In Reply to: 'A hiring recession': Trump's tariffs devastate job market posted by mh on December 16, 2025 at 10:54:40
Nuclear weapons and chemical weapons are dramatically different things. A chemical weapon, while terrible, has a much smaller area of killing that a hydrogen bomb. There are high-power conventional weapons that are more lethal than chemical weapons.
This conflating different types of weapons allowed George W Bush administration, to claim that since Saddam used chemical weapons we were at risk of nuclear destruction.
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The executive order President Donald Trump signed Monday designating fentanyl and the opioid’s precursor chemicals as weapons of mass destruction has “zero legal impact,” said CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig during a “NewsNight” appearance later that evening.
“It is completely meaningless,” said Honig. “It’s symbolic. Federal law describes what a weapon of mass destruction is. Generally, it has to be an incendiary device, something that blows up, something that shoots, something that disseminates poison, that kind of thing.”
He added, “If you commit a crime involving a weapon of mass destruction, it’s very serious. Penalties involved could be life in prison, could be death if someone dies. But the president saying drugs or fentanyl are now weapons of mass destruction has zero, zero legal impact.”
The U.S. has launched deadly military strikes against alleged drug smugglers in Caribbean and Pacific waters since September, with Trump maintaining that these potentially extrajudicial killings aim almost exclusively to curb the flow of narcotics into the country.
Honig argued Trump has no authority to designate drugs as weapons, let alone WMDs.
“It’s up to the judges,” he said Monday. “It’s up to the parties on a case-by-case basis. It’s an interesting argument. It doesn’t meet the definition. But it’s like, if the president declared that a slingshot is a firearm, it doesn’t make it a firearm, for legal purposes.”