Chemistry as a Weapon

I plan for one of my characters to be well-versed in chemistry so he can create a variety of weapons. What else can you think chemistry can make? Besides bombs, acids, poisons, etc.

This is a character involved in a war zone, so I wonder if he'll be able to brew these substances up or does it really require a laboratory?

Is it possible to make these substances out on a war zone?

No. Someone with that kind of skill will stay back home and do his research. He would be too much valuable asset to risk placing in a battleground.

Unless of course this is a fantasy story and battle chemists are a thing.

Do most fantasy stories even have chemists (not alchemists), let alone explosives and other chemical products?

Unfortunately not.

In a war zone? there is not much a chemist can do. Modern chemicals need labs to work, resources, other base chemicals to mix together to create FUN* stuff. All the really FUN*stuff a chemist can make, assuming they know how, tend to be rather finky to make and often just as dangerous to the person making them as the intended target.

but lets hand wave that for a second, you have a fantasy tony stark level chemist here and can do anything he wants in a cave with a box of scrapes.

In general a chemist can do one of three things to a human, explode you, light you on fire or make chemicals react in your body. That last one sound technical, but that's just a short broad stroke explanation of how chemical weapons work, you breath them in and they react with your body. Some of the really deadly stuff just needs skin contact to interrupt the connections of your nerves and kill you. . . with less then 50 milligrams, but it's also really hard to make and makes your character a unmitigated bad guy, full stop, use chemical weapons, do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars you are now evil in alignment. Some chemicals also react with your body, some of those can go through your skin and react with your bonus forming acids within your body, (shuders) lets stop talking about these. Suffice to say, there is a way to weaponize pretty much all of the periodic table in a way that leaves you a weeping mess spraying fluids from every orifice. Your only limited by what you can make, and your own morals.

Being lit on fire is only slightly below chemical weapons in the 'bad ways to die.' This is kinda a mix with the above category since a lot of chemicals react with you, by lighting you on fire. The most extreme one i remember is chlorine triflouride, and by the word "flouride" you should know where this is going. A ton of the stuff was once spilled by accident and then it burned through a concert floor then a meter of dirt and gravel under it, a eye witness is reported to have said "the concert was on fire" so you can see it's pretty potent stuff and I will insistent to any one that will listen to me that you could kill super man with the stuff since I doubt his atoms are super and that stuff will just rip the carbon from his skins. (Cough) off topic my bad.

The issue is weaponizing this stuff,any attempt to use it leaves you just as much in the area of effect as the target. Air dropping might work, but air dropping liquids are not as effective as air dropping a gas, and on top of that why drop a bottle of stuff that can cause a major disaster on your air field with a crack when good old fashion napalm exists?

Acids are in the same category, there likely not as effective as regular weapons, there morally questionable and acids need to melt through the clothing and body armor of a target and after only one use you can best your enemy's will be ready and prepared for it, not to mention the UN would want a word with you.

Which leaves explosions, you said to ignore thise so I will, but I will point out Thermobaric weapons which act a little bit different from a normal bomb and so may be worth a look.

In general, unless your talking a gas which can spread, be persistent to act as areal denial, and has some major area of effect thanks to it's high lethality, then most chemicals don't really work. The best burning material, napalm, has already been invented and you can't improve on it, and spread liquid chemicals is effective as a gas so why bother. It's worth remember, that there has never been a successful attempt to weaponize an acid in human history so unless your up against aliens and all else fails to get through there armor, I can't think of a way to make a chemical weapon most constantly lethal, and cheaper, then a gun.

Seems that the largest problem is "the UN would want a word with you"

well technically the ICC and the Huage would want a word with you but you get the point

However that sadly is not the biggest problem. If you've got a strong government backing you, or at are on friendly terms with one of the vetoing UN nations, China, Russia, America, France, or England then you could get away with it, it's just that none of the above nations want the political backlash chemical weapons would cause.

No the real problem with chemical weapons is cost, fire arms and regular bombs do the same job cheaper and more effectively, why go to the trouble of shipping a chemical around that can kill you just as easily as the target when you can just use a bomb and not care which way the wind blows? Chemical weapons are awesome but impractical.

There is also the issue that if you did use a highly effectively, highly lethal nerve agent to kill thousands or millions of soldiers or civilians, the other side may think they have the standing to just nuke you, and nobody wants that, which is one of many reasons why chemical weapons are just not used.

I suppose that with access to a grocery or a pharmacy, one could makeshift a gun.

A chemist might be able to improvise some things out in a warzone, but they'll almost inevitably be inferior to things he can actually make in a lab.

Take a bomb, for instance. By scavenging grocery stores and the like, it's not hard to make something that will explode when provoked. The trouble is, whatever you manage to make will almost certainly try to blow your face off the moment you pack it into a container, since the purity of the ingredients tends to matter a lot, and impurities can scotch an entire batch of "product" (often with results that the would-be bombmaker would not survive). In contrast, the shelf-stable stuff that's packed into artillery shells or aerial bombs? That's made in actual laboratories and carefully quality-controlled factories for obvious reasons.

No, someone with that kind of skillset—assuming they survive to become part of some group or another—would be kept away from the frontlines if possible and put into a lab.

edited 6th Dec '15 6:25:30 PM by SabresEdge

All right, I get your guy's points. Chemical weapons are expensive, dangerous, and impractical. In my world, the use of them is unrestricted and so Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical weapons are a free-for-all. I just wanted to know how to utilize them in my world, but you're right, a conventional weapon like a gun can do a much better job than acid.

They're better off nuking the hell out of each other and spreading diseases whilst firing missiles than air dropping those chemicals. Honestly though, I was thinking of making a character that could make bombs and use them in the middle of the battlefield.

But since this is set in the future, I might be able to "fictionalize" a certain chemical that's made. Is that really possible?

edited 9th Dec '15 11:26:52 PM by Victor_Skye

Sounds almost like a "Mad Science" setting.

It's more like religion vs religion with technology being thought of as holy weapons that have spirits inside them. To the people that live there, they don't think in a scientific way at all and answer questions with pure philosophy.

It's actually real life religion vs real life religion, but that's controversial, so do you think I should make it an Expy instead?