Looking at the arguments about Iran and nukes - some claim that Iran is irrational and suicidal and could go for first strike against Israel. But I thought - if Iran wanted to make a national suicide attack would it not use bioweapons - easy to do and deadly - just spray viruses around population centres ? Or are bioweapons not really that deadly ?
This is a complicated question and I could elaborate as to the complexity and/ or complication with using Bio-weapons especially as a first strike option. However bio-weapons have and will always be a very deadly tool in any military strategy.
One important point that often comes up with bio-weapons is dispersing effectively and efficiently. Most currently used methods require ships or planes. This requires air/ sea superiority to be done with any real effectiveness. I probably don’t need to say this but Iran would have neither in a first strike.
Another noteworthy point would be the actual infected area per bio-weapon:
Agent Downwind Area Number of Casualties
Kilometers Dead Incapacitated
Rift Valley Fever 1 400 35,000
Tick Borne Encephalitis 1 9,500 35,000
Typhus 5 19,000 85,000
Brucellosis 10 500 125,000
Q Fever 20+ 150 125,000
Tularemia 20+ 30,000 125,000
Anthrax 20+ 95,000 125,000
Note: Assumes 50 kilograms of agent along a two-kilometer line upwind of a population center of 500,000.
So in the case you were able to somehow get a first strike to land without being shot down you will probably just piss off Israel and its allies. Often the point of a drastic first strike is to get a nation to capitulate or be forced into a position of ineffectiveness.
Finally I would note bio-weapons have no ability to take out infrastructure an important part of a first strike since most battles require air superiority to win.
Summary:
Most biological agents that would be weaponized are too slow-acting and unpredictable for surprise attacks or repelling the immediate attacks of others. Biological attacks may be more suitable for use against fixed defensive positions in long wars of attrition, or against reserve combat units, formations massing in preparation for an offensive, air force squadrons, or rear area support units-where immediate results are not required and the
danger to friendly forces is minimal.
Sorry if that was to long its my first post on this site and I love strategy!.. Also sorry for spelling errors not my strong suite!
some information was obtained from: http://csis.org/files/media/csis/pubs/081028_iranbw_chapterrev.pdf
Sorry table from previous post did not load correctly.
Agent… Downwind Area… Number of Casualties
…Kilometers …Dead …Incapacitated
Rift Valley Fever… 1… 400 …35,000
Tick Borne Encephalitis … 1 …9,500 …35,000
Typhus …5 …19,000 …85,000
Brucellosis …10 …500 …125,000
Q Fever …20+ …150 …125,000
Tularemia …20+ …30,000 …125,000
Anthrax …20+ …95,000 …125,000
Well, I was thinking about the Iran/Israel case, really. I have nothing against either nation, i should say first, by the way, i just wondered at the logic of it. Let’s say Iran didn’t care about a revenge nuclear strike by Israel, the most damage would simply be having agents release viruses at multiple locations via aerosol - on buses and trains, in crowded places - that sort of thing. Undetectable and impossible to stop i would think. Would it be as bad as a nuclear attack ?
What do you mean “undetectable”?
How do you think biological warfare agents would be dispersed? Like a guy gets on a subway train and quietly opens a box, and a few hours later everyone on the train drops dead?
A biological weapon needs to infect the targets. How does it do that? The targets have to either eat, drink, inhale, touch, or be injected with the live virus or bacteria, depending on the exact agent used. And for the attack to really be successful, the targets have to reinfect others around them and cause an epidemic.
It is not easy to spray large areas with aerosol live viruses. The simplest methods are to contaminate drinking water supplies. The problem with the drinking water attack is that modern water treatment will prevent such attacks, people can get clean water, or boil water. Water-borne disease is only a danger when people don’t have clean water, like in refuge camps, or soldiers at the front. But you don’t want to dump cholera into the water at the front, your own soldiers are as likely to be affected as the enemy.
I thought it worked something like that yeah. Guy on a bus, reaches in his bag a sprays a little aerosol round when nobody is looking. Obviously nobody drops dead there and then but yeah, like an artificial sneeze. Bob’s your uncle, epidemic. I’m surprised it hasn’t happened already somewhere.
When the Europeans pushed out onto other continents there were epidemics of things like smallpox and measles in populations that had never been exposed to them before. Fatality rates from smallpox in the Americas may have reached 90% in some places, and that was from just accidental spread of the virus. Pacific islands like Hawaii were decimated by measles.
That wasn’t intentional biowarfare, but it illustrates that there is potential for really devastating effects at least in theory.
Both smallpox and measles are airborne - just being in the vicinity of someone with the disease, breathing the same air, puts you at risk. This is in contrast to something else scary, like ebola or rabies, which are not airborne and require more direct and intimate contact with the sick in order to spread.
On the upside - we’ve eliminated wild smallpox and getting your hands on one of the two remaining stocks in deep freeze would be quite difficult to impossible for the average terrorist. We also have a measles vaccine in wide use, and if only we could get some nutty hold-outs to vaccinate we might eliminate that one, too.
Anthrax is probably the most likely threat these days, and it’s dirt common in the environment - literally, you can find it in dirt. On the other hand, the mere fact the spores are that common and we’re not all dropping dead would indicate that getting it to infect people isn’t the easiest thing. The 2001 anthrax attacks in the US resulted in 5 dead and 17 others getting sick, but didn’t result in a widespread outbreak in general.
Bottom line: potentially horrific, but so far the only “success” stories seemed to have happened by unintentional introductions that lead to epidemics. Harder to actually put into practice than you might think.
I’m not so confident because states have been tweaking germs for years. I believe the anthrax attacks were done using stuff from weapon labs ? Tnx for contributions. But to answer the original question would a bio attack provoke a nuclear response ?
I’m a little confused, maybe I read your original question incorrectly but I don’t see where you asked if it would provoke a nuclear response. This thread is going in so many directions it is hard to know where to start dissecting the problems. Having said that…
First I will say I think you should read the PDF in the provided link, it answers many questions pertaining to Bio-warfare capabilities of Iran. Both in speculation and practical application, really is a fun read if your into modern warfare. http://csis.org/files/media/csis/pubs/081028_iranbw_chapterrev.pdf
Second as I stated in the previous table, even if you are using a particularly potent form of know bio-weapon, such as anthrax, you would need to disperse about 110 pounds over 1.2 miles to do any significant damage to a population of 500,000. Even then only about 90,000 would die. Also the conditions of the attack would need to be such as the city was down wind and ideally not on a summit (Israel is full of summits with populated cities).
Dispersing such a large amount of particulate over a large area can be a hard task to do covertly even when the biological weapon is in an arousal form. Not to mention it would need to be evenly dispersed to be truly effective. Think of it like this: in your typical arousal spray can (lets say the cooking spray you use to make pans non-stick) the ingredients in the can only weigh a few grams. This means to be a weapon of mass destruction you would need to spray about 12,250 cans of at the same time with the same consistency in perfect weather conditions pointed at a city with the perfect geological formations.
I would also note that even changing the formula from 2 parts per million to 5 parts per million would drastically alter range and the effectiveness of said weapon.
Third, it seems like your looking for a zombie type effect with bio-weapon capability where one group of people is infected and then goes near other people who are then infect which then in-turn wipes out a population. This has proven to be very difficult if not impossible way of spreading a deadly disease even in designer bio-weapons. The reason for this is complicated both at a sociological level and biological level. Complex germs are not always as resilient as you would think they would be which means most the time you need direct fluid contact which is something humans seem to have a natural advertence to (you don’t have the need to touch or lick open sores when seen in your species, unlike dogs or other animals).
This does not mean that one such deadly virus can not evolve over time which what a previous poster eluded to with the native Americans and being wiped out by disease that evolved for hundreds of years in Europe.
To produce a designer bio-weapon with the “zombie effect” you would need to do the same thing that happened to the native Americans. Produce a biological germ that killed people and let it keep killing people in an isolated environment. Only when the germ was at a potent stage, a few hundred or thousand years later, could you then release the germ on unsuspecting populations. Even then there are problems with doing this outside of the obvious fact that you cant tell a bio- weapon who not to kill so potentially you could wipe the world.
Finally to the question “would a bio attack provoke a nuclear response ?”
Sure why not if you pissed someone off enough they might do anything. Or maybe not since sanctions on Iran crippled their economy to the point of ineffectiveness, and that was just at the threat of owning nuclear weapons. Maybe if they actually use bio-weapons in a way which threatened the world we will all come together to kill them…. Or die from some unknown bio-germ.
Either way that’s allot of maybes and unknowns which is why speculation can never truly be accurate.
I think that pdf covers everything thanks.
It has.
Turns out that, in many cases, those “flashy” attacks are significantly less effective than an old-fashioned bomb.
I would like to point out that Sarin gas is a nerve agent which would classify it as a chemical agent not a biological agent.
Chemical agents are in a class of there own and often confused with biological agents.
Biological weapons transmit disease such as small pox
chemical weapons transmit a chemical reaction upon delivery often causing instant death such as Sarin.
This is often why you will see chemical weapons used as apposed to bio-weapons, the desired effect is more instant.
Any time, hope the reading helps depict the complexity of using bio-weapons. although it can be deadly it is extremely hard to manipulate a disease to cause a desire effect.
Thank you for the interesting topic!
I think maybe a chemical attack is a more probable outcome which is also worth discussion.
Remember, folks… don’t try this at home 
Hmm, I think Aum Shinriko were just a bunch of incompetents. I would expect state trained agents to be a lot more effective. I’ve heard Mike Scheuer talk about how if the US struck Iran there would be an immediate and unpleasant response from Iranian agents already in the States. Assuming he’s not BSing then it’s probably something along these lines.
But yeah the reason I got onto this is thinking about claims I hear that just because the Iranians are islamic then they are too irrational to own nukes, as if the Iranian leadership are like suicide bombers on a national scale. I don’t really buy this line of reasoning because, if they were suicidal it would be best to attack with what they have now and await nuclear obliteration. It’s just the inevitable mud slinging of international rivalries, seems to me. Could be wrong, just seems like that at the moment.
In the specific case of anthrax, it just happens to be a pathogen that is normally harmless in low doses but easy to spread around in large doses. “Weaponized” anthrax is garden variety anthrax (again, literally) that has been grown into huge quantities of spores. One or even a few dozen spores are probably harmless, and you probably breath in some on a regular basis. But the spores are tiny and easily wind-born, so if you scatter great clouds of it over a populated area, many people will inhale a deadly quantity (tens of thousands of spores according to Wiki and the CSIS paper linked by Face Push).
“Weaponizing” anthrax is basically a process of growing, packaging, and delivering the spores.
There’s the 1984 Rajneeshee bioterror attack in The Dalles, Oregon. More about rigging an election than the destruction of the US, but they did infect 751 people by poisoning 10 restaurant salad bars with salmonella.
I’ve always worried about Anthrax & Cocaine.
It’s a perfect & deadly match.
“Cut” the Cocaine with Anthrax spores, & route it through smuggling channels into the States.
People would voluntarily does themselves with Anthrax–by snorting it, or by injection!
And the people who use Cocaine would be very, very reluctant to seek help, for fear of arrest.
Equally, paranoia & mistrust of Government would cause many people in the drug culture to disbelieve warnings.
Great, not only will the anthrax kill us all, its sexually aroused while it does that! Today is the worst.
In all seriousness, I imagine bio weapons would be much more effective after a first strike scenario, not before. You’d use nukes to scramble everything to hell, the sewers, roads, bridges, electricity, etc and then release the super spores. Without an effective infrastructure to fight a pandemic the death tolls would be much worse than if released in a vanilla attack and in general would greatly impede a nation’s recovery from said nuclear exchange. It would be a dick move, though, and I do not approve.
Now you’ve reminded me of the time oranges were being injected with mercury. Must have been late seventies, some variety of Arab terrorists were injecting exported Israeli oranges, remember it on TV.