Reading Tom Clancy’s Red Storm Rising, and in his part about a possible Soviet chemical attack on West Germany, the book says that in order to grow crops again after such an attack, a lot of insect larvae would need to be procured first.
…What for? To eat the chemical-killed human and animal bodies? Or recycle the soil or something?
Where do you get them - do countries just keep lots of insect larvae on stock? And which kind>
Maybe talking about insect pollinated plants?
That was the whole purpose behind the conversation in RSR, that getting slimed was worse than getting nuked. I might be using the wrong example, but the rehabilitation of love canal and other industrial wastelands takes a while, and now to start thinking of that on a national scale.
This seems misguided to me. I do know that when cropland is contaminated by nuclear fallout, the remedy is to scrape it all off and dispose of it. In that case I can see how you’d want to get that land biologically enriched as soon as possible, and insect transplantation could be an important part of that. But a chemical attack? That stuff is pretty fragile and degrades rapidly after being deployed. Clancy may have gotten this one wrong.
Right, but I’m a bit confused and not sure where you are going. I am not asking whether a chemical attack is worse than a nuclear attack; I’m just asking what insect larvae are used for in such a scenario, what they do, and which kind or where a country would get them.
Mainly that no country keeps stocks of insect larvae on hand, you would have to first source the larvae from another country, and then do what ever your gonna do with them, assuming that the ecology of that particular region could be recovered in a useful time period.
I can only imagine that Canada and possibly the States would have the capacity, and I am assuming that on thinking that on East Germany’s latitude. Europe would be fucked, Chemical weapons were targeted for lines of communication and civilian populations.
It was supposed to the kind of chemical munition oil based VX maybe, but yeah I can see Clancy getting it wrong or perhaps writing it as he was told by an expert.
As stated, this makes no sense to me. Can you give the exact sentences where this appears?
I can’t think of any way that insect larvae are a requirement for agriculture in general. Bees might be necessary for pollination, but that would require hives, not bee larvae. Some insect larvae aerate the soil, but earthworms do it as well.
I heard a chemist describe pesticides as nerve gas for bugs, alternatively, nerve gas is pesticide for people.
The point is that the chemicals in many pesticides is very similar to nerve gas, indeed Iraq got away with building a chemical warfare factory (way back before the wars) by claiming they were building a pesticide plant.
So after a large scale chemical attack, the beneficial bugs will have to be re-introduced into the environment.