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Biological weapons are not used by the US due to practicality, not morality. 1. It's difficult to manufacture biological agents in large quantities. 2. It's h
by GartzenDeHaes 3y ago
Biological weapons are not used by the US due to practicality, not morality.
1. It's difficult to manufacture biological agents in large quantities.
2. It's hard to store biological agents for long periods of time, since living things tend to die.
3. It's hard to disperse biological agents over a large area. Spray tanks require flying at low altitude at slow speeds, or multiple deployments at high speeds. Munitions with bursters are problematic because the explosive burster tends to destroy much of the biological agent that you're trying to spread.
4. It's easy to protect troops in the field from biological agents and all major countries maintain and exercise the capability to do so.
5. Biological agents are slow acting and unreliable in their effect.
Long after the Korean War, the Soviet microtoxin program overcame many of these problems. The Americans took a different approach and focused on improving nerve agents, with the most recent development (that I know of) being a multi-part agent called GB-2.
- rvba 3y agoGB is sarin. What is that GB-2? Cannot find much information about anything like that via google.
- GartzenDeHaes 3y agohttps://emedicine.medscape.com/article/831901-overview https://emedicine.medscape.com/article/831901-overview "Known binary agents include the following: GB binary (sarin, GB2): DF is located in 1 canister, while OPA is in a second canister. The isopropyl amine binds to the hydrogen fluoride generated during the chemical reaction. After deployment of the weapon, the 2 canisters rupture and the chemical mixture produces GB."
- rvba 3y agoBinary of sarin is latest they got? Doesnt sound very "new".
- GartzenDeHaes 3y agoThe US destroyed it's chemical weapons stockpile in the 1990's and 2000's. After the fall of the Soviet Union, there's no use case for chemical weapons and precision weapons are more profitable.
- hulitu 3y ago> The US destroyed it's chemical weapons stockpile in the 1990's and 2000's. Maybe officially.
- MichaelZuo 3y agoIf the evidence presented in this article are true, then it's likely because of the 'test trial' usages in the Korean War that it was confirmed to be impractical. Plus, considering there's substantial evidence that McArthur was close to nuking Manchuria, it seems likely he would have been willing to try something slightly less escalatory and much easier to hide and plausibly deny.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- photochemsyn 3y ago[flagged]
- RajT88 3y agoBig claim at the end there. The FBI agents assigned to that investigation themselves admit they are not sure Bruce Ivins was their man. Nor if he was, that he acted alone. Even if it was just him, no evidence of motivation was ever found. Truly one of our nation's great unsolved mysteries.
- photochemsyn 3y agoNo it wasn't Bruce Ivins, the anthrax powder in the envelopes was a highly sophisticated preparation and Ivins didn't have access to the necessary technology (electrospray aerosolization of pure spores in a specific solution designed to make them maximally aerosolizable when dry). If you look up 'electrospray technology for vaccine production' c. 1999 you'll find the culprits. In West Jefferson, Ohio, acting under CIA government contracts delivered to Battelle Memorial Institute. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Jefferson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Jefferson The truth is often a painful thing. ...Incidentally this is also why the aerosolizable route to vaccination was abandoned, if you look up the history, the technology used to make a stable dry inhalable vaccine was far too likely to be used to make bioweapons.. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10194842/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10194842/ (1999) Dry powder inhalation as a potential delivery method for vaccines That's why you've never heard of it since. You can encapsulate live bioweapon viruses and bacteria as well as vaccine particles using that technology, which of course the Russia, China, America, Israel, India, etc. are all well aware of. I wish they would quit lying about it, and just admit what they've been up to.
- RajT88 3y agoI cannot seem to locate the first paper you mentioned. Only seem to come up with stuff published in the last 5 years. I am interested in trying to follow along though.
- 3y ago
- orangepurple 3y ago[flagged]
- dukeofdoom 3y agoThis is the most likely scenario at this point. Not sure why you're being downvoted.
- operatingthetan 3y ago> bioweapon That part? Really? If you're downvoting, provide a citation...
- __MatrixMan__ 3y agoZoonotic diseases fill a ecosystem niche: they're an immune response against habitat loss. That makes them more or less weapons. The questionable part is whether humans are attempting to use them as weapons, or if they're solely wielded by nature.
- operatingthetan 3y agoI'm not sure what you're adding here because the context of what they said was "bioweapon lab." So the question is, was it a lab for weapons or not?
- __MatrixMan__ 3y agoI don't know those labs get up to, but given that institutes of virology aren't exactly thick on the ground, I think it's pretty plausible that it was a lab leak. And if it was a lab leak, then what was being researched? If it was benign, there would be published explanations. And if you wanted a bioweapon that you could use with genome targeting, you'd want something exactly like COVID (re: how is mostly benign among bats). You'd want it to sleep until it found its target. It's a pretty fantastical conclusion to reach, but it's about as hard to believe as the alternatives, at least until there's evidence backing them. I'm not ruling it out until they figure out which ecosystem change lead to the transmission event (e.g. perhaps a hawk that keeps horseshoe bat populations in check went extinct and the virology lab thing is truly a coincidence). So my point was that it's a good choice for that kind of research. It's already weaponized, one needs only figure out how to target it.
- kornhole 3y agoA few engineered viruses can go a long way cheaply. Problem is you cannot control the spread. You need to have a vaccine ready for the blowback.
- chii 3y agonot to mention a virus could evolve to evade the vaccine too.
- JPLeRouzic 3y ago> "Problem is you cannot control the spread." Some historians say that the English defeated Napoleon at Waterloo because many French soldiers (including Napoleon) had diarrhea. An important difference between French and English soldiers was that the former boiled water for tea, while the French preferred wine. https://www.historynet.com/napoleonic-wars-soldiers/ https://www.historynet.com/napoleonic-wars-soldiers/
- WeylandYutani 3y agoMoney has never been a consideration for the Pentagon since 1941.
- dukeofdoom 3y agoDo we really know what the current capabilities are. It would be top secret. It's been decades of research. I would expect many of these issues have been worked around. I used to think AI was fictional pipe dream. Yet it came to be. > 1. It's difficult to manufacture biological agents in large quantities. Yet the covid vaccine was manufactured in huge quantities in short time. > 2. It's hard to store biological agents for long periods of time, since living things tend to die. The covid vaccine was kept cold storage of -60, and it was good for 18 months. >3. It's hard to disperse biological agents over a large area. This would not be an issue for a respiratory virus, that targets a specific ethnic group. > 4. It's easy to protect troops in the field from biological agents and all major countries maintain and exercise the capability to do so. Yet almost everyone got infected by covid. > 5. Biological agents are slow acting and unreliable in their effect. Covid was fast acting. Yet not that deadly. So i suppose if it was more deadly this too would fall.
- morkalork 3y agoThe problem with #3 is that viruses will happily evolve and hop species. Covid for example spread to farmed mink, then to wild populations. Even random zoo animals were catching it.
- rurban 3y agoWe do have the results of the South African chemical and biological weapons program in clear: https://css.ethz.ch/en/services/digital-library/articles/article.html/d6264a52-9fba-4986-baa2-cf30c2bddc1a#Doc90 https://css.ethz.ch/en/services/digital-library/articles/art... And they certainly did not come out with such lists out of the blue.
- sterlind 3y agotargeting a specific ethnic group would be extremely challenging. afaik, ethnicity is actually responsible for surprisingly little genetic variation. maybe you could e.g. come up with a spike protein that's 25% better at binding an ACE2 receptor variant that 80% of ethnic group X has vs. only 30% of ethnic group Y, but that's not going to make Y immune.
- __MatrixMan__ 3y agoPretty much none of these limitations apply if you can tune the agent to be contagious and harmless (except for the target).
- t-writescode 3y agoNothing like a FOXDIE scenario :D (Metal Gear superweapon that eventually begins to decay and loses its specific-person targeting ability to the point where Snake needs to die to save the rest of the world)
- HWR_14 3y agoBiological agents are not used by the US because it went all in on nukes. Frankly, the US having an official policy of "biological attacks will be met by nukes" is better than having a bioweapon program as deterrence.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- WeylandYutani 3y agoNuclear weapons got better. You can deliver a hydrogen bomb anywhere on the planet via ICBM so why muck around with germs?
- coolhand2120 3y agohttps://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-grant-darpa/ https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-gra... What would you describe this as? This was proposed to the US military. Then it was executed by the Chinese military.
- fit2rule 3y ago[dead]