Bioweapons instead Nuclear?

How can we have biological weapons as the ultimate scourge of mass destruction in the 20th century?

Thanks!
 
The big problems with bioweapons are deployment and control.

On the one hand, the biological agents involved can only live in a certain range of conditions, so your delivery system(s) have to not breach those while still spreading their contents over a wide area. It's much harder to design an ICBM warhead that delivers it's germ payload alive and over a usefully large area than to make one deliver a nuclear bomb intact, for example. Cruise missiles or aircraft are much better for that, but have their own problems with respect to delay and the possibility of interception. Another aspect of this is that there's usually a delay between the agent being delivered, and it having an effect on the target population. This delay means bioweapons don't give instant results (unlike nukes), so they're not very good battlefield weapons. This also means that if you suspect a biological attack you have time to take prophylactic measures, including immunisations against suspected agents or just increased hygiene etc. Or, of course, launch your own attack in response.
On the other hand, bioweapons are inherently difficult to control. Once released, their area of effect is out of your hands - they will spread and mutate over time, which is something of a problem if you or anyone else wants to be able to use that area ever again. It's also entirely possible that a biological attack will swing around and hit your own population.

So you simultaneously have a weapon that is difficult to control, imprecise in its effects, and gives your opponent time to retaliate once it is used; to say nothing of the possibility that it will affect ones own population as well. That isn't a very attractive combination for most purposes, and more or less makes them impractical for battlefield use. They might make good vengeance-weapons, in the same way that the threat of massive nuclear retaliation might have a deterrent effect, but deterrence depends on your opponent believing that you're crazy enough to actually do it (and is outside the scope of the question in any case).

I suppose that if there was a clear historical example of their use bringing a state to its knees (before or during WW2), that might give them the same sort of status as nukes do today. But really, from a practical standpoint nukes or chemical weapons are preferable for most purposes I think.
 
Unit 731 delivers plague vectors to the US via balloon and/or renegades deliver plague vectors to US air force base after the war. Millions die across the world

The post-war fear is not that a nuke would be drooped against USA but that someone would follow the example of Japan and unleash a disease based weapon.

Nukes become slightly more "acceptable" in strategic warfare (BNC suits rather than NBC). Terrorist groups consider bio weapons rather than nukes as the ulitmate threat.
 
According Ken Alibek, the former number 2 of Soviet Bioweapon Program.
The Soviet try to replace there nuclear warheads with anthrax warheads in 1980s
they consider them cheaper in maintenance costs as nuclear warheads.
it was Mikhail Gorbachev who advocate this insanity in 1986 !

Source:
Alibek, Ken and Handelman, Steven
Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World - Told from Inside by the Man Who Ran It, (1999)
Random House, ISBN 0-385-33496-6.
 
No need for them to be weaponized, just send Ahmed to central Africa, once there is an Ebola outbreak, he deliberately make his way to the area to get infected. HE then makes his way to an airport with a ticket to the US. Since the infection takes time to incubate, he will appear healthy for the duration of this trip.

Once he is in the US, other operatives collect his infected body fluids and "distribute" them to Americans.
 
Have alqaeda get their hands on some weaponized bioweapons, and make the death toll around the world millions rather than thousands?

depends what for Bioweapon type or disease they got in there hands.
because the natural disease like plague and anthrax are easy to cure with antibiotics.
you need allot of how-know to make from natural anthrax a Bioweapon thats immune against antibiotics.

I don't know if this story is true, i have read this in french newspaper some years ago
it was a Article about Algerian branch of Al-Qaeda, work on bubonic plague as Bioweapon.
with not great success, as Algerian military forces enter the desert camp, it was quite death...
but I think that story was a newspaper hoax...
 
Can biological 'weapons' be any more lethal than natural malaria? Or other diseases in the wild that kill millions a year without our intervention? Reintroducing small pox wouldn't be as effective as feared, at least not after the vaccine product gets into full gear.



The big problems with bioweapons are deployment and control.

Working definition of a weapon.
 
I do think a Unit 731 'special breakthrough' would probably be a powerful PoD. That, or a "horrible accident" of some kind.

Imagine a 1943 flu pandemic that's as nasty as the 1918 Spanish Flu, and does a similar death toll: 3% of the world's population. As it did in the Spanish Flu, Japan uses a similar approach of quarantine any sick sailors, and thus has the same mortality rate again: 0.5%

This kills MILLIONS OF PEOPLE. It is revealed to be a "deliberate project" of Imperial Japan, and frankly it could well kill people like FDR.

Throw in that the UK decides to Anthrax Germany as it appears that all WMD are getting unleashed in WWII, and the ramifications for how serious bioweapons can be is forced upon the world.

Nukes get pushed off the pedestal of most dreadful weapons. Most nations in the world are instilled with a deep fear of unleashing a "Doomsday Pandemic Scenario" even more than a nuclear attack. But like nuclear weapons, it's immediately obvious that there is really no winning a bioweapon war, and it follows a similar line of reasoning.
 
depends what for Bioweapon type or disease they got in there hands.
because the natural disease like plague and anthrax are easy to cure with antibiotics.
you need allot of how-know to make from natural anthrax a Bioweapon thats immune against antibiotics.

I don't know if this story is true, i have read this in french newspaper some years ago
it was a Article about Algerian branch of Al-Qaeda, work on bubonic plague as Bioweapon.
with not great success, as Algerian military forces enter the desert camp, it was quite death...
but I think that story was a newspaper hoax...

Can biological 'weapons' be any more lethal than natural malaria? Or other diseases in the wild that kill millions a year without our intervention? Reintroducing small pox wouldn't be as effective as feared, at least not after the vaccine product gets into full gear..

Right. But anthrax requires a special antibiotic that wasnt kept in stock in enough quantities to treat millions of exposed people. If al qaeda had access to weaponized anthrax, and let it loose in manhattan, the could kill more people easily than the planes did. 10s of thousands, maybe, but it would likely be tough to get a million. Partly because its not contagious.

Spreading smallpox, otl, in ny, sf and london, say. Possibly ohare, jfk, heathrow, lax, schipol ... airports, you could get the virus spread around the world quickly. Oh, sure, some of us have partial immunity from childhood shots, and vaccine production could be ramped up, but until then, a million deaths each in nort america, europe, south america, two million in asia, and maybe 10 million in africa, seems entirely feasible to me before the epidemic is wiped out.

A virulent, novel flu virus like the spanish flu, might be just as bad. Remember, it takes about six months to get flu vaccines ready.



Getting bioweapons to kill more people than nukes have done would be fairly easy. Getting them as feared as nukes were is probably possible, if we had the millions of deaths ive postulated. But the fear would because it was in the hands of crazies, rather than because it could 'destroy all life on earth'. (Note the quotes. That wasnt real even for nukes at the height of the cold war, but it was a fear people stated.)
 
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and there still smallpox in some laboratory
from infection speed, the disease is Ultra Fast...

On japans Unit 731 and other units
they made very primitive and crude R&D on Bioweapon
As the USA got there Data in the hand, there were disappointed
the USA bioweapon R&D was farther,
although Unit 731 made more test on humans (War prisoners or Chinese ) as USA (on prisoners)

On how to control Bioweapon ?
Ken Alibek explane in his Book Biohazard,
That Soviet union manage to breed Anthrax who is vulnerable UV-light.
A Study claim that ICBM with multiple Anthrax Warhead could kill the population of New York.
With out destroying the city like Nuclear weapons and after some time the UV-light kills the Anthrax.
A idea who pleased the Soviet military according Ken Alibek.
 
IMO Smallpox is more likely to be aimed at Moscow than London or Washington DC, the reason being the Soviets were the big bio-weapons operators, and in the collapse of the USSR, who's to say what went missing (although it would more likely fall into the hands of local anti-Russian terrorists than international anti-American ones)?
 
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