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by GartzenDeHaes
1355 days ago
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0. For chemical and biological weapons, there's in inverse relationship between dispersal characteristics and ease of force protection. For example, oily liquids such as VX disperse well, but personnel can be projected with simple charcoal lined protective clothes and gas mask filters. On the other hand, viruses and microtoxins are difficult to protect against, but they also have poor dispersal characteristics from bombs and projectiles. 1. The armed forces of major countries spend a lot of effort to LOOK as if they are prepared to operate under chemical and biological conditions. This includes large stockpiles of protective gear and regular exercises that include chemical weapons scenarios. 2. Chemical and biological weapons aren't used militarily because there's little reason to think that they would be effective.
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The US Navy dispersed a microbe off the coast of SF to test natural wind dispersal of biological warfare agents. The microbe was harmless to healthy people, but hospitals contain unhealthy people-- some of whom the navy managed to kill.
In the midst of an international mosquito eradication effort that (temporarily) rid much of the Americas from disease carrying mosquitoes, the US Army was breeding and releasing mosquitoes within the US. The Army was testing mosquitoes as a vector for spreading weaponized biological pathogens. I'm not sure if this was a "success" i.e., proved it would have killed a lot of people or not.
When I was in university, there was a physics professor at UC Berkely who was trying to call attention to the UC system getting 1/3 of their funding from the military. Some of that funding was probably accounted for by the University of California being the entity that manged the national labs developing nuclear weapons. But, some of that funding was going into research into creating new strains of pathogens e.g., gain of function research which seems pretty much exactly the kind of research you would do when developing a biological warfare agent.
I guess <adjusts tin foil hat>, I'm not 100% convinced the US abandoned biological weapons. While I'm not convinced that they didn't abandon them either the US has invested a lot into them, and that gain of function research funded by the military was not that long ago.
And, non-nuclear states can more easily get the precursors for chemical and biological weapons than nukes. E.g., Iraq's chemical weapons program (mainly used against Iran) used some production equipment sourced from the US, and precursor chemicals sourced from Germany and the UK. And, the, apparently believable, cover story was that they were manufacturing pesticides. I'd be surprised if a lot of militaristic smaller countries didn't have this sort of weapons program.