Explain to me: Bioweapons

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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They wouldn't. Locusts are herbivores, most other crop pests are herbivores. Unless you had the kind of genetic engineering you have today, they aren't gonna be hurting anyone directly.

There was a film on the Horror channel a few weeks ago where someone had done that.
 
It's really hard to say how effective superpower (US or Former USSR) bioweapons would be in practice. The USSR spent quite a bit of effort on weaponizing things like smallpox back during the Cold War and so I presume did the US.
I'd recommend a book called Biohazard by Ken Alibek for anyone who wants to learn more about the Soviet biowarfare program. The author, born Kanatjan Alibekov, started as a military doctor before working his way up to become head of the program by the late 1980s, before he moved to the United States.
 
It's really hard to say how effective superpower (US or Former USSR) bioweapons would be in practice. The USSR spent quite a bit of effort on weaponizing things like smallpox back during the Cold War and so I presume did the US.
You might think that, but you'd be wrong (sort of). The United States did spend a fair bit of effort on bioweapons in the 1940s through '60s, but sort of gave up on them in the late 1960s and early '70s because they seemed to have little strategic purpose in relation to their cost and because a lot of the experimentation that the government had been doing became public and people didn't like it at all. That's why the Biological Weapon Convention came around, and at the same time the termination of the American bioweapons program and the destruction of American bioweapons. Now, there's no way to prove that the United States didn't keep a secret bioweapons program the way that the Soviets did--there was no verification mechanism--but there's more evidence suggesting that the United States really did give up biological weapons under Nixon.
 

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You might think that, but you'd be wrong (sort of). The United States did spend a fair bit of effort on bioweapons in the 1940s through '60s, but sort of gave up on them in the late 1960s and early '70s because they seemed to have little strategic purpose in relation to their cost and because a lot of the experimentation that the government had been doing became public and people didn't like it at all. That's why the Biological Weapon Convention came around, and at the same time the termination of the American bioweapons program and the destruction of American bioweapons. Now, there's no way to prove that the United States didn't keep a secret bioweapons program the way that the Soviets did--there was no verification mechanism--but there's more evidence suggesting that the United States really did give up biological weapons under Nixon.
IIRC, the US did continue to research bioweapons, but the focus shifted more towards how to defend against them. Which, unfortunately, involves researching how to actually use them so you know what to look for and how to stop it.
 
IIRC, the US did continue to research bioweapons, but the focus shifted more towards how to defend against them. Which, unfortunately, involves researching how to actually use them so you know what to look for and how to stop it.
Yeah, but it's not really the same; they stopped working on dispersion methods altogether, and the quantities of agents produced were much less than in the case of a full program. So there was no real way to use the agents as weapons without a fairly time-consuming breakout period.
 
I'd recommend a book called Biohazard by Ken Alibek for anyone who wants to learn more about the Soviet biowarfare program. The author, born Kanatjan Alibekov, started as a military doctor before working his way up to become head of the program by the late 1980s, before he moved to the United States.

its best Book about Soviet Bioweapon program, special on R&D and concept of Biological Warfare
 
Did you know that the Aum Shrinrikyo sprayed much more anthrax over Tokyo than the British used on that island? No one died. It didnt turn Tokyo into dead mans land.

Sure - because the strain they used wasn't designed as a weapon and didn't use it effectively.

Japanese officials long suspected the anthrax strain the cult used was flawed, and Keim's lab confirmed the strain they used was an anthrax vaccination developed for cattle.

"While they may have been trying to kill people, the most they could have done is actually immunize people from the disease," said Keim. "But there's no sign that that happened either."

https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=98249&page=1

Aum Shinrikyo dispersed a benign strain of anthrax commonly used for vaccinating livestock; there were no casualties.
http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-anthrax-aum-20130522-dto-htmlstory.html

Multiple-locus, variable-number tandem repeat analysis found all isolates to be identical to a strain used in Japan to vaccinate animals against anthrax, which was consistent with the Aum Shinrikyo members’ testimony about the strain source. In 1999, a retrospective case-detection survey was conducted to identify potential human anthrax cases associated with the incident, but none were found. The use of an attenuated B. anthracis strain, low spore concentrations, ineffective dispersal, a clogged spray device, and inactivation of the spores by sunlight are all likely contributing factors to the lack of human cases.
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/10/1/03-0238_article

What's this about Aum Shrinrikyo and anthrax?

They made two separate attempts to disperse it in Tokyo in 1993 - from the cooling towers of their HQ building in Kameido and sprayed from a van in central Tokyo. And that's aside from the failed attempts to weaponize and disperse C. botulinum.
 
Sure - because the strain they used wasn't designed as a weapon and didn't use it effectively.


https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=98249&page=1


http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-anthrax-aum-20130522-dto-htmlstory.html


https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/10/1/03-0238_article



They made two separate attempts to disperse it in Tokyo in 1993 - from the cooling towers of their HQ building in Kameido and sprayed from a van in central Tokyo. And that's aside from the failed attempts to weaponize and disperse C. botulinum.
Yep, but those cases have limited relevance for attempts to distribute agents selected for human fatality.
 
One of the problems of weaponizing biological agents has to do with dispersal. Bursting charges will generate heat that will destroy/inactivate a potentially large percentage of the agent, whether bacterial or viral. A large percentage (though not all) of bacterial and viral pathogens are relatively fragile. If they are not in a suitable environment, whether a host or the proper environment, they die/become inactivated in a relatively short period of time (anthrax is a notable exception as a spore former, like tetanus and other clostridial bacteria {gas gangrene etc}). Additionally biological "warheads" need to be loaded shortly before use in most cases. All of this combines for technical reasons why using biological agents/biowarfare in a traditional military conflict is difficult, over and above the issues of cross-contamination of your own troops.

Puttinh all of this together it shows how biological agents are, in general, more suited for a "terrorist" model than actual warfare. Spraying agents covertly (out of a "shaving cream can") in a metro station, contaminating a food or water supply, or even using human suicide volunteers to spread disease are all better models.
 
Warning: Some speculation follows.
One of the big issues with bioweapons is blowback. If you don't have a vaccine for your bioweapon it may well hurt you as much as it hurts your enemy. Assuming that due diligence is being done (something I'm way less confident of than back in pre-911 days, major powers are always putting the blood of defectors and the like literally under a microscope to look for unusual antibodies. It's probably not feasible to do a mass vaccination for a new tailored bioweapon without showing a lot of your hand to your enemies. Even big civil defense drills got the old DefCon meters up (why, because they telegraph and increased probability of a first strike). This is not perhaps quite as destabilizing as orbital nuclear platforms (outlawed by treaty because they'd force a hair-trigger nuclear posture), but this is very destabilizing.
 
Yep, but those cases have limited relevance for attempts to distribute agents selected for human fatality.
Exactly my point. Pan was arguing anthrax wasn't useful as a bioweapon, using AUM's attempt as an example. He was right - if you're talking about the strain and methods AUM used, rather than an actual weaponized strain, produced and disperesed correctly.
 
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