For nukes, the argument is a little weaker, but not by very much. True, you can make a city go away by firebombing it... but you can't smuggle in a full-scale air raid in a standard twenty-foot shipping container.

But chemical weapons really don't belong in that club. I still haven't heard a convincing argument that choking on sarin is worse than bleeding out from shrapnel, or stepping on a cluster bomb sub-munition, or being shredded by machine gun fire.

I guess I can see how chemical weapons are more indiscriminate than machine guns (as long as you don't sell the machine guns to street gangs pretending to be rebel forces)... but you'd have a really hard time arguing that they're more indiscriminate than air raids. And sarin, unlike cluster bombing, doesn't leave unexploded munitions around for people to enjoy after the cessation of hostilities.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

Nation-states don't like chemical warfare because a small number of semi-trained or trained chemical weapons technicians and experts can cause a huge amount of disruption and death.

same with nukes, come to think about it...

for wars to be profitable they can't be won too easily. lots of blood and rubble the 'geneva conventions' way, as long as there's an angry young man to sell guns to there's money to be made, same with arming besieged dictators.
 you don't want these profit machines wars to be 'over', unless you are looking for those fat 'rebuilding' contracts.

oh yes, war is the inevitable result of too much money in too few hands, there's no payoff to peace comparable.

that's why they are so against a green economy, it decentralises power, literally as well as metaphorically. any monopolist's nemesis!

cook the planet for quick profits... when people can't afford to pay the rentier class for the privilege of staying alive, then war is what happens, by hook and by crook. consume what and as we wish, or die!

nice planet, pity about most of the gulled inhabitants.

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty