3 ms·

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

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.

Nasrudith 8y ago
True there are some applications even if they may be inferior to conventional weapons in some ways - the real weakness with the biological weapons is protective equipment. Stopping bullets is hard and explosives are even harder. However like chemical weapons masks and coveralls can offer complete protection in many cases. The interesting thing is that many of those targets are also conventionally attackable yet don't seem to be even considered. Firebombing farms isn't the norm although it is technically an option to weaken them. For instance terrorists could cause a lot of disruption and casualties just by sabotaging train tracks or shooting substations yet they they target people directly instead. It seems almost memetic that they avoid the 'boring' options even when they lack other motivations. Al-Qaeda doesn't plan on annexing the US in even their wildest dreams so they would have no reason to care about damage to an asset - it is even cheap and uses highly available tools locally. Yet they never even attempted it. The closest thing was considering bringing a plane into a nuclear powerplant until they did the math and realized that it wouldn't cause a meltdown, radiation leakage, or even loss of power - it would cause cosmetic damage.
- noir_lord 8y ago
  I've never understood it either. You could bring down a power grid in a European nation by a well timed series of strikes on major substations and the parts to replace them just aren't held in stock (not in large numbers) and the lead time is long. The economic damage from blacking out entire regions would be catastrophic.
  - PJDK 8y ago
    The problem, from a terrorist point of view, is that if your lights go out you don't think "terror attack". A terrorist is looking for maximum publicity for minimum effort, not maximum economic damage.
    - GW150914 8y ago
      It’s also hard to build bombs without killing yourself, hard to transport them, hard to deploy them for maximum effect. Then you’re likely to face the wrath of whoever you attack, and tracing bombs and bombers is something governments do well. Tracing a pathogen could be very tricky, and it might not be possible at all in some cases. Spreading a virus is something even a toddler can manage. If it becomes cheap and easy to engineer to a contagious pathogen, deploying it will be all too easy, tracing it will be challenging.
      - PJDK 8y ago
        Interestingly the lack of tracability brings it's own problems (if you are a terrorist). If some group were to have claimed responsibility for the 2014 ebola epidemic, would you have believed them?

Nasrudith 8y ago

True there are some applications even if they may be inferior to conventional weapons in some ways - the real weakness with the biological weapons is protective equipment. Stopping bullets is hard and explosives are even harder. However like chemical weapons masks and coveralls can offer complete protection in many cases. The interesting thing is that many of those targets are also conventionally attackable yet don't seem to be even considered. Firebombing farms isn't the norm although it is technically an option to weaken them. For instance terrorists could cause a lot of disruption and casualties just by sabotaging train tracks or shooting substations yet they they target people directly instead. It seems almost memetic that they avoid the 'boring' options even when they lack other motivations. Al-Qaeda doesn't plan on annexing the US in even their wildest dreams so they would have no reason to care about damage to an asset - it is even cheap and uses highly available tools locally. Yet they never even attempted it. The closest thing was considering bringing a plane into a nuclear powerplant until they did the math and realized that it wouldn't cause a meltdown, radiation leakage, or even loss of power - it would cause cosmetic damage.

noir_lord 8y ago
I've never understood it either. You could bring down a power grid in a European nation by a well timed series of strikes on major substations and the parts to replace them just aren't held in stock (not in large numbers) and the lead time is long. The economic damage from blacking out entire regions would be catastrophic.
- PJDK 8y ago
  The problem, from a terrorist point of view, is that if your lights go out you don't think "terror attack". A terrorist is looking for maximum publicity for minimum effort, not maximum economic damage.
  - GW150914 8y ago
    It’s also hard to build bombs without killing yourself, hard to transport them, hard to deploy them for maximum effect. Then you’re likely to face the wrath of whoever you attack, and tracing bombs and bombers is something governments do well. Tracing a pathogen could be very tricky, and it might not be possible at all in some cases. Spreading a virus is something even a toddler can manage. If it becomes cheap and easy to engineer to a contagious pathogen, deploying it will be all too easy, tracing it will be challenging.
    - PJDK 8y ago
      Interestingly the lack of tracability brings it's own problems (if you are a terrorist). If some group were to have claimed responsibility for the 2014 ebola epidemic, would you have believed them?