"Limited" Biological Warfare

There are often discussions of "limited" nuclear warfare. Was there ever any time during the coldwar when "limited" biological warfare was seriosuly considered? What would the effects have been?
 
Biological weapons work too differently I guess... "limited" warfare could anyway kills MANY as the 'plagues' go off control...
 
The issue with biological weapons is that they cannot effective and be contained at the same time. Bacteria and viruses just don't care about national borders or who's side the current host/carrier is on and have a nasty tendency to mutate quickly making a mockery of any attempts at controlling them.
 
It would require finding an enemy who's not immune to something you are, and it would have to be something rather more dangerous than the common cold. Not easy.
 
Unless in the future, someone do the VERY touchy genetic manipulations for a germ or virus targeting special markers of some... ethnicity or groups...

and I am not sure it is doable scientificaly.
And dystopic.... 'Race warfare' indeed.
 
Walter Mosley wrote a science fiction anthology "Futureland", in one of the short stories a white supremacist group attempts to spread a genetically modified virus. The incredibly ironic outcome is that the virus in question mutates to where it kills anyone with less than 1/12 African DNA. This sort of outcome is entirely too plausible.
 
David Drake wrote something similar

As for limited Biowarfare I remember reading a short story about nonlethal bio weapons, give you bad headache and diarrhea but not kill you, good for destroying productivity without killing people. Of course thse things can mutate but this is your best bet
 
Unless in the future, someone do the VERY touchy genetic manipulations for a germ or virus targeting special markers of some... ethnicity or groups...

and I am not sure it is doable scientificaly.
And dystopic.... 'Race warfare' indeed.

I read that the South Africans worked on this in the 80s, but as far as I know they never got anywhere...
 
A lot of the research that went into biological warfare was dedicated to making it limited (read: controllable). However, given the legal and emotional status of bioweapons, I don't think this was ever actually discussed in public. It was certainly not part of any official war plans.
 
I suppose that biological weapons targeting food supplies could count, there was a fair bit of development of those style of weapons.
 
Limited and virus don't work so well together. I don't even know why they call them weapons, since a weapon is something you can control. Anyway, back to the question; something like this was used against the Indians, when they were given blankets that were infected with some disease to which the soldiers were resistant.
 
Limited and virus don't work so well together. I don't even know why they call them weapons, since a weapon is something you can control. Anyway, back to the question; something like this was used against the Indians, when they were given blankets that were infected with some disease to which the soldiers were resistant.
It was smallpox
 
Was there ever any work done on viruses/ bacteria/ etc that would have a "timer" where they would all automatically die off after say 2 weeks or something? Of course, there's still the chance for mutation...
 
You can't do that with viruses or bacteria, individually you can program bacterium cells to die at a certain age, but you can't engineer a whole group of them at different ages to die all at one.
 
A limited biological strike that could be traced back to a nation-state would result in that nation state being hit with nukes. If that nation was the Soviet Union, and the US was attacked, I think the soviets would be blasted in a nuclear first strike.
 
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