Whiskey Pete..White Phosphorus...

Since alot has been made about the use of artillery shells with white phosphorus in the last week er so i thought i should drop in my observations on the matter. Listed here is a site with a fairly typical description:

White Phosphorus Article

Now when i read this, a few things strike me pretty quickly. Firstly, I don't wanna trust any reporting from a site that can't get spell checker (white phosphorus or white phosphorous). Secondly after we look at this story we need to actually figure out what white phosphorus does and how it is used. White phosphorus has been used by many different militaries for the past 60+ years. It is used as a smoke creating agent. Yes it can cause burns from intense heat because it oxidizes very quickly in air at high temperatures. However, it is a solid and remains a solid. It would be almost just as easy to brush off as, for example, wood chips from a fire. It does have a tendency to stick to human flesh however but not the the degree that it actively seeks human flesh. Also to actually get hit with WP you would have to be very close to it. Close enough in fact that if the artillery shell that landed contained HE instead, you would, instead of being burned, would be blown apart or covered in shrap. The other two uses for WP are in flares (although not common) and tracer rounds. In a flare it is pretty much impossible to use it offensively because flares come down very slowly and the WP would burn out before it came near the ground. In a tracer round, the round burns for less than one second and is traveling at hundreds of miles per hour. There is neither time nor amount of WP for it to actually burn anything. In addition, WP is not very good at creating fire in the first place. Although it does burn, the burn is centrally contained, similar to a lit cigarette. If i threw it into a dry pile of leaves and left it, a fire might start but just throwing it at someone isn't gonna light them on fire. In addition, there is no treaty in the world that bans the use of WP. So in my opinion, all this conjecture about the use of WP as a "chemical weapon" is from people who don't know what they are talking about. You'd have to imagine if we really wanted to use a chemical weapon for the use that we are being accused of, we could come up withe something better, even napalm is far superior for doing what they accuse our military of doing. So either they are wrong or we are using an illegal weapon, very poorly, in a stupid method. You make the call.