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Even in war, the golden rule still applies. If you employ tactics that are against the rules of war, so will your opponents, and leaving you with no net benefit. So you end up in an even more destructive war, worse for both sides, for no gain.
Indeed, consider the use of gas in the First World War: the idea was "if we try this new hideous weapon once, we will break through the enemy, the war will be over immediately, and many fewer lives will be lost in the end". What actually happened is that the new weapon turned out less infallible than expected, the other side immediately started using it as well, and the bloodbath went on as before, with one more hideous weapon thrown in the mix. Worth noting that even Nazi Germany, not exactly well-regarded for their humaneness or reasonableness, refrained from using gases in WW2 because they were afraid of this happening again (while of course having no scruples in using them against captive civilians who could not fight back -- restraint from self-interest, not from compassion).
(Arguably, nuclear weapons might have been an exception, but in my understanding Japan was already burning and starving by that point, so they couldn't have mounted much more of a fight with or without nukes.)
Chemical weapons actually have problems of not being worth so much. Except against civilians.
Very often, maybe almost always, bringing regular artillery shells will be better use of anyones resources.
I have a Soviet book for children about artillery, published in the 30s, and back then chemical weapons were still considered useful. An example they give, let's imagine there's an enemy mortar team hiding in a grove. The grove is too big to just level with explosive shells, but we can drop some gas shells upwind from the grove to force them out.
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