Re: Arming Outer Space

[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Henry Spencer) wrote 


> Exactly.  There has been occasional debate about whether very large and
> very effective "conventional" weapons conceivably might qualify, but so
> far nobody's proposed it seriously, to the best of my knowledge.

(With the exception of the US criminal code, where it's not only
been proposed, but passed into law and successfully used in court.
Timothy McVeigh was put to death precisely because he used such a
weapon of mass destruction, to wit, a truck bomb.)

Howsomever, the semantic/conceptual confusion as to what should
be called a WMD is well illustrated by the broader tendency to
exclude large, effective conventional explosive weapons but to
include such things as sarin artillery shells. Regrettably abundant
experience shows that the former are by far the more destructive/
lethal in conditions of actual use.