re: #250 Obdicut

I’m not discounting it— that’s what makes them good terror weapons. They definitely have a larger political influence, too.

To put it in WWII forms, chemical weapons are like the V1/V2 weapon programs. They were not militarily successful or useful, and the amount of resources poured into them could have been used for much better weapons. However, they did mean that the Allies had to react to their presence, since they were terror weapons, and politically they couldn’t ignore them, even though it would have made military sense, in many cases, to do so.

The V1 and V2 were rocket weapons that used conventional explosives. They were terror weapons but they did not use WMDs. Hitler did not allow the use of chemical weapons on the battlefield during WWII, partly because he did not want German soldiers to suffer as he had (he had been blinded by mustard gas during WWI).