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So this has happened before. If anyone here has read “The Hot Zone”, which is one of the great ‘techno-thrillers” of the 90’s (but still nonfiction), the virus

So this has happened before. If anyone here has read “The Hot Zone”, which is one of the great ‘techno-thrillers” of the 90’s (but still nonfiction), the virus spreads to Kinshasa. It’s the capital of Zaire and a major city. But then...it disappears. Ebola is a weird virus. Extraordinarily fatal, about 90% during the 1995 outbreak (smallpox is around 20% for comparison), although they have better treatments now for Ebola that bring it closer to 50%. Either way, lots of health workers have been documented working in a hut with an infected person and never getting infected, yet others have just passed an infected person on the subway and died. The real concern here is what this means for the future of warfare. A lot of people have noted that chemical weapons, and perhaps biological weapons, are perfect for distribution by drone due to their light-weightedness. Biological weapons, much like computer viruses, also can be hard to attribute, making them attractive to use. The Japanese cult that put Sarin in the Tokyo subway in 1996 was also working on biological weapons. They never got far enough, but it demonstrated even non-state actors can pull off credible bio-weapons.

krageon 8y ago
The real concern here is the people dying right now. The "future of warfare" is no warfare - it's exactly this kind of thinking that drives "well we should research it because someone else most definitely is" type of scenario's, which is what got us into the nuclear mess.
- jeffreyrogers 8y ago
  I don't think nuclear weapons and biological warfare are comparable. Nuclear weapons give a country that has them a near total advantage over a country that doesn't in conventional warfare. That's the whole reason countries want nuclear programs: to prevent other countries from using nukes on them. Biological warfare seems less likely to be used by a stable country because its consequences are so hard to predict and it isn't very targeted. And the future of warfare isn't no warfare unfortunately. War and violence are human universals. We can definitely do things to make it occur less frequently, but one of those things is having strong deterrents to war in the form of a strong military.
  - Symmetry 8y ago
    They're hard to predict if you're using something contagious like Influenza. For non-contagious agents like Anthrax (lethal) or Tularemia (mostly just incapacitating) they function more as extra-potent versions of chemical weapons. The Soviets had Anthrax warheads on a number of their ICBMs aimed at US cities back in the day[1], they weren't considered good counterforce weapons but they made good countervalue weapons so if a country's doctrine isn't oriented around a first strike like the US's was they make sense. And given the possibility of nuclear winter you could argue that non-contagious biological weapons are a lot less likely to get out of control. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdlovsk_anthrax_leak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdlovsk_anthrax_leak
  - Retric 8y ago
    That's actually why Anthrax was researched as a bio-warfare agent. Goes airborne spores to human so collect the spores and you get an airborne agent, but it's very bad at Human to Human transmission basically requiring direct contact with open spores.
DanBC 8y ago
> The Japanese cult that put Sarin in the Tokyo subway in 1996 was also working on biological weapons, they never got far enough, but it demonstrated even non-state actors can pull of credible bio-weapons. They got pretty far. https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/10/1/03-0238_article https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/10/1/03-0238_article
Nokinside 8y ago
The real trick is to weaponize them in a way that they spread optimally and then disperse them in a way that avoids detection as long as possible. North Korea has had bio-weapon development program for a long time and has conducted human experiments with prisoners. They also might do larger scale testing in remote islands. No need to Biosafety level 4 laboratory if the researches are not allowed leave the lab and go home every night. If things go south, you torch the island including the people and start over after few years. It's almost impossible to know how good they are in bio-weapons until they use them.
sndean 8y ago
> The real concern here is what this means for the future of warfare. I don't think Ebola is likely to play a role in the future of warfare. Based conversations with Sergei Popov [0], in his experience making biological weapons, viruses generally make for poor weapons because they're difficult to deploy / release. Their work led to them to favor B. anthracis and other sporulating bacteria. You'd probably have to invent a new kind of platform for deployment if you want viral weapons to be targeted. I can see how viruses could be used in terrorism or something comparable to arson, but their use by a state seems unlikely. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Popov_(bioweaponeer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Popov_(bioweaponeer)
- mieseratte 8y ago
  > but their use by a state seems unlikely. One would suspect there would be a certain appeal for clandestine purposes, assuming one can make them hard-to-attribute. Plausible deniability is a useful thing for nation-states. Just look at Russia.
  - sndean 8y ago
    > assuming one can make them hard-to-attribute I think it'd be difficult to attribute. The release platform and preparation that's used would probably be the most identifying feature, rather than the organism. In the case of the 2001 anthrax attacks that was (some claimed) the silicon content, which the FBI thought suggested some expert weaponization knowledge and material. IIRC, Popov explained away that saying that you could just mix in some Gas-X [1]. So maybe even investigation into the preparation wouldn't really point to the source. And, yeah, rereading my comment, my concept of both "state" and "warfare" is probably too simple [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simeticone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simeticone
  - searine 8y ago
    > assuming one can make them hard-to-attribute Luckily bio-weapons come with their own tracking tags. From DNA we can reconstruct its origin. So it is not ideal for clandestine operations.
forapurpose 8y ago
> others have just passed an infected person on the subway and died. Who? That's a false, alarmist rumor and the parent reads like a "technothriller", which is probably the wrong way to talk about real diseases that might alarm people. Remember during the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, some people coming to the U.S., including a nurse who was effectively imprisoned, were subject of a public panic that had nothing to do with reality. There was no risk. Ebola, like any disease, is contagious only in certain ways. The U.S. CDC says: https://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/transmission/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/transmission/index.html The virus spreads through direct contact (such as through broken skin or mucous membranes in the eyes, nose, or mouth) with: * Blood or body fluids (urine, saliva, sweat, feces, vomit, breast milk, and semen) of a person who is sick with or has died from EVD * Objects (such as needles and syringes) contaminated with body fluids from a person sick with EVD or the body of a person who died from EVD * Infected fruit bats or nonhuman primates (such as apes and monkeys) * Semen from a man who recovered from EVD (through oral, vaginal, or anal sex) The Ebola virus CANNOT spread to others when a person shows no signs or symptoms of Ebola Virus Disease (EVD). ... There is also no evidence that mosquitoes or other insects can transmit Ebola virus. Please don't spread these rumors. EDIT: It also distracts people from the real risks.
- 2RTZZSro 8y ago
  Ebola may be made airborne locally as some body fluids may be aerosolized during rapid expulsion of air from the lungs.
  - radicaldreamer 8y ago
    Yep, this is sneezing. Ebola is scary because it is one of the most contagious diseases. But in any complex system, it's very hard to predict who will contract the disease and who won't. You can see similar scenarios play out after Chernobyl, where some people who were very close to the reactor which blew up where seemingly unaffected and lived long lives, while others who were relatively far away passed from radiation exposure or the subsequent cancers.
    - 8y ago
xkcd-sucks 8y ago
Biology implements its own blockchain, kind of, so it's pretty easy to track down a common ancestor with enough samples. The oldest one gives you the release location and potentially some information about where it was sourced/created if you have enough information from before the event-- For example, tracking anthrax down to a sample collected from a specific farm during a cattle outbreak and then looking at people who were in the area. In contrast, software viruses don't accumulate changes unless they're under active development. Chemical and nuclear stuff can possibly be attributed by looking at isotopic composition or impurities, to determine manufacturing process. But doesn't really tell you anything unique. Exceptions are e.g. polonium which where only a few state agencies are known to be able to make it. The classic, scary chemical weapons (e.g. cholinesterase inhibitors, Sarin) themselves are kitchen chemistry. Ricin, even nastier to die from, is barn chemistry in that it's essentially castor bean tea. However, I suspect that people who manufacture on the cheap usually kill themselves and anyone with enough knowledge and resources to not kill themselves often don't want to make chemical weapons.

krageon 8y ago

The real concern here is the people dying right now. The "future of warfare" is no warfare - it's exactly this kind of thinking that drives "well we should research it because someone else most definitely is" type of scenario's, which is what got us into the nuclear mess.

jeffreyrogers 8y ago
I don't think nuclear weapons and biological warfare are comparable. Nuclear weapons give a country that has them a near total advantage over a country that doesn't in conventional warfare. That's the whole reason countries want nuclear programs: to prevent other countries from using nukes on them. Biological warfare seems less likely to be used by a stable country because its consequences are so hard to predict and it isn't very targeted. And the future of warfare isn't no warfare unfortunately. War and violence are human universals. We can definitely do things to make it occur less frequently, but one of those things is having strong deterrents to war in the form of a strong military.
- Symmetry 8y ago
  They're hard to predict if you're using something contagious like Influenza. For non-contagious agents like Anthrax (lethal) or Tularemia (mostly just incapacitating) they function more as extra-potent versions of chemical weapons. The Soviets had Anthrax warheads on a number of their ICBMs aimed at US cities back in the day[1], they weren't considered good counterforce weapons but they made good countervalue weapons so if a country's doctrine isn't oriented around a first strike like the US's was they make sense. And given the possibility of nuclear winter you could argue that non-contagious biological weapons are a lot less likely to get out of control. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdlovsk_anthrax_leak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdlovsk_anthrax_leak
- Retric 8y ago
  That's actually why Anthrax was researched as a bio-warfare agent. Goes airborne spores to human so collect the spores and you get an airborne agent, but it's very bad at Human to Human transmission basically requiring direct contact with open spores.

DanBC 8y ago

> The Japanese cult that put Sarin in the Tokyo subway in 1996 was also working on biological weapons, they never got far enough, but it demonstrated even non-state actors can pull of credible bio-weapons. They got pretty far. https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/10/1/03-0238_article https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/10/1/03-0238_article

Nokinside 8y ago

The real trick is to weaponize them in a way that they spread optimally and then disperse them in a way that avoids detection as long as possible. North Korea has had bio-weapon development program for a long time and has conducted human experiments with prisoners. They also might do larger scale testing in remote islands. No need to Biosafety level 4 laboratory if the researches are not allowed leave the lab and go home every night. If things go south, you torch the island including the people and start over after few years. It's almost impossible to know how good they are in bio-weapons until they use them.

sndean 8y ago

> The real concern here is what this means for the future of warfare. I don't think Ebola is likely to play a role in the future of warfare. Based conversations with Sergei Popov [0], in his experience making biological weapons, viruses generally make for poor weapons because they're difficult to deploy / release. Their work led to them to favor B. anthracis and other sporulating bacteria. You'd probably have to invent a new kind of platform for deployment if you want viral weapons to be targeted. I can see how viruses could be used in terrorism or something comparable to arson, but their use by a state seems unlikely. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Popov_(bioweaponeer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Popov_(bioweaponeer)

mieseratte 8y ago
> but their use by a state seems unlikely. One would suspect there would be a certain appeal for clandestine purposes, assuming one can make them hard-to-attribute. Plausible deniability is a useful thing for nation-states. Just look at Russia.
- sndean 8y ago
  > assuming one can make them hard-to-attribute I think it'd be difficult to attribute. The release platform and preparation that's used would probably be the most identifying feature, rather than the organism. In the case of the 2001 anthrax attacks that was (some claimed) the silicon content, which the FBI thought suggested some expert weaponization knowledge and material. IIRC, Popov explained away that saying that you could just mix in some Gas-X [1]. So maybe even investigation into the preparation wouldn't really point to the source. And, yeah, rereading my comment, my concept of both "state" and "warfare" is probably too simple [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simeticone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simeticone
- searine 8y ago
  > assuming one can make them hard-to-attribute Luckily bio-weapons come with their own tracking tags. From DNA we can reconstruct its origin. So it is not ideal for clandestine operations.

forapurpose 8y ago

> others have just passed an infected person on the subway and died. Who? That's a false, alarmist rumor and the parent reads like a "technothriller", which is probably the wrong way to talk about real diseases that might alarm people. Remember during the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, some people coming to the U.S., including a nurse who was effectively imprisoned, were subject of a public panic that had nothing to do with reality. There was no risk. Ebola, like any disease, is contagious only in certain ways. The U.S. CDC says: https://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/transmission/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/transmission/index.html The virus spreads through direct contact (such as through broken skin or mucous membranes in the eyes, nose, or mouth) with: * Blood or body fluids (urine, saliva, sweat, feces, vomit, breast milk, and semen) of a person who is sick with or has died from EVD * Objects (such as needles and syringes) contaminated with body fluids from a person sick with EVD or the body of a person who died from EVD * Infected fruit bats or nonhuman primates (such as apes and monkeys) * Semen from a man who recovered from EVD (through oral, vaginal, or anal sex) The Ebola virus CANNOT spread to others when a person shows no signs or symptoms of Ebola Virus Disease (EVD). ... There is also no evidence that mosquitoes or other insects can transmit Ebola virus. Please don't spread these rumors. EDIT: It also distracts people from the real risks.

2RTZZSro 8y ago
Ebola may be made airborne locally as some body fluids may be aerosolized during rapid expulsion of air from the lungs.
- radicaldreamer 8y ago
  Yep, this is sneezing. Ebola is scary because it is one of the most contagious diseases. But in any complex system, it's very hard to predict who will contract the disease and who won't. You can see similar scenarios play out after Chernobyl, where some people who were very close to the reactor which blew up where seemingly unaffected and lived long lives, while others who were relatively far away passed from radiation exposure or the subsequent cancers.
  - 8y ago

xkcd-sucks 8y ago

Biology implements its own blockchain, kind of, so it's pretty easy to track down a common ancestor with enough samples. The oldest one gives you the release location and potentially some information about where it was sourced/created if you have enough information from before the event-- For example, tracking anthrax down to a sample collected from a specific farm during a cattle outbreak and then looking at people who were in the area. In contrast, software viruses don't accumulate changes unless they're under active development. Chemical and nuclear stuff can possibly be attributed by looking at isotopic composition or impurities, to determine manufacturing process. But doesn't really tell you anything unique. Exceptions are e.g. polonium which where only a few state agencies are known to be able to make it. The classic, scary chemical weapons (e.g. cholinesterase inhibitors, Sarin) themselves are kitchen chemistry. Ricin, even nastier to die from, is barn chemistry in that it's essentially castor bean tea. However, I suspect that people who manufacture on the cheap usually kill themselves and anyone with enough knowledge and resources to not kill themselves often don't want to make chemical weapons.