Friday, April 19, 2024
American University
A project of the Rev. James B. Simpson Fellowship at American University’s School of Communication

I don’t really understand exactly why people regard this as being different, if you blow up someone with a bomb versus killing them with gas. Historically, the reason why countries banded together to prevent the use of gas attacks is because, among other things, it ended up being used inadvertently against your own troops….at this point the evidence seems to be that there’s only four countries in the world that have chemical weapons. We happen to be one of them. In fact, arguably, the United States has the largest stockpile of chemical weapons in the world. So, on the basis of that, I’m not sure that were in the best moral position to be indicating to others what to do about chemical weapons.

american-unversity
I don’t really understand exactly why people regard this as being different, if you blow up someone with a bomb versus killing them with gas. Historically, the reason why countries banded together to prevent the use of gas attacks is because, among other things, it ended up being used inadvertently against your own troops….at this point the evidence seems to be that there’s only four countries in the world that have chemical weapons. We happen to be one of them. In fact, arguably, the United States has the largest stockpile of chemical weapons in the world. So, on the basis of that, I’m not sure that were in the best moral position to be indicating to others what to do about chemical weapons.
— Alan Grayson