The US has had a lot of trouble figuring out how to detoxify its stockpile safely.

The problem is that the chemical weapons breakdown into hazardous chemicals. And those hazardous chemicals have to be safely disposed of.

So instead of killing you because it is a nerve agent it will give you cancer and birth defects.

Guess what? That's still music. I say this as a musician who can carry a tune. Don't be such a fucking snob.

But the question that still hasn't been properly answered (at least in my opinion) is why the use of these weapons on a small number of victims relative to the total number killed in the conflict should suddenly lead the international community to "need to act".

Seconded.

I understand the concept in a battle between nations. It takes a lot of chemical agent to kill someone (dispersed through the air). But it does not take much to cause life-long problems. Like blindness or breathing issues or nerve damage. So using them on an enemy nation means that that nation will take longer to recover from the war. Their former troops will not be able to return to their pre-war jobs.

Now you can apply that same reasoning to insurgents in this case. But it is only their own future that they're wrecking. And they were on course to do that any way. Killing 100,000 is okay but killing 1,000 is unacceptable.

In the case of chemical weapons, months after an attack someone a few villages away can drink the water from their local well, contract a horrible disease and die.

I think you're talking about bio weapons.

Most chemical weapons degrade quickly. Even the "persistent" ones.

You misunderstood completely. The problem won't be autonomous dealing with traffic jams, but causing them, because they have to always err on the side of caution when faced when something they haven't been programmed for.

Where a human driver can, in a fraction of a second, determine whether a T-shirt in the road can be driven over, or whether the person waving at you from the side is someone selling charity car wash or a policeman asking you to drive on the lawn to get around broken glass in the road.
Autonomous systems cannot deal with what they haven't been programmed for, and will have to err on the side of caution. Sometimes that means stopping, and blocking traffic behind it. It only takes one car to block a lane for miles, so even a very low percentage of this happening can have dire consequences.
And thse who say that sure, a car can be programmed to deal with the two examples above - sure, it can, if we know about them - the problem is that there are an unlimited number of situations that occur that won't be programmed for, and where a human driver can use common sense. Someone has put planks over a deep rut hole. The idiot in front holds up a cell phone to his ear. A business has released confetti and hundreds of balloons. Tumbleweed. A rider on a horse. A soft leafy branch on the road. A hard leafy branch on the road. Demonstrators. Fata morgana. A flock of sheep.
Cars can do a lot of things, but will, in many cases, have to stop because they don't know what to do.
You understand that when a polceman waves you around a broken down trailer, you are allowed to cross the double yellow lines, or even pass on the shoulder of the road, and should do so. Will an autonomous car?

The left, obviously. ;)

I work in south Longmont. Where I cross the Boulder Creek, it's usually 3 meters wide and so shallow the rocks on the bottom emerge from the surface of the water. When I was hauling out yesterday after our workplace got an evacuation notice, the creek was a kilometer wide, backed up against the bridge, which is probably 15 meters wide by two meters deep.
Longmont spent eighteen months reworking the Lefthand Creek drainage, deepening it and tearing out all the trees beside it, through the middle of the city. At the time, local citizens were outraged at the expense, writing nasty letters to the newspaper and showing up at city council meetings yelling about what a waste of money it was and how debit spending was the devil. Lefthand filled right up to the top and moved like a freight train, but didn't overtop through much of the town. The place where they stopped the rework, and the creek returns to its shallow, cottonwood-tree-filled drainage, is where it spread out and started flooding basements, according to pictures my friends who live there are sending me. I'm hoping this experience will motivate the city of Boulder to do the same for Boulder Creek. One of my friends lived in a house across from Naropa University, right beside Boulder Creek, that had a big metal sign on the front warning the inhabitants that they lived in a flood zone. That should never happen. That should be parkland, not places where kids live. (She moved, thankfully, because that house had close to two meters of water in the main floor, from pictures I've seen, and I'd hate for her and her two toddlers to still be living there.)