Bioweapon usage in the event of nuclear war?

Effect of bioweapons in WW3?

  • Bioweapons cause more deaths than the nukes

    Votes: 12 27.3%
  • Bioweapons cause as much death as the nukes

    Votes: 10 22.7%
  • Nukes would have been deadlier

    Votes: 22 50.0%

  • Total voters
    44
Yes the US effectively ended their BW program in the late 60s. The USSR ramped theirs up to the point where by the '80s they were able to produce and stockpile annually:

Sorry, I think I was unclear - I was responding to the bolded comment, that the reason the Soviets made all these BWs was because the US had them. The US didn't, by the time the Soviets started investing heavily in biowarfare. So, my question is - why did they make them? Bioweapons don't seem to really deliver any more bang for the buck than nuclear weapons, while being a hell of a lot harder to deliver and less controllable. So why did the Soviets spend so much money on them?

Of course this is enough to kill everyone on Earth many times over. The Soviets spent billions of dollars on their BW program and they took it deadly seriously, as seriously as their nuclear program. Any exchange between the US and the Soviets was practically guaranteed to see a major release of bioweapons as well. Every city hit by a nuke will get hit by smallpox, plague, tularemia, or a combination thereof as well. Anything to make sure that the "Evil Capitalist System" goes extinct when the smoke clears.

Do they have the delivery systems to actually deliver that many bioweapons?
 

Wendigo

Banned
Sorry, I think I was unclear - I was responding to the bolded comment, that the reason the Soviets made all these BWs was because the US had them. The US didn't, by the time the Soviets started investing heavily in biowarfare. So, my question is - why did they make them? Bioweapons don't seem to really deliver any more bang for the buck than nuclear weapons, while being a hell of a lot harder to deliver and less controllable. So why did the Soviets spend so much money on them?



Do they have the delivery systems to actually deliver that many bioweapons?

They had the ability to fill at least 800 warheads or 80 missiles with BW. Plus an unknown amount of bombers and aircraft equipped with spray tanks.

Also the USSR had a bioweapon program going back to the 1920s. They just were able to devote a large amount of funding plus had the means to engineer and upgrade diseases seriously starting from the late 60s. The reason is because if the US had downgraded its BW capability this would be an opportunity to score a great advantage over their sworn enemy in case of war.

The USSR was completely prepared just as much as the US if not more so to burn the world to cinders and turn the cinders into finer dust if it meant their ideological system would be the only one left standing. Of course any major exchange would pretty much wipe out any nation involved particularly the two superpowers (try telling them that.)

Why else would the Soviets by the mid 1980s have a total arsenal of 40,000 nuclear warheads, 10,000 tons of biological weapons and over 50,000 tons of chemical weapons? Because they wanted to be over prepared in case of war. The US was pretty much as bad with 25,000 warheads and at least 30,000 tons of CW.

If WW3 ever broke out between them civilization as we know it would be gone. The Grim Reaper would have been busy for a looong time.
 
They had the ability to fill at least 800 warheads or 80 missiles with BW. Plus an unknown amount of bombers and aircraft equipped with spray tanks.

They had the agent, but did they have the missiles? Every missile you load with BW is a missile not carrying nukes. And if you're planning to go silo-hunting - which the Soviets almost certainly were - you need every nuke you can get.

Also the USSR had a bioweapon program going back to the 1920s. They just were able to devote a large amount of funding plus had the means to engineer and upgrade diseases seriously starting from the late 60s. The reason is because if the US had downgraded its BW capability this would be an opportunity to score a great advantage over their sworn enemy in case of war.

The USSR was completely prepared just as much as the US if not more so to burn the world to cinders and turn the cinders into finer dust if it meant their ideological system would be the only one left standing. Of course any major exchange would pretty much wipe out any nation involved particularly the two superpowers (try telling them that.)

Why else would the Soviets by the mid 1980s have a total arsenal of 40,000 nuclear warheads, 10,000 tons of biological weapons and over 50,000 tons of chemical weapons? Because they wanted to be over prepared in case of war. The US was pretty much as bad with 25,000 warheads and 30,000 tons of CW.

This doesn't really answer the question, though: why spend all this money on BW agents instead of nuclear weapons? A nuclear weapon is more reliable, more controllable, harder to defend against, and, in aggregate, likely to do as much or more damage if you target it properly. So why make all this anthrax?

The reason this puzzles me is that I've found that, if you dig into the thinking of the time, most decisions that seem illogical from the outside make sense if you can put yourself in the decision-makers' shoes. Something like Project Plowshare (digging canals with hydrogen bombs) - in retrospect, it's a very bad idea. But if you read through the documents from the AEC, you can understand why they supported it, given the information available to them at the time, and the existing policies they had in place. Same thing with the decision to make tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, or thousands of tons of nerve agents. Not saying it was the right decision, but it's a decision I can understand.

I just can't figure out why the Soviets spent so much money on biowarfare. I can't figure out how to make it make sense, even from the perspective of the decision-makers of the time.
 

Delta Force

Banned
Chemical and biological attacks are more difficult to detect and defend against than nuclear fallout. While radiation can be detected with an inexpensive Geiger counter, there are some chemical weapons that require lasers to detect.
 
Very good info is the Book "Biohazard-the chilling true story of largest biological weapon program in world" by Ken Alibek, former number two in USSR biological weapon research.

According Ken Alibek had in end 1980s the USSR complete the development to replace ICBM Nuclear Warheads by anthrax Warhead
Study had show that ICBM with 10 anthrax Warheads can kill entire population of New York, likewise to 10 nukes, but left the infrastructure intact at lower cost as the Nuclear weapons !
the book give some insight how Soviets solve some problems, but i not go in detail about this here, read the book.
Interesting is who support this project: Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev !
After the collapse of Soviet union, Russian military took over this program, at point Ken Alibek left his post at former USSR biological weapon research,
The Russian experimented on dual Bioweapon system: a deathly combination of Anthrax, follow by Ebola.
 
I would suggest that biological warfare provides two distinct yet valuable options to the USSR in its war planning. First, as a first strike weapon it can be used to "soften" the enemy as well as add fuel to the fires of crisis that the USSR hoped to set as a way to prepare the battlefield. Thus the famed "Spetsnaz", the covert warfare, terrorism, sabotage; the aim is to stress the enemy on the eve of war and an epidemic is a method to further that. Second, the use of biological agents not merely inflict casualties, ones that stress a nation's infrastructure, but deny territory, and one of the true fears of the USSR was that its armies would merely defect once war began, a destroyed Europe and America was not perhaps enough, but an unlivable and hopelessly dead zone might serve to keep the troops loyal. The USSR faces a battle where it either succeeded or went extinct, it had to conquer all or perish, in that way these weapons are the end logic of scorched earth. The USSR was not fighting only for supremacy, but for survival in a winner take all game.
 

BlondieBC

Banned
Is that really the case, though? My understanding is that the US (with the help of the UK, Canada, and Australia) had a program from WW2 through the '70s, when Nixon decided to unilaterally disavow bioweapons and push for the Biological Warfare Convention. The Soviets had a program through that time, but it seems to have been pretty low-key. They only started gearing up their bioweapon program, and actually deploying bioweapons for use in warfare, after the BWC was signed and the US had given up our program.

Again, I'm going off of limited reading here, so if I'm wrong, please tell me. I've got the Big Book of Soviet Germ Weapons on my reading list, but haven't gotten to it yet.

Yes, your analysis is correct. Much like the Soviets played catchup on the Atomic bomb and Hydrogen bomb, they were playing catchup here. The difference is we cancelled our bioweapon program but not the nuclear programs.
 
Chemical and biological attacks are more difficult to detect and defend against than nuclear fallout. While radiation can be detected with an inexpensive Geiger counter, there are some chemical weapons that require lasers to detect.

But CB weapons are still much easier to defend against then a direct nuclear attack.

Very good info is the Book "Biohazard-the chilling true story of largest biological weapon program in world" by Ken Alibek, former number two in USSR biological weapon research.

According Ken Alibek had in end 1980s the USSR complete the development to replace ICBM Nuclear Warheads by anthrax Warhead
Study had show that ICBM with 10 anthrax Warheads can kill entire population of New York, likewise to 10 nukes, but left the infrastructure intact at lower cost as the Nuclear weapons !
the book give some insight how Soviets solve some problems, but i not go in detail about this here, read the book.
Interesting is who support this project: Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev !
After the collapse of Soviet union, Russian military took over this program, at point Ken Alibek left his post at former USSR biological weapon research,
The Russian experimented on dual Bioweapon system: a deathly combination of Anthrax, follow by Ebola.

But why would they want to leave New York City intact? That seems like a strong reason not to use anthrax. Especially since the effectiveness of bioweapons is always going to be dependent on weather conditions in a way that nuclear weapons are not.

I would suggest that biological warfare provides two distinct yet valuable options to the USSR in its war planning. First, as a first strike weapon it can be used to "soften" the enemy as well as add fuel to the fires of crisis that the USSR hoped to set as a way to prepare the battlefield. Thus the famed "Spetsnaz", the covert warfare, terrorism, sabotage; the aim is to stress the enemy on the eve of war and an epidemic is a method to further that.

Sure, that was the direction the US program went in towards the end of its life as well. But you don't do covert warfare with ICBMs loaded with anthrax.

Second, the use of biological agents not merely inflict casualties, ones that stress a nation's infrastructure, but deny territory, and one of the true fears of the USSR was that its armies would merely defect once war began, a destroyed Europe and America was not perhaps enough, but an unlivable and hopelessly dead zone might serve to keep the troops loyal. The USSR faces a battle where it either succeeded or went extinct, it had to conquer all or perish, in that way these weapons are the end logic of scorched earth. The USSR was not fighting only for supremacy, but for survival in a winner take all game.

You could do the same thing with cobalt bombs, but they'd be more reliable and controllable, and would provide some nuclear bang to go with the contamination.
 
Biological weapons are not an either / or, they are a multiplier, they have a place in the overall plan. Their use is optional before the war even begins, they can be used to cover wider area than mere point destruction and they can deny terrain. And they, unlike radiation, can be protected against, if you hold the antidotes, this was the holy grail, a weapon that can defeat us without the wholesale destruction. The Soviet elite planned to ride out the war, they cared nothing for the populace, so why disease the West, let then incinerate the East, and emerge to inherit what is left. No one says it would work, but gunpowder was once an untested new weapon with some potential.
 
But why would they want to leave New York City intact? That seems like a strong reason not to use anthrax. Especially since the effectiveness of bioweapons is always going to be dependent on weather conditions in a way that nuclear weapons are not.

It was question of far lower cost compare to Nuclear Warhead production (nuclear reactors for plutonium, deuterium & tritium refinery, manufacturing and assembly of all parts to warhead.
And maintain cost, the every 15 years general overhaul of Warhead and replace the disaggregated tritium.
The Soviet hoped that the Anthrax Warheads needed almost no maintenance, here getting a intact enemy infrastructure was consider as bonus...
Also according Ken Alibek the Soviet manage to manipulate Anthrax so far that has a fail safe, after certain time in outside world, it dies.
 
Unless you are willing to trash your own population and food supply, any bioweapon you use has to have a cure/effective vaccine you have and can make in "adequate" amounts. You need to take in to account whether or not any of the area you hit will ever be transited by or used by you. Anthrax spores live a LONG time and decontaminating an area hit by a lot of anthrax is difficult and expensive. Likewise if you have a disease that can find a non-human host, you end up with zoonotic reservoirs just waiting to jump back in to humans once they reenter the hot zone. While you may have a vaccine for something like a "super influenza" the problem is that some pathogens, influenza being one example and HIV being another, readily mutate away from the original design so that your vaccine is no longer effective - this is why new flu vaccines come out yearly. None of these issue are insurmountable, but when you throw in the issues of dispersal of an agent to be effective (sure crop dusters and aircraft with sprayers work but they have to go low and relatively slow, and are not long range systems) bioweapons are less attractive than you might think for major powers in a "regular" war, whether or not nukes and chemicals are used.

IMHO this is why bioweapons are currently considered to be a terrorist weapon, with covert employment using relatively primitive means of delivery including infected volunteers. If you want to depopulate and area without much damage, and be able to occupy it safely afterwards, neutron bombs are the way to go. If you want to make an area a no go zone, decide what radioactives you want to use, and have a predictable period before its safe.
 
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