Reply #5: If we seek to deter only the most rational acts our task would be easy [View All]

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

Our long-time nuclear mutually assured destruction doctrine was nothing if not indiscriminate. If nuclear winter models proved accurate we would have been looking at a global situation quite similar to a particularly destructive pandemic striking friend and foe alike.

(Could China develop agents that kill 35% of infected caucasians and africans but only 5% of infected east asians? Not right now but it isn't a cetegorical impossibility. And we were willing to go toe-to-toe with the USSR with worse numbers than that.)

Regarding smallpox, if we released smallpox into the average nation in a way calculated to maximize effect there would be little hope of containing it, no matter how overtly ill people were. Think of the effect in Iran--like most muslim nations a good bit more urbanized then the US. Or Somalia. Or North Korea, a nation with almost no public health infrastructure whatsoever.

I am not suggesting that we would do that, but noting that if we did the world would be no less horrified than if dropped a few megatons.

In all but a few first-world nations we could achieve literal decimation with a handy old virus. As to what we have in Fort Detrick... well, I hope we have something on hand a lot worse than smallpox.

(I say that because the only way to keep ahead of biologicals is to have an aggressive program of development of terrible pathogens in order to see what is doable. So, trusting soul that I am, I assume we are doing just that. If we can come up with something really bad then we know that somebody else will come up with the same thing eventually. And we ought to know about it.)

I understand that these stances are diplomatic in nature and that in practice we will always nuke whoever we feel like nuking on a given day. And if our new stance is diplomatically useful then that's fine.

But given the arc of bio-technology the lethality of bio agents will expand a lot more in the next generation than the lethality of chemical or nuclear/physic-based weaponry. I believe we (humans) are likely to develop species-threatening pathogens before we develop, say, anti-matter weaponry.

Of course, given the cut-backs on our space program we are missing out on the ultimate cost-effective mutual-assured-destruction vehicle which would be to push some large asteroids into the sun. The resultant activity would blow off our entire ozone layer without a backward glance.