What are the historical reasons for banning chemical weapons

>>2658028
Just because they lumped them in with NBC, nuclear biological and chemical.

Chemical is the baby brother of those three; really nobody wants to see nukes go off.

Nukes are bad, mkay?

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>>2658032
chemical weapons were banned in warfare before nuclear bombs existed.

>>2658028

>What are the historical reasons for banning chemical weapons use internationally?
Because chemical weapons are of severely limited use for anything other than terror purposes. They're only really more effective than conventional things at attacking a group of people who are enclosed somewhere, otherwise you're probably better off with just a bomb or a bunch of bullets. States don't really approve of that sort of thing, so they try to outlaw chemical weapons.

>If chemical weapons weren't internationally banned then those smaller powers would be more of a threat to the large powers. Is that accurate?
No, it is not accurate. No chemical weapon yet known is great at facing people who are in the open, spread out, and have gas masks. They'd be all but useless in conventional war against a great power, outside maybe one or two time surprise value if they weren't prepared against such.

>>2658054
okay, that makes sense to me.

>>2658028
Almost all major powers agreed to ban chemical weapons because of its performance during WWI, where soldiers of both sides were suffering greatly from its mutual use, both sides suffered so greatly from it that it was agreed by all signatories of the Geneva Protocol because of the sheer suffering it brings to people, burning the lungs or making people drown to death from the fluid buildup in their lungs.

It's a horrific affliction that most parties agree brought too much suffering to both enemy troops and their own, so it was adopted as a customary law to prohibit their use. The only real solid objective reasoning why this is upheld by the greater international community is because it's a mutually beneficial agreement, as no party wants to deal with the effects of casualties for their soldiers from chemical attacks.

Another large reason is to prevent their expanded use towards civilian targets. Again, no party in war wants to deal with a chemical strike on a largely populated city where the gas can linger for weeks, whereas conventional bombing lasts until the bombing run is done.

With mutual benefit from the agreement being the cornerstone that holds the agreement together, other smaller details come into play such as chemical clouds being unpredictable and at the mercy of the wind once it's released. The gas you fired could easily drift back into your own trenches which happened often in WWI.

the real take home from this is that the weapons are banned because all signatory parties benefit from the agreement more than they would by having them be a staple of war, where both sides using gas wouldn't give one party an inherent advantage over the other.

lastly, violations of the agreement are met with punitive actions by signatory parties in order to deter its use, to add a consequence to violating the agreement, as a show of force to say that the terms of the agreement simply will not be ignored.

>>2658028
They screw up babies, and the environment.

Google Agent Orange.

Another reason is because they basically slowly torture someone until they die, where as a bullet to the heart does that in a couple of seconds.

>>2658127
>Almost all major powers agreed to ban chemical weapons because of its performance during WWI, where soldiers of both sides were suffering greatly from its mutual use,
90% of WWI deaths were from artillery yet there were no agreements to ban it. Stop spouting dumb memes moron.

>>2658165
I wonder what the total tonnage of conventional artillery was compared to the tonnage of chemical weaponry used

>>2658207
Are you seriously arguing that chemical weapons were more effective at killing people than explosives?