10 Suspected Alien Hideouts

It sounds like science fiction but they’ve actually been in the UN’s sights for over
20 years. Now the world has caught up and laser weapons are a dangerous science fact.
Now just to be clear, I’m not talking about ‘death ray’-type lasers, which are surprisingly
legal, but that’s one for another video.These are weapons designed purely to blind enemy
combatants.
In a 1995 protocol added onto the 1980 Geneva Weapons convention, 107 signatory states agreed
to internationally prohibit the use of any weapon designed to permanently destroy or
seriously disable eyesight.
You might be wondering why this is banned and so much lethal tech isn’t, and that’s
because most weapons agreements tend to be made with the goal of preventing unnecessary
suffering.
That doesn’t mean lasers are completely off limits on the field of battle though.
From 2010, the US Military began using weapons called ‘Dazzlers’ in Middle East conflicts,
which can temporarily blind enemies from around 300m. That’s just a year after they finally
agreed to the original protocol banning laser weapons.
But critics in the scientific community say that these weapons are coming much too close
to violating the United Nations agreement, given that some Dazzlers can permanently blind
at a range of just 50m.
If your first thought when you heard that word was Breaking Bad, then you’d be absolutely
correct. But I’ll leave it there for fear of spoilers.
This substance is a toxin derived from the seeds of the castor plant, which means that
it’s as readily available as it is deadly. Good thing it’s incredibly illegal under
both domestic law and multiple international treaties.
When ingested or inhaled, the bioweapon can cause intense sickness and even death within
days in sufficient amounts, and when injected it just straight up causes organ failure.
Safe to say that’s not a pleasant way to go.
Ricin has typically been used more in terrorism than warfare, like in the 2013 letters mailed
to President Obama and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the assassination of a Bulgarian
dissident in London in 1979.
But over the years attempts have been made to weaponise the substance for warfare, like
the unused methods developed by the US and UK to aerosolise it around 1918, not to mention
Iraq’s reported experimentation in the 1980s.
But on the plus side, the way Ricin works makes it pretty damn unlikely that it would
be used as a Weapon of Mass Destruction. The US Government estimates that it would take
8 metric tons to kill 50% of people in a 100 sqkm area. That’s just really impractical.
You’re probably familiar with this infamous gas from the dark days of World War I, where
it was the first major use of chemical weapons and killed at least 90,000 people over the
course of the conflict.
But despite a century of technological developments in deadly weapons, Sulfur Mustard has been
used time and time again to devastating effect.
It works by blistering anything it comes into contact with, which usually means the skin,
eyes and, most dangerously, the lungs. It has even been known to attack down to the
bone marrow.
It leaves victims in intense pain, disfigured and with essentially useless lungs in sufficient
amounts.
That has meant that the substance, along with others, has had to be repeatedly addressed
in treaties, conventions and protocols throughout the 20th century, including the 1899 Hague
Convention, the 1925 Geneva Convention and the 1992 Chemical Weapons Convention.
With weapons that deadly, some unscrupulous militaries have seen fit to violate international
law, like Saddam Hussein in the 1980s Iran-Iraq conflict and most recently in 2016 when ISIS
carried out the first ever chemical attack against US forces in the Middle East.
It sounds strange to be talking about the cause of a centuries old disease outbreak
on a list of banned military weapons, but here we are. In fact, biowarfare goes back
way further than the 20th century.
Going back a whopping 700 or so years, there are accounts of legendary pillager Genghis
Khan using the dead bodies of plague victims as ammunition in the 1346 siege of Caffa.
The Mongol conqueror would catapult the bodies over the city walls and leave Caffans with
the grim task of cleaning up what was basically makeshift plague grenades.
But this isn’t just a history lesson, the Plague is still a serious military concern
in the modern world, enough that it is banned under the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention.
According to the CDC, the plague, officially named Yersinia pestis, is in the deadliest
category of biological weapon. It even poses a risk of naturally or artificially mutating
to be resistant to antibiotics.
The World Health Organisation has said that just a 50kg cloud released on a city would
cause 36,000 deaths - and that’s with effective antibiotics.
To bring it home in a pretty shocking way, an ISIS militant’s laptop was recovered
in 2014 and found to contain a 19 page guide to testing the plague as a form of bioterrorism.
Given that there’s no vaccine, a treatment-resistant strain could cause catastrophic damage if
used in that way.
It’d be hard to argue if you said there were much more devastating weapons in terms
of scale on here, but I can guarantee you would see why these are banned if you got
yourself caught on one.
Prohibited under the 1980 Geneva Convention, Punji sticks could be called comically stereotypical
booby traps if they weren’t too gruesome to be a laughing matter.
As a staple of Viet Cong guerrilla warfare, these sticks are made by sharpening and heating
bamboo, then hiding them in any manner of ways. Covered pits, bear traps, you name it.
They were even hidden in elephant grass to skewer american helicopters.
And even though recorded casualties were only in the hundreds, Punji Sticks led to some
pretty harrowing tales.
Human and animal feces coated the tips to give survivors some nasty infections, and
a few soldiers were unlucky enough to be pierced through the back of the throat and even the
anus. Ouch!
It’s stories like that that led to punji sticks falling under the watchful gaze of
the UN, and even though tech has come a long way since then, I’m pretty glad they’re
off limits.
While most offending munitions get the axe for their brutal effects in combat, Landmines
are one of the smaller group to catch the UN’s eye for their effects outside of the
battle.
That’s because anti-personnel Landmines, or APLs, have the devastating flaw of not
caring at all who steps on them. Soldiers, terrorists, civilians, even children. They
just don’t discriminate.
And what’s worse, they can remain active for more than 50 years after they’re first
imbedded in the ground. There was even a case of two World War II APLs spontaneously exploding
in the German town of Brandenburg in 2011.
So understandably, the world looked to tackle them in the 1997 Ottawa Treaty, where signatory
states agreed to not only stop using APLs, but to destroy any stockpiles they already
had.
But war-ravaged countries around the world have struggled to remove a staggering 110
million landmines estimated to remain in the ground.
Iraq alone has seen 29,000 landmine accidents since the 1980s, and the majority of them
were civilian.
While it has been a tough fight to rid the world of these weapons, huge strides were
made in 2014 when the US finally changed its policies in line with the treaty.
That’s with the major exception of the Korean Peninsula, where there are still more than
a million landmines between both warring countries, because, y’know, this guy.
Like landmines, White Phosphorus is a weapon that has faced consistent criticism over the
massive risk of murdering civilians while using it. But I should probably explain what
it is before I get into it.
Nicknamed “Willie Pete” in the Vietnam War, White Phosphorus is a chemical whose
burning fills the air enough for it to be the most effective smoke screening agent available
anywhere.
But that’s all fine legally. The big problem comes when it’s used as an incendiary weapon,
in other words using it specifically to burn things - people specifically.
Along with similar incendiary weapons like Napalm, using White Phosphorus in this way
is explicitly banned under the 1980 Geneva Convention when it’s pointed anywhere near
civilian areas.
That’s because it will just keep burning and burning for an incredibly long time, which
on people means right through the skin, muscle and even down to the bone.
But the US has repeatedly run into controversy for its use of the chemical in the Middle
East, where it employed it in the 2004 battle for Fallujah and more recently in 2016 where
human rights groups attacked its use in the crowded Syrian city of Raqqa.
If the last few entries or your sense of human decency have taught you anything, it’s that
killing civilians is a huge reason to ban a weapon, so it shouldn’t come as too much
of a surprise that randomly hurling explosives around is frowned upon.
I’m talking specifically about cluster bombs, which are containers dropped from planes holding
sometimes hundreds of soda-can sized explosives that can cover up to 28 sqkm.
That means that not only do the mini-bombs potentially fall into civilian areas, unexploded
contents can stay dormant in the ground for long periods, just waiting for an unsuspecting
person to run into some bad luck.
The biggest hit against these weapons came in 2008 when 102 countries signed the Cluster
Munitions Convention, after which the British Government stated that a harrowing 60% of
victims are civilians and a third are children.
So it’s kind of embarrassing that in 2016, Saudi Arabia was found to have been using
Cluster Bombs supplied by the UK in its war against Yemen. And while they were sold in
the 1980s, the British assistance in the conflict raised questions over just how much the UK
knew.
It sounds a little bit counterintuitive in a wartime setting, but this one makes the
list simply because it’s just too good at killing. It’s kind of like how your friends
probably don’t let you play Eddie Gordo in Tekken anymore.
Hollow Point bullets are nothing drastically new, but they’re at the forefront of developments
in ammunition designed to break up on impact, instead of passing through like traditional
ball ammo.
That means that shards of bullet will spread through the organs of the victim, making it
much more likely that they’ll die from their wound.
But body counts aren’t really the point of war, so treaties like the Hague Convention
try to prevent the use of weapons that excel in killing for no real reason.
Despite being too brutal for war, Hollow Points are perfectly legal in law enforcement and
used by Police all over America because of the minimal risk of hitting bystanders - unless,
y’know, you miss and come way closer to guaranteeing a messy kill.
Even so, the US Army is working to re-interpret the Hague Convention so it can start using
the bullets in XM17 pistols starting from 2018.
Some in the military see following the 1899 agreement as a failure to keep up with modern
warfare, namely the fight against ISIS.
Known as the “deadliest nerve agent ever created”, VX is something you never want
to come close to contact with, and it’s not hard to see why it’s internationally
banned as a weapon of mass destruction.
With its full name O-ethyl S-diisopropylaminomethyl methylphosphonothiolate*, it’s as hard to
say as it is to survive. In fact, a drop containing just a thousandth of a gram of this stuff
is enough to induce fatal disruption to your nervous system.
In a particularly grim death, sometimes taking just minutes, the clear, oily substance is
known to cause convulsions, paralysis and respiratory failure in its extremely unfortunate
victims.
The US and Russia are the only nations to have admitted to stockpiling the deadly chemical,
but it was thought that Saddam Hussein utilised it against Kurdish fighters in 1988, not to
mention it was a favourite of the Japanese death-cult Aum Shinrikyo.
And you probably won’t be surprised that North Korea is thought to have the third largest
stockpile, especially considering that it was used in the suspected assassination of
Kim Jong Un’s half brother Kim Jong Nam in 2017.
Given that it’s pretty tough to detect unless you’re looking, the best advice I could
give if you want to avoid a brutal VX-induced death is maybe don’t make yourself an enemy
of any dictatorships. And that’s just good advice in general.
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10 Suspected Alien Hideouts

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