“The use of such chemicals is not an isolated incident,” the State Department said.
  • Semi-Hemi-Lemmygod@lemmy.worldEnglish
    151·
    6 months ago

    The department also determined that Russia has breached the CWC’s prohibition on the use of riot control agents as a method of warfare, the statement said.

    Super neat they’re allowed to use these against civilians but not soldiers. Please educate me as to why this isn’t abhorrent.

    • Skua@kbin.social
      13·
      6 months ago

      A few reasons.

      • Using any of them in war is far too likely to lead to escalation. Someome on the receiving end of it doesn’t necessarily know what they’ve been attacked with, and seeing that the other side is using chemical weapons will retaliate with their own more serious ones. Civilians are unlikely to bring their own nerve gas to protests, so this isn’t a concern in civilian contexts.

      • Killing your enemy is usually necessary in war, but torturing them isn’t. As such, using weapons that are only intended to cause pain is just wanton cruelty rather than simply a means to the ends of winning the war. Police theoretically don’t want to be killing or permanently disabling people, so again this isn’t applicable to civilian contexts.

      • They are wildly uncontrollable. The carveouts for civilian use of tear gas and the like in the Geneva conventions require them to disperse quickly because of this.

      It’s not unfounded. To be clear I don’t think that police should be allowed to use such weapons, but there are reasons that it’s considered more serious in warfare.

    • cooljacob204@kbin.social
      7·
      6 months ago

      My understanding from other articles is this is much worse then the stuff they use on crowds. Makes you insanely nauseous on top of the sinus and eye burning stuff.

      It’s also harder to filter out and was used in WW1 in order to force soldiers to take off their mask. So they would use this agent then follow it up with more lethal gases.

    • CTDummy@lemm.ee
      31·
      6 months ago

      My guess is chemical agents for means of crowd dispersal == no problem. Chemical agents for lethal force, or “warfare” == bad (maybe).

      • AdamEatsAss@lemmy.world
        6·
        6 months ago

        The big reason is you can’t tell what chemical weapon was used in war. They shoot pepper spray at me I panic and fire mustard gas back.