Chemical Weapons, Nuclear Weapons, and the Changing Meaning of Military Victory
Department of Research, Studies and Strategic Reports 03/08/2026
Makhlouf Meriem
Introduction
Human history is defined as much by the weapons it chooses to outlaw as by the horrors it chooses to institutionalize. In the twentieth century, the international community achieved a rare normative milestone by transforming chemical weapons, once widely deployed poison agents, into an international taboo that led to their near total elimination. Yet, in dismantling the threat of chemical warfare, humanity did not move toward peace; rather, it traded one existential fear for a far more absolute one. Today, global security rests on the fragile architecture of nuclear deterrence, a system that holds civilization hostage to the promise of mutual destruction.
This paper explores the structural paradoxes that govern modern warfare and arms control by confronting three central questions. Why was the international system capable of banning chemical weapons while remaining structurally bound to nuclear arms? Does overwhelming material and nuclear firepower translate into actual political victory in modern conflict? And is global nuclear disarmament a realistic political horizon or an unresolvable structural trap?
To answer these questions, this paper proceeds through three interconnected analytical sections. First, it explores the chemical nuclear paradox by comparing the legal, technical, and strategic divergence between the two weapon classes, demonstrating how dual-use infrastructure and deterrence utility protected the bomb from the fate of poison gas. Second, it deconstructs the firepower myth, examining empirical evidence on the limits of nuclear coercion, the leveling effect of complex terrain in asymmetric warfare, and the revolutionary impact of low-cost drone technology. Finally, it evaluates the feasibility of nuclear disarmament by analyzing the structural constraints of the security dilemma alongside groundbreaking advances in zero-knowledge verification technology that may offer a technical way out of political paralysis.
Part 1: Outlawing Poison While Embracing the Bomb
1.1 Poison Gas Gradually Transformed from an Accepted Tool into a Universal Taboo
Chemical weapons transitioned from an accepted tactical instrument on the battlefields of World War I to one of the few weapon categories the international community successfully banned. Across subsequent conflicts, most notably Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia and the Iran-Iraq War, chemical weapons suffered a profound shift in reputation, becoming stigmatized as intrinsically dishonorable and barbaric.
This growing revulsion culminated in the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC). However, the CWC did not merely reflect a shared moral judgment; it codified a prohibition mechanism backed by real operational teeth. Through the establishment of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the treaty built a comprehensive infrastructure incorporating strict prohibition, mandatory reporting, and intrusive verification.
1.2 Nations Accepted a Strict Norm Against Firing the Bomb While Continually Hoarding It
In contrast, nuclear weapons followed a fundamentally different normative trajectory. In The Nuclear Taboo, Nina Tannenwald argues that a powerful global norm against the use of nuclear weapons developed after 1945. This norm grew so robust that even hardline military realists operate under an implicit taboo regarding their deployment.
However, Tannenwald’s taboo governs non-use, not possession. The international system accepted a norm against firing nuclear weapons while simultaneously legitimizing their continued stockpiling and modernization. The contrast between arms regimes highlights this divergence:
- The Chemical Weapons Model: Built on universal prohibition and total elimination under the 1993 CWC, relying on easily inspectable, distinct production capacities and mandatory OPCW verification.
- The Nuclear Weapons Model: Built on regulated possession under the 1968 NPT, establishing a taboo against nuclear deployment while permitting stockpiling, backed by dual-use fuel cycles that major powers refuse to place under total external control.
The 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) represented the closest attempt to create a “chemical weapons moment” for nuclear arms. Yet, unlike the CWC, the TPNW was signed almost exclusively by non-nuclear states. Every nuclear-armed power systematically rejected it, highlighting the persistent structural divide between moral aspiration and power politics.
1.3 The Technical Inseparability of Civilian Energy and Bomb Fuel Prevents Total Control
Why did identical humanitarian fears produce radically different regulatory regimes? The answer lies largely in technical verification.
Chemical weapons production can be readily isolated from ordinary commercial chemical manufacturing, allowing the OPCW to inspect industrial sites without compromising vital commercial or national secrets. Conversely, nuclear weapons technology is inherently dual-use: the enrichment and reprocessing infrastructure required to produce weapons-grade material is identical to the technology used for civilian nuclear energy.
Enforcing absolute nuclear prohibition would require placing a nation’s entire domestic energy infrastructure under external monitoring. Nuclear-armed states have consistently rejected this intrusion, viewing it as an unacceptable breach of national sovereignty.
1.4 Unpredictable Chemical Gas Failed as a Strategic Weapon While Nuclear Arms Secured State Survival
Beyond technical verification, the two weapon classes diverge sharply in strategic utility. By the mid-twentieth century, militaries increasingly viewed chemical weapons as unpredictable tactical liabilities prone to shifting winds and easily mitigated by protective gear. Nuclear weapons, by contrast, secured an absolute strategic purpose: deterrence.
Under Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), nuclear weapons were not designed to win wars, but to prevent them through the guarantee of unthinkable retaliation. While chemical arms offered low, wind-dependent battlefield value, nuclear arms provided an existential threat capable of blocking preemption and guaranteeing state survival.
Richard Price’s research on the Syrian Civil War demonstrates that the chemical taboo remains binding; international condemnation and responses to chemical attacks reinforced the norm against their deployment. However, because nuclear weapons have not been used in combat since 1945, the nuclear taboo remains tested only by silence rather than by actual violation, creating a fundamental analytical limitation in evaluating its true strength.
Ultimately, the chemical nuclear paradox is structural. Chemical weapons were eliminated because they possessed minor military utility and could be separated from civilian industry. Nuclear arms persist because their fuel cycles are inseparable from civilian energy production and their strategic value as an existential defense remains unmatched.
Part 2: Why Overwhelming Firepower Fails to Guarantee Victory
2.1 Possessing Nuclear Arsenals Rarely Helps States Coerce Their Rivals in Ongoing Conflicts
If nuclear weapons represent the peak of military firepower, logic suggests that nuclear states should easily coerce non-nuclear rivals. However, empirical security research fundamentally challenges this assumption.
In their extensive historical and statistical analysis, Todd Sechser and Matthew Fuhrmann demonstrate that nuclear-armed states do not achieve superior outcomes when attempting to coerce adversaries. Possessing the bomb fails to yield greater success in territorial disputes or coercive diplomacy. While nuclear weapons effectively deter existential threats, they contribute remarkably little to offensive coercion, blackmail, or shaping the outcome of ongoing conventional conflicts.
2.2 Advanced Military Technology Consistently Loses Its Dominance in Tunnels and Narrow Alleyways
The failure of raw power to guarantee victory is even more evident in asymmetric warfare, which encompasses conflicts characterized by fundamental disparities in strategy, organization, and political stakes. Superior hardware is frequently neutralized by physical geography and urban environments. Urban warfare literature highlights how terrain acts as a “great equalizer,” counteracting major technological advantages:
- Dense Urban Funnels: In Grozny in 1994, the Russian military dispatched the heavily armored Maikop Brigade into the city center expecting a rapid capitulation. Chechen combatants utilized narrow streets to trap the column, inflicting devastating losses, including 800 casualties and the destruction of 20 out of 26 tanks, using basic rocket-propelled grenades fired from rooftop and basement dead-zones where tank cannons could not elevate to reach.
- Subterranean Networks: Air power and precision munitions rely on identifying and targeting assets from above. Forces throughout history have negated this advantage by moving underground. North Korean and Chinese forces used extensive tunnel systems to survive UN artillery; the Viet Cong constructed the 200-kilometer Củ Chi tunnel network, engineered with air filtration and deceptive chambers that defied B-52 carpet bombings and forced manual ground combat.
- Modern Concealment: Non-state actors, such as Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, built deep subterranean infrastructures specifically to operate beneath the surveillance thresholds of advanced drones and satellite arrays.
In each instance, adversaries who understand terrain build operational strategies that bypass an opponent’s reliance on clear line-of-sight targeting and superior armor.
2.3 Weaker Forces Can Prevail Simply by Outlasting the Political Patience of Great Powers
Beyond physical terrain, political asymmetry explains why power does not dictate results. As Andrew Mack posited in his foundational 1975 framework, strong states must achieve a clear, positive political objective to claim victory, whereas weaker states or insurgents merely need to avoid complete destruction.
Over time, this asymmetry compounds. As a protracted conflict drags on, domestic and economic costs escalate for the invading power, while the insurgent’s mere survival is framed as a success. Superior firepower cannot resolve this dynamic because the primary challenge is political endurance, not destructive capacity.
2.4 Inexpensive Consumer Drones Are Actively Neutralizing Multi-Million-Dollar Armored Vehicles
The war in Ukraine reinforces this shift, demonstrating how low-cost, mass-produced technology can impose unsustainable costs on a materially superior force. First-Person-View (FPV) drones costing a few hundred dollars, typically around $500, consistently disable or destroy armored vehicles worth several million dollars.
Furthermore, long-range drone campaigns targeting industrial and energy infrastructure demonstrate that low-cost systems can reach deep into an adversary’s economic engine. These campaigns impose direct costs that alter the political leverage of belligerents during strategic negotiations.
While nuclear capability continues to define the strategic threshold of major power conflict, tactical dominance on the battlefield relies increasingly on adaptive innovation, industrial capacity, and cost imposition rather than sheer warhead counts.
Part 3: Rethinking the Feasibility of Nuclear Disarmament
3.1 Universal Anarchy Creates a Self-Reinforcing Paranoia Trap That Makes Trusting Rivals Dangerous
The structural barrier to complete nuclear disarmament is rooted in the security dilemma, first conceptualized by John Herz in 1950 and expanded by Robert Jervis in 1978. In an anarchic international system lacking a centralized authority to enforce contracts, actions taken by one state to increase its security, such as acquiring defensive arms, inevitably reduce the perceived security of its rivals.
This creates a self-reinforcing trust trap:
- State A enhances its defenses or retains nuclear weapons out of caution.
- State B perceives these actions as potential threats and expands its own arsenal in response.
- Mutual distrust escalates, making complete disarmament seem dangerously reckless for any single party.
Even if nuclear-armed nations genuinely sought total abolition, no state can verify with absolute certainty that a rival will not secretly retain an operational capability. Because a single unmonitored nuclear weapon yields strategic dominance, rational states choose to hedge, slowing disarmament and locking the global system into perpetual caution.
3.2 Strategic Stability Fluctuates Depending on Whether Technology Favors Retaliation or Interception
Jervis noted that the intensity of the security dilemma fluctuates depending on whether military technology favors offense or defense, and whether offensive weapons are distinguishable from defensive ones.
Reliable second-strike capabilities, such as submarine-based ballistic missile forces, actually stabilize the security dilemma. Because missile submarines guarantee retaliatory capacity without signaling an immediate pre-emptive strike, they reduce the pressure for immediate launch. Conversely, highly accurate counterforce weapons and missile defense systems sharpen the security dilemma: they threaten an adversary’s retaliatory capacity, making disarmament look like unilateral vulnerability.
3.3 Groundbreaking Zero-Knowledge Verification Could Finally Allow Safe Disarmament Inspections
Historically, nuclear verification required inspectors to examine warheads closely, risking the exposure of highly classified warhead designs and national security secrets. However, recent scientific advances offer a novel technical mechanism to circumvent this political deadlock.
Researchers at Princeton and MIT have developed zero-knowledge verification systems utilizing techniques like nuclear resonance fluorescence. These systems allow an external inspector to confirm that a physical object is a valid nuclear warhead undergoing genuine dismantling without revealing any classified information regarding its internal geometry or chemical composition.
While technical hurdles remain, such as preventing states from spoofing detectors with non-weapons-grade materials, zero-knowledge proofs address one of the structural barriers identified in Part 1. By separating verification from the exposure of military secrets, technological innovation can help mitigate the trust deficit inherent in the security dilemma.
Conclusion
The evolution of modern weapons reveals a profound truth about global order: nations do not surrender power out of moral consensus alone, but when technology, strategic utility, and verification mechanisms align. Chemical weapons were successfully abolished because their tactical battlefield utility was low, their stigmatization was absolute, and their production could be separated from peaceful civilian enterprise. Nuclear weapons remain entrenched because they offer existential deterrence, their fuel cycles are linked to civilian energy, and the anarchic international system rewards states that maintain ultimate security guarantees.Yet, as this paper demonstrates, the assumption that nuclear arsenals provide total control is an illusion. Nuclear weapons fail to translate into effective coercive diplomacy, and superior military firepower is regularly neutralized by asymmetric terrain, political endurance, and cheap, adaptive technologies like modern drone networks.
Achieving a nuclear-free world is neither a simple moral choice nor an impossible dream. It requires addressing the structural logic of the security dilemma through political design and modern verification technologies. Until verification protocols like zero-knowledge proofs are fully realized and integrated into global treaties, humanity will continue to navigate a dangerous balance, relying on the non-use of the ultimate weapon while remaining exposed to the risks of its existence.
Bibliography
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