It makes sense to agree to not do biological weapons. Because the line between "warfare agent" and "extinction event" gets blurred really fast when you go into customized superbugs.

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.