This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, May 2, 2013.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Syrian government has perhaps crossed a red line set by the Obama administration, the use of chemical weapons. a John Mueller, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and co-author of

terror, security, and money offers his thoughts.

Why does it matter that the issue here is chemical weapons rather than

bullets or some other like mortars or something like that.

Yeah, well it really shouldn't.

Of course we've gone to war over, it's more or less chemical weapons in 2003,

so the history has a distinct problem there.

The starting World War I, when the chemical weapons were used a lot,

they tended to start to become differentiated from other weapons even though chemical

weapons actually were more humane in the sense that if you were wounded by

gas there's a very good chance you'd survive. Only about two or three percent died, whereas if you're wounded by

bullet or shrapnel is more like 25 percent. But you died in a somewhat horrible way in a lot of ways.

So I picked up this onus and of course has now been banned in various ways. The problem is in particular tying it in

as a weapon of mass destruction. Almost everybody's written about chemical weapons tends to suggest that, well, they can't really kill massively.

In World War I, they counted for less and well less than 1% of the total deaths, battle deaths.

They created a lot of casualties that made people sick, but they wouldn't be killed.

They'd be out of action for a few days and then come back. And in order for a chemical weapon to really

kill a fairly large number of people, they would have to be used, you have to use a lot of them.

In the case of a nuclear weapon, one nuclear weapon can kill massively, but one chemical

weapon can't. You'd have to, for example, to, one study has demonstrated that in order to kill more people than you could kill with

...