Originally posted by Sandman_SBM
If he did have it, I guess he could have been saving it for the next war.
yeah... that's it...
Sandman,
To use N.B.C. weapons you need several things.
1. A stationary enemy, nice to have a stagnant front like WW1 but you need the other guy to hold still for a bit. We moved way to fast to use them on us.
2. Weather needs to cooperate, no wind and surely not one blowing toward you. The weather in the early days of the war would have rendered the weapons useless.
3. The enemy needs to be unequipped to handle the threat. if he is trained and equipped you will only piss him off and he may use with justification his WMD i.e. tactual nuclear as we have said we will respond to WMD in kind and that’s the only kind we have. They knew of our MOP capabilities. I am also sure they were advised not to use them by a large number of the advisers they employed.
4. The delivery system to get the weapon on target when the stationary target is located. Iraq had only artillery to do this so the warheads had to be brought to within 20 or so miles of us to do that. We were not there long enough to even think about the getting the weapons to the tubes even if they could communicate this information. We destroyed their ability to communicate at most every level, but most certainly at the field level. They could not really use long range rockets as to the problem with targeting and the threat to the interception of said rockets.
5. The will to use the weapons at the field level. I believe the prewar propaganda program may have been at work here as well, there is evidence of oil rigs that were set with explosives but they had been sabotaged so they would not go off. I think many higher ranking officers knew the gig was up and really didn’t want to take the risk for no real payoff militarily.
Many of these items are I believe also true as to why Germany did not use any Chemical weapons in WW2.
Biological weapons are not a weapon to use in a wartime environment, as they are to variable in there use and effectiveness and they are slow in their mortality.
To say that "if they had them they would have used them" is really an over simplification, we had weapons that we did not use for a verity of reasons.
The facts about the possession of Chemical and Biological weapons are not disputed by anyone, they had them in the past and used them, this is a fact. To think that Saddam just decided to get rid of them out of the goodness of his hart is laughable. The inability of them to show where and how the were destroyed is what speaks to the deception of the regime. If I lived next to you and you wanted me to show you I had disarmed like I said I did would not be hard, if I really did and I wanted to prove it. If you told me something and it was true and you wanted (or needed) to back it up I thing you would go balls out to show my the truth. Look at South Africa as an example. They did and wanted to prove it and did.
It is really Simple,
Regards and thanks for letting me put in my 2 cents.
