Weapons of mass distraction: Part 1

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Biological Weapons: Fact Vs. Fiction >>

Happy Thursday everyone! If you’re a regular, welcome back, if you’re new to the blog, then you’re very welcome. This week we’re going to start off what should be a four-part series on WMDs: Weapons of Mass Destruction, and their treatment on screen.

Today’s post is about chemical weapons, those nefarious tools most beloved of baddies in fiction and, in some cases, real life. We’ll focus first on the Hollywood baddies, and how they use chemical weapons (CW) because of their scary reputation, the effects they have on their enemies, and their strategic effect and utility in their schemes. Then we’ll discuss some real-life users of CW and contrast their experience with that on screen. Finally, we’ll spend a bit of time discussing the importance (or lack thereof) of CW in the modern military context.

This series will hopefully¹ consist of four posts, one for each of the elements of “CBRN”, that hateful abbreviation which strikes fear into the heart of every soldier² :

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Hollywood baddies love chemical weapons

Chemical weapons, and usually (more specifically), nerve gas, is unquestionably a favourite weapon of on-screen villains, to mention a few examples:

Before we go into detail on nerve agents, let’s take a minute to see where they fit in the grand scheme of CW:

There are three reasons for nerve gas’s popularity with on-screen baddies: fear, rapid lethality, and mass casualty effect.

Chemical weapons have a scary reputation

Let’s start with the fear factor, since this aspect is the closest to the truth. If you’re a supervillain, the mere threat of chemical weapons is enough to make world leaders sit up and take note of your demands.

Of course, this means that they also draw the attention of the world’s best spies, special agents, cops, and all-round good guys. There are real-life parallels here. The US and its allies went to war (and were ultimately defeated) in Iraq based in part on the supposition that Saddam Hussein’s regime had an ongoing CW program³. In fact, the intelligence that the UK’s MI6 intelligence agency obtained about Saddam’s CW program was so dramatic and alarming that it read just like a scene from the aforementioned The Rock:

This is, of course, because it was. The “intel” was lifted straight from the film, and the experts along the way who knew better⁴ said nothing, or were told to say nothing, because the government wanted to go to war and needed the justification. Another real-life parallel is Syria, where Basher Al-Assad’s use of CW against “rebel” civilian populations drew international ire and was a US red line—at least, until it wasn’t.

Back in Hollywood, screenwriters make good use of this fear factor. CW, like all WMDs, are so universally feared that including them in the storyline automatically raises the stakes for the heroes and makes the villain much worse. They also give the writers space to escalate or at least vary the threat from sequel to sequel or from series to series, e.g. in 24.

Chemical weapons have dramatic effects

Hollywood writers and the baddies they write both love CW for the dramatic, gruesome, and painful effects they have on their enemies. Nerve agents such as Sarin, Tabun, and VX first cause a runny nose, chest tightness, and pinprick pupils. Higher doses cause difficulty breathing, and the loss of control of bodily functions (i.e. vomiting, urination, and defecation). Death occurs from asphyxiation due to loss of control of the breathing muscles. Lethal doses can be as low as 20 milligrams for a fully-grown adult male, and nerve agents can be absorbed through the skin. Chemical weapons are scary and a dramatic way to go. They are not at all like the ballet-style fake deaths/knockouts in Goldfinger:

Bad and all as the above effects are, they are sometimes exaggerated for effect to include Simpsons-style “monsterism”:

Filmmakers take some liberties with these effects to raise the tension. After all, nerve gas is a lot less scary if a simple respirator and skin covering can protect against it. Instead, it’s made corrosive too, and blisters skin. And victims are often shown clutching their throats, although this would be a symptom of choking agents such as chlorine:

Chemical weapons are “super effective”

The biggest reason that CW are beloved of on-screen baddies is their supposedly highly lethal effects. This is also the furthest stretch of the truth, as we’ll see in the next two sections. Let’s summarise some of the ways selected supervillains try to use CW to achieve their strategic aims:

Film & baddie	CW used and amount	Desired effect	Strategic aim
Hugo Drax, Moonraker	Nerve gas (from orchids), somehow only deadly to humans5. Less than one space-station’s worth	Kill all humans on Earth	Start humanity anew with master race
Brig. Gen. Francis Hummel, The Rock	VX nerve gas (15 rockets’ worth)	Kill many people in San Francisco	Extract money from government
Auric Goldfinger, Goldfinger	Delta-9 nerve gas (non-lethal and lethal variants). One aerobatic squadron’s worth	Incapacitate soldiers at Fort Knox	Access the gold in Fort Knox vaults and render it worthless
Terrorists (or so it seems), 24	Sentox VX-1 (20 canisters)	Mass casualties in LA	Change US foreign policy (or so it seems)

In each case, notice how the desired effect involves mass casualties (or all the casualties, in the case of Moonraker). This is the least realistic aspect of CW in film & TV: they work well. As we’ll see in the next section, CW, while scary (and something you don’t want to be on the wrong side of), are not magic. While Hollywood greatly downplays the lethal effects of explosives, as we’ve discussed on this blog before, it exaggerates the lethal effects of CW.

Real-life terrorists have used chemical weapons, but to more limited effect…

As I mentioned above, terrorists’ use of CW is unfortunately not confined to the silver screen. The most infamous example is the Tokyo subway attack by the Aum Shinrikyo cult in 1995. The cult manufactured their own sarin gas and released it on five packed subway trains during the morning rush-hour. They killed twelve and hospitalised 5,000. It was a despicable attack, and I wouldn’t want to minimise the suffering of the victims, but it could have been much worse. One way it could have been worse was if the terrorists had used explosives, like the perpetrators of the 7/7 bombings in London (52 killed and 800 injured) or the March 2004 commuter train bombings in Madrid (200 killed and 2,500 injured).

Another notorious terrorist use of CW was the attack on the “Midwest Fur Fest” furry convention in 2014 at a hotel near Chicago. This attack involved chlorine gas released in a stairwell adjacent to the man hall of the venue. Sadly, the perpetrators were never found. The police botched the investigation and most media commentators were dismissive of the attack because it related to the furry fandom⁶. Once again, however, and not to minimise the trauma caused, but these casualty figures could have been far, far higher if explosives were used instead of CW.

CW have also been used by the Tamil Tigers during the Sri Lankan Civil War in the 1990s (they used commercially available chlorine gas), and by ISIS during their heyday.

The most recent such attack (arguably not terrorist, since it was state-sanctioned) was the poisoning of Sergei Skripal, a British spy, and his daughter Yulia, by agents of the Russian Federation in 2018. The Russian assassins used the “Novichok”⁷ nerve agent in their attempted killing. The poison claimed its first victim several months later, when an unsuspecting person sprayed the discarded bottle of nerve agent onto their arm, thinking it was perfume, since it was in a perfume bottle.

Chemical weapons, therefore, have been used by various terrorist factions, but never to a great or decisive effect⁸. Put simply, CW, for all their horrors, are not as good at killing people as high explosives and bullets are. And terrorists are not the only people who’ve come to this realisation, as we’ll see in the next section.

…which is why mainstream militaries have stopped using them too

Modern armies don’t habitually use chemical weapons, because they’re not very effective. You might argue that it’s actually due to the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1997⁹ which bans the use of CW, as well as the large-scale development, production, stockpiling, or transfer; and also mandates the destruction of existing stockpiles and verification. All UN member states apart from Israel, South Sudan, Egypt, and North Korea are parties to the agreement. Surely this explains it, right? The vast majority of countries are held in check by international norms, otherwise they would develop and maybe even use CW.

There’s one problem with this argument: international opprobrium has not stopped the world’s biggest powers from signing on to treaties banning other “unsavoury” weapons¹⁰ if there is a strategic advantage to be gained by keeping said weapons. For example:

• Landmines. The Ottawa Treaty (also of 1997) bans the use, stockpiling, production, and transfer of anti-personnel mines¹¹. Although 164 countries have ratified the treaty, major exceptions include USA, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Egypt, and Israel. In other words, anyone who feels they might need to use anti-personnel landmines has declined to ban them. Ukraine is a signatory to the treaty but this has not stopped it using anti-personnel mines against the Russians in the ongoing war.
• Cluster munitions. The Convention on Cluster Munitions (adopted in 2008 in Dublin and Oslo) does likewise for cluster munitions¹². 124 countries have committed to the goals of the convention, with notable exceptions which will not surprise you one bit. At the time of writing, Lithuania had just announced its intention to withdraw from the treaty.
• Nuclear weapons. Although there is no international agreement banning nuclear weapons, there is the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). This is signed by almost every country (let’s come back to the four exceptions), although there’s a catch: any country which already had, or was about to develop nuclear weapons is allowed to keep them. Why? Because nuclear weapons actually are effective, unlike CW, and no sane country would give them up having developed them. And those four exceptions I mentioned above?
  • India: Has nukes.
  • Pakistan: Has nukes.
  • Israel: Is universally assumed to have nukes, but does not confirm or deny.
  • South Sudan: You would assume that, as a new country with bigger fish to fry until quite recently, they have simply not gotten around yet to joining.

International treaties won’t stop a country using the weapons it wants to use. The real reason that modern armies don’t use chemical weapons is that they’re not very effective, at least in the context of how modern militaries like to conduct their business. I’m going to summarise an argument made very convincingly by Brett Devereux in his ACOUP blog (if you don’t know it yet, you’re in for a treat). He says:

• Armies which follow the “modern” system are much more effective than those which don’t (for example, look at the US military Vs. Iraqi military in the First Gulf War).
• The modern system relies on lots of manoeuvre at the tactical level, which in turn relies on high levels of training of and trust in junior officers and NCOs. This is hard to achieve, which is why many armies¹³ are unable to replicate the effectiveness of “Modern System” armies.
• Chemical weapons, by denying the use of large areas for a long duration, can interfere with the ability of modern armies to do what they do best. However, respirators and chemical warfare suits enable modern armies to mitigate against CW, even if a less “modern” adversary uses them.

• Pound for pound¹⁴, CW are far less effective on the battlefield than high explosives.
• For these reasons, modern militaries eschew CW. As confirmatory evidence, look at the fact that CW production has stopped in all countries with a modern military.

I buy his argument, with the only caveat being that anyone who thinks that you can do normal military tactics in dress category 4R clearly hasn’t gone through the ritual “degradation” exercise which is part of CBRN training. But that’s a minor quibble. Modern militaries don’t use CW because they don’t have to: high explosives are more effective. If CW were effective on the battlefield, you can bet they would be using them (or at least keeping them in reserve as an option).

Update: Since writing this, I have been reading some reports about Russia’s recent use of chloropicrin against Ukrainian fortified positions. Chloropicrin is a tear gas (“lachrymatory agent”, in the parlance) and also induces vomiting. It remains to be seen how decisive this use of CW is, but it is obviously an important caveat to the argument above.

Conclusion: Weapons of mass distraction

Chemical weapons are not (or at least are no longer) effective weapons of war. They are also not hugely effective as terrorist weapons of mass casualty. They are, however, effective at causing fear and perhaps panic. Hollywood writers know this and use CW to impart a greater sense of threat. And all of this is not to play down their danger (which is very real) or the suffering they can and have caused (which is also very real), but to put their threat in perspective when compared to high explosives or other WMDs.

In this sense, chemical weapons might be more accurately described as “weapons of mass distraction” rather than “destruction.” But fear and panic are still very real things and can cause real death and injury as they spread in a population. Hollywood villains are right to consider CW in their master plans, but they should really keep a better eye out for spies who want to spoil their fun. And if they catch the spy, they should just shoot them there and then, no elaborate slow death nonsense. As always, XKCD has a comic for this:

Next week we’re going to continue looking at WMDs, but will shift our focus to biological weapons, including their use on screen and in real life. I won’t give the game away but will simply note that almost every country in the world has signed up to the Biological Weapons Convention—this should tell you everything you need to know.

As always, thanks for reading! Please let me know what you think of chemical weapons in film and TV in the comments below. If you liked this article, please subscribe so that you never miss and article, and share this content with anyone whom you think might enjoy it. I’m always trying to expand my reach and get new readers to inspire me to write about new topics. I’ll see you next week.

Featured Image: The Rock, Buena Vista Pictures Distribution (1996)

1. I’m qualifying this statement because I find my posts often end up in a very different structure to my original plan. For example, the Exploding Cars two-parter (1 and 2) was planned as one post which grew a bit too big. By contrast, for the Science Fiction Weapons series, I had originally planned to write separate posts for technical, tactical, operational, and strategic considerations, rather than the by weapon type (lasers 1 and 2, and lightsabers) posts which they turned out/are turning out to be. It’s an uncertain process, is creation. To use an old military maxim: no plan survives first contact with the enemy. ↩︎
2. Not, I hasten to add, because of the fear of the effects of CW. No, it’s because of the fear of carrying extra kit, and ultimately having to do all the normally painful parts of soldering (crawling along ditches dragging a machinegun and 25kg of kit), but with an extra uncomfortable layer of clothing and a mask which seriously restricts your breathing, vision, and communications. ↩︎
3. He did undeniably have a CW program in the past: the Iraqis used CW during their 1980-88 war against Iran. ↩︎
4. For one thing, nerve gas isn’t kept in glass, which is rather notoriously breakable, and the last material you’d use in a munition of any kind. ↩︎
5. And delivered in <sigh> glass globes. 🤦‍♂️ ↩︎
6. Some examples of contemporaneous reporting are here and here, with a notable lack of mainstream outlets. If you want to know more about this, I would strongly recommend Fur and Loathing, a podcast about this incident and the hunt for justice for the victims. ↩︎
7. “Novichok” is Russian for “newbie”, and is not a single substance, but a family of new nerve agents which are binary. This means they are stored and transported as two separate, less or non-toxic substances, which combine to form the deadly CW. ↩︎
8. Of course, you could debate at length the meaning of “decisive” in the context of terrorism, but at its simplest, it would involve killing many people. And again, while not minimising the pain and suffering of victims in the examples above, it’s quite clear that CW never came close to matching the horrors of conventional explosive terrorism. ↩︎
9. The Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on their Destruction, administered by the Office for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). ↩︎
10. This supposes, of course, that there are “savoury” types of lethal weapons, but you get my drift. ↩︎
11. Anti-tank mines are still “fine”. ↩︎
12. Which I’ll cover in more detail sometime. For now, think of cluster munitions as one big bomb which dispenses a whole bunch of small bombs. The problem they pose is that lots of the small bombs don’t explode right away and pose a threat to civilians after the conflict has ended. ↩︎
13. Devereux calls them “Static System” armies. ↩︎
14. Kilo for kilo, if you hate freedom. ↩︎