He told me he was way more afraid of the BC, and particularly the B leg of the NBC triad. He didn't give me any more details than that, but it does anchor my estimate of how effective such things might be.
It could well be simply because we have an inbuilt aversion to diseases and significant folk memory of outbreaks like Black Death that still resonate through our culture (Ring a Ring o' Roses...).
Nuclear weapons are fairly scary but if you're properly equipped and not stood in the immediate area when one goes up you've a decent chance of surviving (unless enough of them are used for Nuclear Winter scenarios, of course) and chemical weapons are pretty scary but we know they're not really all that effective (especially against a properly equipped soldier).
You can say the same about biological weapons, of course, but they also come with thousands of years of folk memory and terror that neither nukes or chemical weapons have. They're also the only weapons we have with the potential to kill millions in one go (if the user gets lucky and causes an epidemic).
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