That would scare me more than the nukes. The Soviets had a massive biological weapons program, in gross violation of the Biological Weapons Convention. Imagine if your country was dusted with extremely virulent strains of smallpox, anthrax, and other diseases, genetically engineered for maximum lethality.
When I was a kid in the '80s it was a popular idea that the US and the USSR had enough nuclear weapons to literally crack the planet in half. Even our teachers told us this in school. I’ve since learned it wasn’t true but it scared the shit out of me at the time.
True; however, deployment issues are always the bane with bioweapons. If the vector is too virulent you can’t deploy without threatening your own troops or population; if it is not virulent enough the infection dies out before it can spread far from the nucleus, which requires either a very wide deployment or highly targeted application. Chemical weapons are even worse; their deployment is seriously impacted by weapons, yet they can remain persistent in the affected environment for weeks or even months, which makes their battlefield use problematic and strategic value highly questionable. In a real world scenario, more people would die from thermonuclear attacks on population centers and the resultant effects therefrom than from biological or chemical weapons.
Stranger