6 ms·

I shudder to think what modern warfare would be like without biological weapons being banned.

by lanius 8y ago

duxup 8y ago
It's hard to imagine a nation choosing to release something like smallpox considering the risk of it coming back at you and infecting your own population is pretty high. It's not like anyone has a fully resistant population where they could be sure it wouldn't spread to their own nation, or allies or generally cause political / military response by other nations. I mean if two nations were at war, my nation / I didn't care, but fucking small pox showed up spreading around I'd be all for some serious interventionist stuff.... I imagine most nations would be all for it. Granted, chemical warfare could still be a thing :(
- scarface74 8y ago
  Nation states usually act somewhat rationally because they want to continue their existence. What you have to worry about are the zealots who don’t care about dying as long as they can take their enemies out with them because they think they will have a better life on the other side.
  - duxup 8y ago
    Yeah fringe groups / terrorist organizations who are all about causing as much chaos and flourishing in that would be the folk's I'd be worried about that.
  - PhasmaFelis 8y ago
    Terrorists are still acting for a cause, and usually it involves the (perceived) well-being of their culture. Which doesn't mean that terrorists actually have the good judgment to recognize potential consequences, but e.g. your typical Islamic extremist would consider wiping out the Middle East to be undesirable.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > What you have to worry about are the zealots who don’t care about dying as long as they can take their enemies out with them because they think they will have a better life on the other side. The zealots are usually foot soldiers for states or quasi-states, or groups aspiring to control/creation of states, and most of those groups are similarly rational to states. A random Hamas footsoldier, especially with assurances that his family will then be cared for, may commit a suicide attack, just as a soldier of a name might engage in kamikaze attacks, of in military missions that involve a practical certainty of personal death. But neither the leadership not the groups as units are prone to deliberate self-destruction to maximize damage to enemies.
jstarfish 8y ago
Everything old becomes new again. It just changes appearance. Nukes, synthetic bio and chemical weapons are high-profile. If you acquire, produce or use them, you end up on the international radar. Everybody's watching you. But coordinate some useful idiots into convincing enough of their own population that vaccines are bad for them, and you'll pave the way for wiping them out by reintroducing the simple pathogens those vaccines protected against. The future of biological weapons will be organic, all-natural and non-attributable. We are setting ourselves up for something very bad.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
dmurray 8y ago
Plenty of war practices are banned but still carried out. Torture of prisoners, chemical warfare, targeting civilians, killing enemies who have surrendered or who can't fight back. All of these get committed by major modern states - most of them even by the US in the last ten years. Governments refrain from biological warfare because it's not effective in achieving their aims, not because it's banned.
- DuskStar 8y ago
  Give it another 25 years; I'm sure we'll see genetically engineered plagues used by ethnostates (find some mutation that a large portion of your population has that your opponents do not & make that confer resistance) or as an instrument of genocide (the same thing but in reverse) by then. Or if you're willing to plan ahead a little more... Develop the plague and the vaccine a decade or more before use, and spend the intervening decade adding it to childhood vaccines and seasonal flu shots. When it comes time for use, have the remainder of your population vaccinated. I may be a pessimist, but I'd guess that "biological warfare is ineffective in achieving the aims of nation-states" won't be a thing forever.
  - GW150914 8y ago
    It depends on your aims, and willingness to accept the consequences of potential mutations. Eventually the requirements to engineer and produce a plague will become something that can be done in a garage, and without the fundamental limits of something like a nuclear bomb for which plutonium is a required. At that point, I suspect aggressive deterrence will be the only viable option.
    - DuskStar 8y ago
      Of course, it's also possible that by the point genetic engineering is sufficiently well understood and accessible to the public that someone could create a doomsday plague in their garage we'll have medical technology sufficient to deal with the threat. We've sort of followed that trajectory with computer viruses, after all. This still doesn't say good things about the survivability of the 3rd world, though. Even though modern server, desktop and handheld devices (let's call these "people with high-tier healthcare") are rather well hardened, older systems (people without that healthcare) and IoT devices (pets/farm animals/crops/nature) are notoriously vulnerable.
Nasrudith 8y ago
The good thing is that biological weapons kind of suck at being weapons at least. If they are too lethal while horrifying their spread is mercifully limited like ebola - if they are too weak they don't wind up noticed. They stick around and either have no collateral discrimination or are already cured or vaccinated for your own people. Even the classic 'throw plague corpses over the walls' has the twofold problem of having to expose yourself to your weapons to use them and the territory or loot to claim now being tainted. The end impact wouldn't be good start with - less freedom of movement overall with increased tracking and quarantines, less global trade, more restrictions, and bodily autonomy would be a thing of the past as going untested at borders let alone unvaccinated would be an unacceptable threat. Your body /is/ their business as anything related to the immune system becomes a matter of national security. Said heavyhandenss would breed its own backlash as well to perpetuate conflicts as conspiracies that they are making the disease would spread regardless of truth - which is a bit of a problem now even from the people who insist AIDS was a secret project or Ebola workers being attacked by people who don't have causation and correlation straight. Think 'fake news' is bad now along with fact-immune belief? Imagine how tempting censorship would be in the face of those destabilizers combined with the Streisand effect. Then there is without the sociopathic easy solution 'shoot the sick just in case' which would certainly lead to more travesties. The ironic kicker is that this dystopian state would have some upsides in making it in even the most vile dictator's interests to overfund public health and ensure adequate food supply as starving people have weakened immune systems and may catch something to spread around. World hunger may be ironically ended by selfishness. Instead of Military Industrial Complex the term may well be Medical-Military Industrial Complex with fringe benefits. Overall it would be horrifying and I personally consider the most horrifying part is that there would be some large actual benefits to that twisted status quo.
- GW150914 8y ago
  That’s not really true though, and you don’t have to kill people to have an effective weapon. You could releas foot and mouth and devastate an economy or starve people. The truth is that biological weapons could be very effective, depending on your aims. You can attack people to weaken, but not slaughter a population, to pave the way for a conventional assault. You can attack livestock, crops, and yes, go for mass slaughter. Ebola is an extreme case, but many other organisms have a more agreeable profile. Anthrax can be used as an area denial weapon because of its persistent nature for example. You just have to utterly lack a conscience, and that’s an ingredient already present in many cases.
briandear 8y ago
I was a Nuke, Chem Bio Officer in the US Army in the early to mid 2000s.. Bio weapons are very much a threat. Just because we haven’t seen widespread use doesn’t mean they are a benign threat. Belligerent states don’t care about what is “banned.” Chemical weapons are also banned but there have been several public and not-so-public uses of those during the past 20 years.

I shudder to think what modern warfare would be like without biological weapons being banned.

by lanius 8y ago

I shudder to think what modern warfare would be like without biological weapons being banned.

It's hard to imagine a nation choosing to release something like smallpox considering the risk of it coming back at you and infecting your own population is pretty high. It's not like anyone has a fully resistant population where they could be sure it wouldn't spread to their own nation, or allies or generally cause political / military response by other nations. I mean if two nations were at war, my nation / I didn't care, but fucking small pox showed up spreading around I'd be all for some serious interventionist stuff.... I imagine most nations would be all for it. Granted, chemical warfare could still be a thing :(

scarface74 8y ago
Nation states usually act somewhat rationally because they want to continue their existence. What you have to worry about are the zealots who don’t care about dying as long as they can take their enemies out with them because they think they will have a better life on the other side.
- duxup 8y ago
  Yeah fringe groups / terrorist organizations who are all about causing as much chaos and flourishing in that would be the folk's I'd be worried about that.
- PhasmaFelis 8y ago
  Terrorists are still acting for a cause, and usually it involves the (perceived) well-being of their culture. Which doesn't mean that terrorists actually have the good judgment to recognize potential consequences, but e.g. your typical Islamic extremist would consider wiping out the Middle East to be undesirable.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > What you have to worry about are the zealots who don’t care about dying as long as they can take their enemies out with them because they think they will have a better life on the other side. The zealots are usually foot soldiers for states or quasi-states, or groups aspiring to control/creation of states, and most of those groups are similarly rational to states. A random Hamas footsoldier, especially with assurances that his family will then be cared for, may commit a suicide attack, just as a soldier of a name might engage in kamikaze attacks, of in military missions that involve a practical certainty of personal death. But neither the leadership not the groups as units are prone to deliberate self-destruction to maximize damage to enemies.

jstarfish 8y ago

Everything old becomes new again. It just changes appearance. Nukes, synthetic bio and chemical weapons are high-profile. If you acquire, produce or use them, you end up on the international radar. Everybody's watching you. But coordinate some useful idiots into convincing enough of their own population that vaccines are bad for them, and you'll pave the way for wiping them out by reintroducing the simple pathogens those vaccines protected against. The future of biological weapons will be organic, all-natural and non-attributable. We are setting ourselves up for something very bad.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

dmurray 8y ago

Plenty of war practices are banned but still carried out. Torture of prisoners, chemical warfare, targeting civilians, killing enemies who have surrendered or who can't fight back. All of these get committed by major modern states - most of them even by the US in the last ten years. Governments refrain from biological warfare because it's not effective in achieving their aims, not because it's banned.

DuskStar 8y ago
Give it another 25 years; I'm sure we'll see genetically engineered plagues used by ethnostates (find some mutation that a large portion of your population has that your opponents do not & make that confer resistance) or as an instrument of genocide (the same thing but in reverse) by then. Or if you're willing to plan ahead a little more... Develop the plague and the vaccine a decade or more before use, and spend the intervening decade adding it to childhood vaccines and seasonal flu shots. When it comes time for use, have the remainder of your population vaccinated. I may be a pessimist, but I'd guess that "biological warfare is ineffective in achieving the aims of nation-states" won't be a thing forever.
- GW150914 8y ago
  It depends on your aims, and willingness to accept the consequences of potential mutations. Eventually the requirements to engineer and produce a plague will become something that can be done in a garage, and without the fundamental limits of something like a nuclear bomb for which plutonium is a required. At that point, I suspect aggressive deterrence will be the only viable option.
  - DuskStar 8y ago
    Of course, it's also possible that by the point genetic engineering is sufficiently well understood and accessible to the public that someone could create a doomsday plague in their garage we'll have medical technology sufficient to deal with the threat. We've sort of followed that trajectory with computer viruses, after all. This still doesn't say good things about the survivability of the 3rd world, though. Even though modern server, desktop and handheld devices (let's call these "people with high-tier healthcare") are rather well hardened, older systems (people without that healthcare) and IoT devices (pets/farm animals/crops/nature) are notoriously vulnerable.

Nasrudith 8y ago

The good thing is that biological weapons kind of suck at being weapons at least. If they are too lethal while horrifying their spread is mercifully limited like ebola - if they are too weak they don't wind up noticed. They stick around and either have no collateral discrimination or are already cured or vaccinated for your own people. Even the classic 'throw plague corpses over the walls' has the twofold problem of having to expose yourself to your weapons to use them and the territory or loot to claim now being tainted. The end impact wouldn't be good start with - less freedom of movement overall with increased tracking and quarantines, less global trade, more restrictions, and bodily autonomy would be a thing of the past as going untested at borders let alone unvaccinated would be an unacceptable threat. Your body /is/ their business as anything related to the immune system becomes a matter of national security. Said heavyhandenss would breed its own backlash as well to perpetuate conflicts as conspiracies that they are making the disease would spread regardless of truth - which is a bit of a problem now even from the people who insist AIDS was a secret project or Ebola workers being attacked by people who don't have causation and correlation straight. Think 'fake news' is bad now along with fact-immune belief? Imagine how tempting censorship would be in the face of those destabilizers combined with the Streisand effect. Then there is without the sociopathic easy solution 'shoot the sick just in case' which would certainly lead to more travesties. The ironic kicker is that this dystopian state would have some upsides in making it in even the most vile dictator's interests to overfund public health and ensure adequate food supply as starving people have weakened immune systems and may catch something to spread around. World hunger may be ironically ended by selfishness. Instead of Military Industrial Complex the term may well be Medical-Military Industrial Complex with fringe benefits. Overall it would be horrifying and I personally consider the most horrifying part is that there would be some large actual benefits to that twisted status quo.

GW150914 8y ago
That’s not really true though, and you don’t have to kill people to have an effective weapon. You could releas foot and mouth and devastate an economy or starve people. The truth is that biological weapons could be very effective, depending on your aims. You can attack people to weaken, but not slaughter a population, to pave the way for a conventional assault. You can attack livestock, crops, and yes, go for mass slaughter. Ebola is an extreme case, but many other organisms have a more agreeable profile. Anthrax can be used as an area denial weapon because of its persistent nature for example. You just have to utterly lack a conscience, and that’s an ingredient already present in many cases.

briandear 8y ago

I was a Nuke, Chem Bio Officer in the US Army in the early to mid 2000s.. Bio weapons are very much a threat. Just because we haven’t seen widespread use doesn’t mean they are a benign threat. Belligerent states don’t care about what is “banned.” Chemical weapons are also banned but there have been several public and not-so-public uses of those during the past 20 years.