Star Wars chemical weapons - purely choking agents

[Adam Reynolds]

I was recently reading an old thread about WW1 soldiers against the Empire and I had a random thought. There was a discussion about the lack of NBC gear among Rebel troops. Someone mentioned the simple breathing systems from KOTOR and how those seemed effective. To which it was pointed out that that would be useless against WW1 chemical weapons.

Anyway, it seems that the overwhelming majority of chemical weapons shown in Star Wars are purely choking agents that affect the user when they breathe in the gas. Perhaps this is a consequence of the diversity of life in the galaxy that would have differing levels of protection. The one thing virtually all of it has in common is that it breathes oxygen. So more sophisticated chemical weapons aren't used because they would have to be tailored for the species. This has the side effect of making a defense against them extremely easy.

[Balrog]

Given how diverse the Imperial bioweapons division is per the Twilight Company book, I would guess that there are far more types of chemical weapons available besides just the kind which must be breathed in.

[Simon_Jester]

To be fair, though, the existence of diverse Imperial bioweapons does not mean that their actual line combat units can afford to deploy 100 different chemical weapons to attack 100 different species. There probably IS an equivalent of nerve gas that works on just about every creature in the galaxy.

But if the most versatile individual types of gas only work on 30% of the galactic population each and you need dozens of weird exotic gases (one for Wookiees, one for those flying bug aliens like Watto, one for giant rock-monsters, et cetera)... Yeah. In those situations, you wouldn't get a lot of benefit out of using poison gas in warfare. At least, not unless you had time to plan out in advance which chemical and biological warfare agents you'd use, so that you could introduce a cocktail of different threats to attack all your enemies at once.

[Q99]

The rebellion was also not overly resourced. They likely had NBC gear, but wouldn't use it as regularly as the Empire.

[Adam Reynolds]

The scenario of Endor in particular is that the Empire wouldn't have gassed their own base. As for Hoth, perhaps it was too cold. on Tantive IV they wanted prisoners. There really weren't any cases in that era where it would have made sense.

The Clone wars likewise had virtually no cases where it would have made sense. It was fought between droids and soldiers in sealed space suits.

[Elheru Aran]

IIRC there was an episode or two during the Clone Wars (I mean in general, not an 'episode' of the TV series) where chemical or biological agents were used or tested by the CIS. I could be conflating that with Imperial atrocities though.

[Adam Reynolds]

If you are referring to the Blue Shadow Virus from the series, that was a one off occurrence. My point was that there was little reason for large scale employment of chemical weapons during the Clone Wars. They might have worked against Jedi to some degree, but as we saw in TPM that would not exactly be guaranteed.

[Elheru Aran]

I haven't watched the Clone Wars series. I was fairly sure there's an incident somewhere during the war period where a chemical or biological agent was used somewhere, as I vaguely recall reading about it. Perhaps I'm conflating it with something like the Caamas incident though.

An NBC agent could have benefited either side if they used them in terror attacks against the civilian population, but as far as I know neither side resorted to tactics like that very much. Just as well.

[Simon_Jester]

Well, the Empire did in fact resort to plenty of terror attacks against civilian populations, but the sheer resources at their disposal meant they had little need to use chemical and biological weapons specifically for that purpose. Turbolasers are pretty damn terrifying weapons of mass destruction in their own right.

[Eternal_Freedom]

The "they wanted prisoners" argument for no gas etc on the Tantive IV also applies to Hoth. Vader wanted at least Luke alive, and using such an indiscriminate weapon would risk killing him. Hell, that' why they landed troops after the generators were taken out, rather than just blasting it from orbit after all.

[Q99]

Going EU, the Vong war seems to have upped the amount of focus on bio and chemical weaponry.

[Darth Tanner]

The CIS had a tank mounted defoileater weapon that served to wipe out all organic life leaving their droids in tact... however I don't beleive it was actually a chemical weapon, it acted more like some sort of magic organic only explosive... although the principles of how it worked went unexplained.

[Adam Reynolds]

The CIS had a tank mounted defoileater weapon that served to wipe out all organic life leaving their droids in tact... however I don't beleive it was actually a chemical weapon, it acted more like some sort of magic organic only explosive... although the principles of how it worked went unexplained.

I believe it was a high-tech napalm equivalent. Not exactly a chemical weapon. Though that was an odd contradiction with ROTS. In that film, R2 squirts fuel at a pair of SBDs and sets them on fire. And yet this weapons burns organics and doesn't harm even the more exposed standard battle droids.