Inspired by the recent death of Dr. William Patrick III, one of the leading American bioweapons experts - and, at one point in his career, a leading bioweapon developer. Dr. Patrick made an interesting argument in an interview with PBS:
I’m inclined towards a great degree of skepticism here, but this argument does seem to have some force to it. If nothing else, leaving your enemy broken and impoverished at the end of a war is a great way to ensure he’s eager to fight you in the next war as soon as he gets a chance. If you want your enemy to retain a middle class, education, and so on, you want to leave him with his lights running and water treatment functioning as soon as possible. In theory, biological war with non-contagious agents (like anthrax or tullermia) can do that - but it’s tricky even with modern smart conventional weapons.
On the other hand, the prospect of someone deploying contagious biological weapons is a horrible thing. And even non-contagious weapons are hard to control, and likely to kill civilians. (On yet another hand, pretty much any heavy weapons use in urban warfare is likely to kill civilians).
So, what says the Dope? Are there circumstances in which the use of biological weapons is morally permissible, or is the current wisdom (that they are obscenities, full stop) correct?
Dead is dead. I don’t think there are any particularly humane ways of killing someone, so it’s not the tool used that’s important ‘morally’, but how it’s used and most importantly, when it’s employed.
The only thing about biological weapons are the potential for them to get out of control and kill a lot more folks (namely your own) than intended, but then I suppose the same can be said for nuclear or even conventional weapons.
The argument is the same with all weapons of mass destruction, nuclear, biological or chemical. They don’t discriminate on who they kill. Patrick may believe that he can get by with killing only one percent of the population, but the weapons don’t know whether that one percent is soldiers or orphans.
I agree with most of the previous sentiments. Although I think war should be a terrible last option (which is almost never used), when you do go to war with someone it should be to the death of every last one of them (or they surrender)
In which case, I don’t really care what means you use.
I think if this were the case today, you’d have a lot less war.
The one difference is that eventually it will be possible to key a pathogen to specific DNA sequences. Just like it only takes a couple dozen (probably a lot less) sequences to identify someone down to odds of 1 in a few billion, it will soon be possible to target biological weapons with virtually godlike specificity. Hell, it might already be possible.
The use of bio weapons for defence, in which we retain seed supplies for medical research into neutralizing an attack is morally correct and permissible. I don’t think anyone would argue that.
For deployment of said weapons, in my opinion is morally hazardous and impermissible. A nuclear war would be cleaner and have the offending country that got nuked, up and running faster than a running hotzone of weaponized contagions.
Did you think the zombie apocalypse would start itself?
Seriously though, it would depend on the vector. Viruses are notoriously sloppy at replication - both a blessing and a curse - but they probably have shorter incubation times. Some bacteria (and archaea?) have fairly stable genomes but on average probably take longer to proliferate.
I don’t think it would matter though since you can program the cells to self destruct (pretty sure about bacteria, not sure about viruses). You would just have to be able to be specific enough to time when that would happen - probably after a certain number of divisions. Of course that’s also one of the ideas behind eukaryote cells too - unfortunately cancer never got the memo.
In my mind the difference between biological weapons and the rest is that with bombs, even chemical and nuclear bombs, a person is required to drop them. With rifles, a person is required to aim at another person. With ships a person has to target the missiles/guns. With a biological weapon it is too easy to drop it, walk away, and watch it do its killing from a detached distance.
Because war is so devastating it should only be undertaken by humans and at their hands. Even “indiscriminate” bombing discriminates in its targeting and purpose. A microbe is unable to make that distinction.
Biological warfare is just not a one shot deal, but can be ongoing treatments, just look at the pharmaceutical industry and people’s ongoing dependence on a medicine to see how horrible biological warfare can get.
It can be a way of controlling others, basically enslaving a population to a antidote that is only available from one source. inflicting people for the rest of there lives.
There seems to be the assumption that biological weapons are just ways to kill people and spread horrible deadly diseases.
However, there are biological agents which have a fatality probability of less than 1%, but are capable of leaving people completely incapable of fighting for a week or two.
Not that I’m suggesting we use biological weapons, but take Iraq for example.
Iraq has a population of around 20 million. If in 2002 they’d been able to spray the entire nation with an incapacitating biological agent, they could have left the entire country incapable of fighting for about two weeks. Which would have allowed the allies to come in and take over before an insurgency could arise. With an agent that has under a 1% death rate, you would have killed less than 200,000 people and prevented any significant insurgency developing. 200,000 deaths is lower than most reports into the number of deaths in Iraq to date.
How on Earth would that have prevented an insurgency? The insurgents are not composed of remnants of Saddam’s government and army, but rather paramilitary groups that already existed or have formed since the invasion.
Now, if you wanted to make that argument for a conventional government-on-government war, like WW2, then maybe it would work, though you’d have to deal with an almost certain blowback when the disease worked its way back to your own people. But applying that argument to Iraq is foolish.
You could make the same argument about landmines. Every day random civilians get killed by landmines planted in wars that ended before they were even born. It’s about as unfocused a weapon as you could devise.
It’s not quite as bad as all that in tactical employment; landmines (especially mines like Claymores) can give signifigant tactical advantage.
it’s just that so many of the world’s militaries don’t give a shit about their record keeping or cleanup.
But overall, I agree with Doors. Killing-by-proxy lets too many people suffer the illusion that there’s no blood on their hands, that war is bloodless.
It is the logic of the neutron bomb. It would have a small explosion and release radiation that would kill every living thing in its range. It was designed to fight German or Soviet tank divisions without destroying the land they occupied. It would piss off our allies if we destroyed their country to save it. The neutron bomb would kill soldiers in tanks or armor . It would wipe out soldiers ,even those in buildings. No hiding is possible. It would kill every man, woman, dog, cat, insect ,rat or flea.
We fired off 2 A-bombs, but this was seen as too extreme ,even for us.
