NOTE: THIS IS PURELY HYPOTHETICAL. I AM NOT AT ALL SUGGESTING THAT THIS WAS THE ACTUAL CASE WITH COVID-19. The use of the names of countries here is merely for familiarity and convenience.
What if a deadly infectious disease was intentionally released by a major military/economic power causing a global pandemic? Pretend we have indisputable proof. What does the international community, or any individual country with the means, do about it, if anything?
In the case of a possibly formidable but minor power like Iraq, clearly the answer is “go to war.”
But against a major global military and economic power like China, or even the USA, what does the international community do about it? Embargoes, sanctions, and fines? Kick out of the UN? Some of kind of elaborate black ops campaign against that country’s senior leadership? Hem, haw, and grumble loudly but ultimately do nothing?
Also war, but with the gloves off. Everyone considers biological weapons to be WMDs, to which a nuclear response is justified.
Of course, one complication is that there’s no such thing as indisputable proof. No matter what evidence exists, there will always be some countries who, for political reasons, will stick their fingers in their ears and say “fake news”.
Against a nation like China or Russia, I think we’d see everything short of actual “kinetic” war - if it’s a somewhat “mild” disease. Maximum sanctions, embargoes, cyberwarfare, complete cutoff of trade, retaliatory arms sales to all anti-China or anti-Russia allies, etc. A “mild” bioweapon would be something similar to Covid, which still only has a 2-4% death rate and will likely only kill a tiny miniscule percentage of Americans.
If it were something like smallpox or bubonic plague, though, and tens of millions of Americans were dead, then I expect nukes to fly.
Now, if America itself were the culprit - I think we’d see something similar - extreme sanctions and diplomatic penalties if it’s a mild disease, nukes from Russia and China if something Black Death-ish.
For a proven use of biological weapons by a major power, there would be (in addition to “surgical” strikes against identified labs) major trade and diplomatic embargoes/blockades which would likely be crippling to their economies. Fortunately, major players on the world scene are not fanatical and foolish enough to jeopardize their personal power, world standing and the lives of their own people who could not be effectively immunized against a powerful microbiologic agent without word leaking out.
*alternatively, we could blast the offenders with ALL CAPS, rendering them helpless. :eek:
It certainly wouldn’t benefit a major trading nation which is now hurt by not only the lack of trade but also the impact upon transportation and energy.
Biological weapons are weapons of mass destruction because they have the potential to kill many people, but they are really asymmetric weapons; they can’t be effectively guided or controlled, and in fact there is a good chance that the effects will blow back onto the source, so deliberate use in a battlefield context really only makes sense for a rogue state or terrorist organization, and even then it is unlikely to release a pathogen that is virulent enough yet stealthy to spread among the population sufficient to really wipe out an opponent’s warmaking capability.
If this were a genetically modified pathogen, any of the existing tools would leave clear traces in the genome that would demonstrate said modifications. Virologists who have examined the genome of the SARS-CoV-2 virus have universally pronounced this to be a naturally emergent virus which is no surprise because this is exactly the kind of pathogen they’ve been expecting (and warning about) to result in a pandemic for decades.
Well, right now, the US should figure out
-how to make testing kits available (including all the ancillary requirements like swabs), free and ubiquitous
-how to incentivize making PPE in the US of A
-how to incentivize making anti biotics in the US of A
-contract tracing
-how to temperature test every person in every airport in the US of A
-how to rapidly ramp new tests
You gotta play defense against a terrorist bad actor unleashing something nasty.
Since no-one has mentioned it yet, reparations would be completely justified in this scenario.
So you put pressure on with the sanctions and embargoes etc to get them to 1) Pay the reparations, 2) Allow international investigations and war crimes tribunals and 3) Try to force some kind of executive or judiciary change in the country to ensure that this kind of thing is far less likely in the future.
Of course we could ask how a country can pay reparations while under sanctions. But we’d set the value to something feasible for a nuclear power like China. We would want to keep them playing ball and believing that there was a path to rehabilitation, not leave them with only desperate options.
Conspiracy theorist looneys aside, you would expect that if China unleashed this on their own population, then they would not pick a geographic and industrial center to do so. In fact, if you want to go down the lunatic theory, the Covid outbreak and municipal lockdown should have happened in Urumqi or Kashgar. These are metropolitan areas of Uighur Nationality.
Or if you are going to unleash in Han China, then at least find a relatively less important place than the Chicago or St Louis equivalent in China.
Well, a real conspiracy theorist would argue that it’s likely that they studied bats to find a virus they could unleash on their own population to free themselves of needing to care for the costly and vulnerable and/or those pesky Muslims they need to reprogram over in Xinjiang, but before they could bring it to the target area it was accidentally let loose locally when one of the lab workers was unknowingly infected and traveled through Wuhan on his way home.
I mean, come on, you can imagine a movie with this plot, can’t you?
I am not the OP, but I think he specifically meant this to be about something other than Covid-19 and China, and we are China-ing and Covid-ing this thread too much. He is just asking a general question: **What the response would be if a nation deliberately unleashed a bioweapon upon other nations **(under the guise of a natural outbreak.)
If a biowar attack could be unambiguously attributed to a specific nation’s leadership, I would expect a rather extreme response. (Mushroom clouds FTW!) So would the evil-doers, so they’d best have a False Flag target handy. Don’t expect an Iranian dhow to cruise up the Potomac and pop a nuke - they’ll rig a Haitian sloop instead. If SARS-CoV-2 was an intentional bioweapon, the Chinese would be silly cunts (UK usage) to let themselves be blamed. So assume it’s the work of Armenian superscientists.