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Old 06-05-2012, 04:20 PM
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Another very nice product, James.

How much Soviet use of chemical weapons in Europe would be influenced by Warsaw Pact opinion is an interesting question.

I think a few points deserve further expansion and/or mitigation.

Chemical weapons play an offensive and defensive role. As Leg has pointed out, persistent agents are effective for area denial. Combined with surface-laid mines, persistent agents can be very effective indeed at preventing access. Offensively, the preferred agents are fast-acting and have a short lifespan. For this reason, nerve agents are popular offensive agents. However, persistent agents are useful in offensive operations against fixed targets like airfields, ports, and rail yards. Defensively, persistent agents are the preferred option.

The big problem with chemical agents is that they function much like nuclear weapons. Once they are used, there is an overpowering logic to using them every bit as much as the enemy, if not a bit more so. From a military standpoint, chemical weapons promise to slow operations to a crawl as everyone struggles to adapt to contaminated environments and working in protective gear. Casualties among troops will be very great. Casualties among civilians will be stupendous—especially when chemical use moves from tactical to operational to strategic use.

China will answer a lot of questions about chemical use. I think there’s a very good chance that after the drawbacks of chemical use become a bit more apparent both sides will find foreswearing their use desirable. If China suffers a million casualties from chemical use, James, we can bet that they will find some means of retaliating. The use of theater ballistic missiles to deliver persistent agents against communications hubs inside the eastern Soviet Union probably will cause the Soviets to give serious consideration as to whether chemicals are worth using. Fairly quickly, use will escalate to the point at which the use of chemical weapons probably resembles the use of incendiaries in strategic bombing by the Western Allies in WW2: the logic will be that denying the enemy the use of transportation, power generation, and factories by means of persistent agents is a natural development from the use of persistent agents to shut down communications hubs, chokepoints (like bridges and mountain passes), airfields, and supply dumps closer to the front. Both sides will ramp up use quite rapidly until someone cries uncle internally. At that point, threats of nuclear use probably will be aired. The Soviets might suffer fewer casualties in this scenario, but their more restricted supply lines are quite vulnerable to disruption by a relative handful of successful employments of persistent agents. Being on the offensive, the Soviets are going to need an uninterrupted flow of supplies more than the Chinese. I would expect that by the time Operation Red Willow (the main Chinese counteroffensive in 1995) kicks off, both sides would have foresworn further chemical use out of sheer necessity.

In Europe, the lessons of the chemical campaign in China are going to be hard to ignore. The Soviets probably will have a go at their use during the initial West German invasion. The US will promptly supply the West Germans with counter-balancing weapons, and the logic of non-use will rear its ugly head.

Getting back to James’ observation about Warsaw Pact opinion regarding chemical use, the front-line states of Poland and Czechoslovakia would have an interesting position. The Soviets would be highly inclined to ignore their “allies’” opinions regarding chemical use. On the other hand, the Poles and Czechoslovaks would be keenly aware of the effects of chemical warfare on military and civilian personnel alike. It would be very hard to believe that an escalation of chemical warfare to operational and strategic levels would not involve large quantities of persistent agents used against roads, rail, and air hubs in Poland and Czechoslovakia. This might appear to be so detrimental to the Poles and Czechoslovaks that they would threaten the Soviets with withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact. The Soviets, already badly pressed in China and the DDR, would be much more inclined to acquiesce than we might otherwise consider them to be.
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