AHC: Biological weapons regarded as just as bad or worse than Nuclear weapons?

As the title would indicate, your challenge is to create a world where biological weapons are regarded as being just as bad, or even worse, than nuclear ones. The most obvious ways I see to do this would be to have worse, or more, bioweapons used in warfare and/or not having nukes actually used against somebody. If you can think of a different way to do it, well, you can have some of those bonus points that seem to be laying around.

On a related note, what kind of bioweapon would need to be created [and used] in order to have it been seen like this? I mean, some of the OTL ones are pretty nasty but I'm not sure that if any of them could be considered 'worse than nukes' but that might just be my relative ignorance of the subject talking.
 
They're worse than nukes.

The main reason that nations don't get hit as hard for developing bioweapons as for developing nukes isn't so much because citizens and policymakers care about them less, it's because they require a far smaller footprint to develop and it is thus much harder to prove a nation-state is developing them.
 
Have somebody use them and kill millions of the enemy but the bio weapon turns on the country that used it killing millions of their own people.
That would make biological weapons viewed as a suicidal weapon used only by mad men with no concerns about their own population.
 

Insider

Banned
Scenario: after 731 unit deployment in action in China plague, anthrax and so on infect Japanese troops, who carry the bacteria back to Japan.
Or British panic amid battle of Britain and use their anthrax to bring Germany to heel but it gets too effective, and scours entire Europe.
 

missouribob

Banned
Easiest way is to have a bioengineered pandemic released in a way intentionally or not. Maybe a competent Saddam Hussein has an advanced bioweapons program in an ATL and unleashes them when Bush Jr invades. Then again a competent Hussein would probably butterfly getting invaded in the first place...Maybe during the overthrow of Libya they had a more advanced bioweapons program and it gets unleashed?

Idk bonus points would be if you got a group like Al Qaeda to do such an attack. Maybe instead of the Twin Tower's Osama decides to conduct a biological attack instead? Now that would be one heck of a timeline. You could have hundreds of millions of people dead from such an attack if done right...
 
Last edited:
The only way you would get millions dead from a bio attack is to have a very nasty engineered disease. Right now the problem with this is that there are great odds of it rebounding on the folks that deploy it. If you engineered a flu type disease that was easily spread airborne and contact, and had it attack some biomarker present in the target population and not yours that would do the trick. This only works if you have populations that have sufficient differences where such a marker could be found - for example China/Han Chinese vs the USA. In that case there are probably genetic loci that are present in most of one population and not in the other. Naturally there will be some leakage as neither population is pure but at least theoretically it is possible.

Because of medical technology, data processing, and public health knowledge anything less than something engineered to resist treatment, enhance transmission etc, can be contained although with difficulty. The deaths will be significant, and the economic disruption great, but millions or more - unlikely. Where you would get that sort of Black Plague level event (1/3 of the population dead) is if the disease spread to Africa or other third world areas with marginal medical abilities to begin with, and poor governance that can't institute even basic quarantines etc.

If bioweapons had been used a lot, they would be considered like nukes - and they are in US policy, WMD=WMD. The risk to your own forces/population is why they have not been used much.
 

missouribob

Banned
The only way you would get millions dead from a bio attack is to have a very nasty engineered disease.
Ehhh maybe not. Just recreate smallpox and tweak it a bit, get a few teams to spread it at international airports, watch the bodies drop. It has a risk factor of 4 to 7 and even if slightly modified could have a death rate of twenty percent. Assuming only half of the world population is affected by the new strain and you'd have 3.5 billion at risk and that's hundreds of millions of dead people.

Those deaths are spread evenly either so in the Third World with less medical resources but still cramped cities you could be looking at state collapse. Can you picture Pakistan falling apart and its nuclear weapons drifting to the wind?
 
I've talked with people who had the assignment of counting weapons in the NBC triad for treaty purposes. Pretty much universally they agree that B is the worst of the bunch.
 
I've talked with people who had the assignment of counting weapons in the NBC triad for treaty purposes. Pretty much universally they agree that B is the worst of the bunch.

Yep, smallpox and agricultural plagues are especially scary. Moreover, it would be stupidly easy (advanced undergraduate) to create a vaccine-resistant smallpox that plays virgin field.
 
Making a vaccine resistant smallpox is not as easy as one thinks. Changing smallpox in a way that current vaccines are completely ineffective may negatively affect the advantages smallpox has - very transmissable with a multiplier of 5-7, and a mortality of 30% in immunologically naive populations and a significant morbidity of up to 5%. Don't forget anything you engineer needs to be tested to make sure it works, and then you have to develop your own defense against it so some basement lab is really not in the cards here. For smallpox you have to test on humans, all of the pox viruses are species specific which is why cowpox makes dandy vaccine but does not make you ill (likewise, camelpox, monkeypox & so forth). Having said that, let me say of all 3 of the NBC group, bio is the one that is most scary.
 
Making a vaccine resistant smallpox is not as easy as one thinks. Changing smallpox in a way that current vaccines are completely ineffective may negatively affect the advantages smallpox has - very transmissable with a multiplier of 5-7, and a mortality of 30% in immunologically naive populations and a significant morbidity of up to 5%. Don't forget anything you engineer needs to be tested to make sure it works, and then you have to develop your own defense against it so some basement lab is really not in the cards here. For smallpox you have to test on humans, all of the pox viruses are species specific which is why cowpox makes dandy vaccine but does not make you ill (likewise, camelpox, monkeypox & so forth). Having said that, let me say of all 3 of the NBC group, bio is the one that is most scary.
You only need to develop a defense if you intend your group to survive it.

As for the OP, that's easy: have them used in Europe. If we want a post-Cold War setting, suppose Tito had a biological weapons program in Yugoslavia. Maybe it's not finished nor weaponized (maybe in part because they couldn't develop a vaccine). They get released during the civil war in the 1990s and reach the rest of Europe.
 
Top