If you have Netflix, I strongly recommend you enter "Hiroshima" into the search box. There you will find the superb 2005 BBC documentary of the events that started the atomic age. It interviews both the victims of the bomb as well as members of the crew of the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber that wiped out well over 100,000 people in an instant and in the resulting aftermath.
The documentary is chilling, to say the least.
It is in this context one must view the situation in Syria, today. Weapons of mass destruction are a genie that should never leave the bottle, for if they do, God help us all.
By the time this column is printed, the missiles may already be flying. The United States and France may have embarked on yet another Middle Eastern war, one that no one wants. But then again, who wants any sort of war?
The big question around Syria is this: the world scarcely gave a damn while 100,000 people were killed, and two million people became refugees. Why should it care now, when 1,400 or so people (according to the United States) have been gassed by the Syrian regime?
Nancy Pelosi, U.S. Democratic House Leader, said it best so far on the morning of Sept. 3, when she said that it was not President Obama's red line crossed with the use of chemical weapons, but humanity's.
"Humanity drew a line decades ago that I think if we ignore, we do so to the peril of many other people who could suffer," Pelosi said.
It's not that killing 1,400 people with gas is any more or less gruesome than using bullets, artillery, or conventional bombs or missiles. They are just as dead. It's that 1,400 could soon become 14,000, or 140,000, if the use of chemical weapons becomes widespread. Those numbers start looking like what happened in Hiroshima. That's when the world should be most frightened.
After all, nuclear weapons don't have to wipe out cities. In their testing of everything possible with nuclear warheads, the United States came up with small warheads designed to be fired as air-to-air unguided rockets. Since guided missiles weren't all that useful yet, the idea was to swat Soviet bombers out of the sky with a tiny nuke, similar to a shotgun fired into a flock of birds. Canada, believe it or not, deployed these aptly-named "Genie" rockets on its fighter-interceptors during the Cold War, using "dual-key" American-controlled warheads. It's just a bigger boom - at 1.5 kilotons. So what if it's nuclear, right?
Similar small-scale nukes were devised for artillery usage. They even came up with the man-portable M-28 Davy Crockett. It looked like a scaled up RPG with a 20-ton TNT equivalent warhead and 1.35 mile range. They made 2,100 of these little beasties.
The problem is once such weapons become normalized, then where is a limit drawn? If a small scale chemical weapon attack is okay, why not a larger one? Why not carpet an entire city of rebels with Sarin gas? It will take care of your problems in a hurry.
The most basic chemical weapons are easy to make. Almost any chemist given the right facilities can cook them up. If one belligerent starts using them, an arms race will surely follow. It won't take long for the opposing faction to do the same.
After the Germans gassed the allied lines in the First World War, Wikipedia notes the commander ofBritish II Corps, Lt.-Gen. Ferguson said of gas: "It is a cowardly form of warfare which does not commend itself to me or other English soldiers We cannot win this war unless we kill or incapacitate more of our enemies than they do of us, and if this can only be done by our copying the enemy in his choice of weapons, we must not refuse to do so."
Once outsiders like the United States and France get involved, Syria is likely to become another Iraq, perhaps worse. Throw in Iran, and we've got a serious war on our hands. If Iran closes the Strait of Hormuz, the United States will flatten Iran. Iran will strike Israel in turn.
What if Syria or Iran somehow smuggle a few shipping containers of Sarin gas into an American port and set them off? With the exception of Pearl Harbour and the Aleutian Islands in the Second World War, and 9/11, the United States homeland hasn't been attacked in over a century.
The stated position of the United States is that it will respond to a weapon of mass destruction attack, be it chemical, biological or nuclear, with a nuclear strike of its own. Are you worried now?
One last thing: the site of Armageddon is in Israel, only about 20 or 30 miles from the Syrian-border. Let's hope this slippery slope we are on doesn't lead to that.
- Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News. He can be reached at [email protected].
