It was pretty fucked up for the government to not coordinate an antidote with hospitals, but other than that, can anybody really be sure that another approach would have resulted in fewer hostage casualties? The terrorists had the whole place rigged with bombs. Considering the circumstance I think the gas was a pretty good idea with a poor followup.
There is a pretty convincing argument made that a less violent foreign policy would have made the terrorist act significantly less likely to happen in the first place.
Sure, I buy that. But the guys tasked with responding to that hostage crisis couldn't go back in time and fix Russia's [domestic] policy. They had to deal with the situation they were given.
Both the military "Alpha Group" and "Vympel" were active combatants in both the first and second Chechen wars, they are branches of FSB, which were indeed responsible for the Russian presence in Chechnya since 2001.
Point being, the persons in charge of the the gas and raid in the theatre were also the guys in charge of tactics used in Chechnya.
That may be the case, but nevertheless when they were dealt with the hostage crisis, going back in time and correcting the policy decisions which precipitated it was not among their list of options.
(And were the commanders on the ground that week actually in decision making positions during the Chechen conflict? 'Following orders' doesn't excuse their participation, but it seems unlikely they personally were ever in a position to stop the conflict.)
It was not a terrible approach, the use of "poison gas" is a bit of a misnomer. They weren't dousing the theatre with chlorine and melting everyone's lungs for example. It was not deadly poison gas, it was "get high" poison gas. That unintentionally made some people get so high that they died in a state of euphoric bliss.
The gas, high speculated but nobody 100% sure, is thought to be basically super-fentanyl. Fentanyl itself is like hyper powerful heroin, and this stuff was hyper powerful fentanyl. But not fatal per se, certainly intended not.
So all this hubbub about the theatre gas isn't so bad. Per capita if you just walk down the sidewalk in San Francisco's Tenderloin district, you would be exposed to more fentanyl fumes than you would have in that theatre. In the tenderloin residents talk wistfully of the the theatre gassing with superfentanyl, wishing they could have partaken in that bliss. If they had taken a good dozen people off the tenderloin and sent them to the theatre they easily would have smoked it up with between 100 and 1000x times the concentration of opioid fumes.
Yeah, maybe you're right. Excluding the "less violent foreign policy" sibling comment that is also correct, given that the situation had already started, I guess gas isn't a terrible way to handle the situation.
Really terrible about not coordinating with the EMTs, though. They could have saved hundreds of people if they'd just carried Narcan.
