indian intervention in Sri Lanka
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Oct 10, 2019 19:00
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LingcodKilla posted:I thought they did POWs. I can find some contemporary accounts of using child-soldiers hopped up on "martyr juice" being used that way in the NYT and WP, but plenty of bullshit, especially about the mysterious Orient, gets published in Western outlets.  "Human wave attacks" is a huge red flag, as is the utter disregard for the lives of children expressed by the anonymous Iranian officer here
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Oct 10, 2019 19:01
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zoux posted:Did any nation view WWI as existential? Serbia, for sure
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Oct 10, 2019 19:02
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zoux posted:Did any nation view WWI as existential? I would assume the Serbians did. e:f;b. e2: Probably the Austrians too for that matter. Not sure where the Hungarian side of that coin lands though.
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Oct 10, 2019 19:06
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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zoux posted:https://twitter.com/MartinPengelly/status/1182327694786256898 The Enemy Below, Sink the Bismarck!, Battle of the River Plate, Run Silent, Run Deep, The Cruel Sea, Away All Boats, The Gift Horse, The Sand Pebbles, The Bounty, The Ship That Died Of Shame, In Which We Serve, Morning Departure and the Gregory Peck Hornblower adaptation are the ones that come off the top of my head. And the PBR scenes of Apocalypse Now, which I always thought deserved a movie of its own. BalloonFish fucked around with this message at 19:21 on Oct 10, 2019 |
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Oct 10, 2019 19:19
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BalloonFish posted:The Enemy Below, Sink the Bismarck!, Battle of the River Plate, Run Silent, Run Deep, The Cruel Sea, Away All Boats, The Gift Horse, The Sand Pebbles, The Bounty, The Ship That Died Of Shame are the ones that come off the top of my head. And the PBR scenes of Apocalypse Now, which I always thought deserved a movie of its own. I've never heard of half of these, seems like the late 50's-early 60's was a golden age for the WWII naval film
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Oct 10, 2019 19:22
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zoux posted:I can find some contemporary accounts of using child-soldiers hopped up on "martyr juice" being used that way in the NYT and WP, but plenty of bullshit, especially about the mysterious Orient, gets published in Western outlets. Any mine a child can set off certainly wasn’t designed for a tank.
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Oct 10, 2019 19:28
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LingcodKilla posted:Any mine a child can set off certainly wasn’t designed for a tank. it is most nation's doctrine when emplacing an anti-tank minefield to also emplace anti-personnel mines to make demining... less convenient
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Oct 10, 2019 19:30
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:it is most nation's doctrine when emplacing an anti-tank minefield to also emplace anti-personnel mines to make demining... less convenient clearing the anti personal mines won’t do anything for the tank mines without special equipment that would set off the anti personal mines anyways. He expressed concern for the tanks and blowing kids “sky high”.
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Oct 10, 2019 19:33
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zoux posted:I can find some contemporary accounts of using child-soldiers hopped up on "martyr juice" being used that way in the NYT and WP, but plenty of bullshit, especially about the mysterious Orient, gets published in Western outlets. The biggest red flag in this quote is that the events described are third hand. The author didn’t witness this charge himself, but rather is instead relying something witnessed by an unnamed eastern European. When journalists play this kind of game of telephone I would put approximately zero stock into them as a source, regardless of the publication.
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Oct 10, 2019 19:36
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LingcodKilla posted:clearing the anti personal mines won’t do anything for the tank mines without special equipment that would set off the anti personal mines anyways. i am also significantly doubting the account and it was certainly put together to make the iranians look bad but: you're facing a tactical situation where you have to assault through an antitank mine field. you aren't going to waste tanks on it because you don't have tanks to lose, and you don't have the technical equipment to demine effectively. so you just send light infantry over the minefield and accept casualties. it doesn't mean that you're using the infantry to clear the minefield.
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Oct 10, 2019 19:43
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zoux posted:I've never heard of half of these, seems like the late 50's-early 60's was a golden age for the WWII naval film The fact that there were a lot of ex-servicemen actors and lots of war-veteran ships around lends them a certain unique air of authenticity. 'Sink The Bismarck!' stars Kenneth More, who was a watchkeeping officer on HMS Victorious during that ship's involvement in the pursuit - in the film he issues orders to his own ship. Esmond Knight was on Prince of Wales and was blinded by shrapnel from one of Bismarck's hits. With his sight recovered, he plays his former commanding officer. In 'The Battle of the River Plate', the HMNZS Achilles and the HMS Cumberland that appear in the film are the very ships that were in the actual battle. Same with 'The Yangtze Incident', which was filmed mostly on the actual HMS Amethyst just before she was broken up.
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Oct 10, 2019 19:52
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I grew up on a steady diet of those movies. Sink the Bismark with Kenneth Moore, and Midway with Charlton Heston and Henry Fonda are particular favorites.
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Oct 10, 2019 19:59
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BalloonFish posted:The fact that there were a lot of ex-servicemen actors and lots of war-veteran ships around lends them a certain unique air of authenticity. 'Sink The Bismarck!' stars Kenneth More, who was a watchkeeping officer on HMS Victorious during that ship's involvement in the pursuit - in the film he issues orders to his own ship. Esmond Knight was on Prince of Wales and was blinded by shrapnel from one of Bismarck's hits. With his sight recovered, he plays his former commanding officer. Wow, I guess I'm gonna have to check those out, sounds great.
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Oct 10, 2019 20:04
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SlothfulCobra posted:Was there any long-term ecological damage from chemical warfare? Seems like if Saddam was trying to get away with using them on iraqi soil at first, it wouldn't do Iraq any favors. Well, there's a wealthy DC neighborhood littered with buried chemical munitions. Aside from worrying about intact bombs or "live" chemical agents, arsenic leaching out into soil and groundwater from Lewisite is the big problem I'm aware of. I don't know specifically about Iraq, but I've heard of issues in France from use in WWI and in locations where the weapons were manufactured all over the world.
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Oct 10, 2019 20:10
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