The use of Bio-weapons as a deterrent?

Question

I'm working on a heavily customized D&D campaign set in the near future, in this universe nuclear material is heavily regulated to the point that only a couple nations are influential enough to construct a limited number of nuclear weapons.

These are used as a deterrent, similar to the concept of MAD but with a lot more proxy wars.

Anyhow, the story starts after one nation who is fed up with being constantly embroiled in proxy wars started by nuclear nations, decides to build their own deterrent.

Building a nuke would be impossible for them so instead they develop an extremely infectious biological weapon similar to TB but vastly more resistant to current treatments and with a significantly shorter latent period (A month, maybe two).

Its a pretty nasty virus, if you've got it, you better start writing a will. We'll say it has some imaginary fatality rate of 20-30% and a 60% chance of permanent lung damage.

Would such a weapon actually function similarly to a Nuclear deterrent? Like if you had your ICBMs full of this stuff, would nations that have nukes actually take your threat seriously enough to not invade you?

I would have thought so before the pandemic, but after seeing peoples reaction to pandemic control measures, I'm not entirely sure anymore if people would take the threat of a virus as serious as a nuclear weapon. Even when the US and Russia had bio weapon programs, the outcry wasn't remotely as big as with nuclear weapons.

Perhaps the weapon would have to actually be used in a strike before it could be used as a deterrent?

As a side question, would ICBMs be the best delivery method if its being used as a deterrent, or is there another delivery method that makes more sense in this context?

Answer 1

There are two fundamental components of a deterrent:

1. The potential adversaries know that you have it: because if they don't know that you have it, why would the feel deterred?

2. The potential adversaries know what your deterrent can do, and they know they cannot do much to counter it.

Now, you say you have developed a scary virus, and that you have a good way to disseminate it. Most rich and powerful states have quite a lot of experience with attempting to weaponise viruses, and they know that it is much harder than it appears to amateurs. Long story short, they might believe you, or they might not. Not much deterring here.

Then there is the problem of how do you actually show you have it. Any way you do it, the potential adversaries will get hold of samples, and they will start working on a vaccine, or on an antiviral, or both. Because, you see, the problem with biological weapons is that, unlike atomic bombs, they can be countered. One can build an effective defense against a virus, whereas nobody can defend effectively against an atomic bomb.

Answer 2

I don't think the deterrence would be the same in conventional warfare.

Radioactivity takes several years to fade away and has no vaccine against it.

This gives nukes a huge advantage in terms of deterrence when compared to biological weapons.

Moreover if you do your calculation good, radioactivity doesn't spread too much to your side, while once a virus is in the open, good luck with stopping it from entering your country: lock down and isolation work decently only if there is a structure supporting them, and I don't think a decimated country's first worry is "let's stop people from getting out from the contaminated area".

It might be different in case of asymmetric warfare, where the terrorist side has not so much to lose from not protecting their side.

Answer 3

In WWII the 'Doomsday Weapon' was poison gas. It was believed that aircraft could drop enough poison gas to kill whole cities. People were issued with gas masks that would probably have only been good against WWI gases. And yet, gas attacks never happened. This was arguably a form of MAD: we could do it to them, but they could do it to us back. We don't want to conquer a country if by rendering it toxic, and neither do they. If both sides prepare for this type of war, and the neither use it, then we have a stand-off.

In WWII, Germany probably could produce better nerve gas, and the allies had Anthrax. Anthrax was a known disease, but the secret was in how it could be deployed in a form that could be inhaled. If you can't explain how you would deploy it without telling the other side how it is done, then you are kinda stuck. You could do some semi-public experiment such as at Gruinard Island.

Nuclear weapons deter because they can be delivered via missile, and they are instantly effective. A neutron bomb that killed people by radiation but left buildings standing might have the reverse effect. Suppose you have tanks coming into your country. A neutron bomb might mean the tank crews know they have two weeks to live. They do not need petrol to get home. They do not need food and supplies. They do not need to conserve their ammunition. You now have an enemy that hates you and is prepared to die. Now think how a biological weapon works. You might have whole populations of infected people who have nothing to lose rushing your borders and infecting you.

There are some people who just want to see the world burn. They will do anything. But as part of a sensible strategy, I cannot see this working.

On the other hand, if you infected them secretly, then said you had stocks of the cure. That might work.

Answer 4

It is not the weapon itself that is the true deterrent, but the delivery mechanism

I am going to do a quick (heh) segway here and talk about Crime - As a general rule, the severity of the punishment is not a deterrent. That is, regardless if the punishment is a slap on the wrist with a wet bus ticket or a torturous multi-day execution - the Punishment is not what is considered when the decision to break the law is made.

The risk of getting caught, however, is a much much greater factor. Let's pick something mild like speeding - if I am on a nice long straight road with perfect visibility, I might go 10 over the speed limit, 20 over, or if I am on my Motorcycle I might go "I'm sorry officer, I was concentrating on the road and didn't notice what speed I was doing".

You can have the most terrifying and nasty bio-weapon, but if the risk of it being successfully delivered is low, then it isn't much of a threat.

Now, conversely - if we look at the US and their foreign policy - we have the AGM-114R9X - AKA the Ginsu Missile. With all the US hi-tech gubbins, the threat is that no matter where you go, what you do, the US can reach out and touch you if they want.

We are also seeing to a degree this in the Ukraine conflict with Drones armed with Grenades - you can't outrun them, you can't hide from them, they are being piloted by an operator so they can track you - they are a terrifying weapon for the infantryman on the battlefield.

All this is to drive home the point:

I am not worried about North Korea having Nuclear weapons (as an example) when their rockets blow up on the Launch pad.

When they can successfully and consistently launch a weapons system and have it hit it's intended target, then - regardless of the payload - I am gonna start getting worried.

I would have the focus be on a reliable and accurate delivery system that could house a nuclear weapon, or a chemical weapon or a Biological weapon - have it be numerous that it could not be taken out in a first strike, have enough range that it is a threat and make it precise so that what is targetted is taken out - that is a better deterrent than just the bio-weapon itself.

Answer 5

Realistically, no

What you're describing would only be useable in a scorched-Earth scenario where, if you can't win, you're going to take the entire planet with you.

You can't target the release of such a virus. All you can decide is where it goes first. The movie-plot thinking is that you could also prepare an inoculation in enough quantity to immunize your population. This falls short in several ways. The primary one being that you couldn't possibly test the inoculation before release. As we saw with COVID, there were several vaccine candidates that, when tested, proved either ineffective with much of the population, or showed nasty side-effects.

Even if you do have a solid, effective vaccine, it doesn't take much for a virus to mutate to get around it. Your people would have a much higher survival rate from the first wave, but inevitably you'd be up the same creek as everyone else.

Answer 6

If you think it's easy to develop an effective and viable biological weapons program, think again.

The closest a nation ever got was the USSR in the 1970s and '80s, after spending decades and tens of billions of dollars (equivalent), employing tens of thousands of people over dozens of sites across their vast empire.

Japan had a somewhat effective program in the 1930s and '40s operating out of Manchuria (where the USSR got a lot of information from when they captured the area).

It is thought China now has a somewhat advanced program as well, but it's highly secretive.

What all of these have in mind is that there are serious problems when turning an existing pathogen into a weapon, especially stabilising and employing that weapon in a combat scenario. The Soviet program (I've read a lot about it, it's very interesting reading, and scary) planned mostly on using cluster munitions dropped from bombers (and later cruise missiles) to disperse powdered plague, anthrax, ebola, smallpox, and other bacteria and viruses. Biggest problem they encountered (apart from creating strains that would be both extremely virulent and very hard to treat) was that the pathogens weren't viable for long when outside their storage containers (which were usually kept cold with liquid nitrogen), so once a bomb was filled it had to be used within hours or it'd be useless. Solving that took up a LOT of the effort they USSR expended on their program (the rest going towards trying to create pathogens that were extremely resistant to treatment and vaccines, including attempts to create a new strain of pneumonic plague that'd release ebola or smallpox virus particles when exposed to antibiotics), and never worked well.

Deployment using ICBMs would be extremely problematic because of the extreme heat encountered by the warheads during reentry. That's why the Soviets were considering loading cruise missiles armed with biological warheads onto submarines and launch those from near enemy shorelines.

btw, I don't talk much about the US and UK BW programs as those were discontinued in 1969 (US) and 1950s (UK) and never reached anywhere near the level of sophistication the USSR (and assumed China and Russia these days) did. Effectively they didn't get much further than what the Japanese managed in the 1930s/40s which was not really an operational weapons system but good enough for some occasional experimental deployments (the Japanese never went beyond dropping some clay pots loaded with plague infected fleas on Chinese cities from bombers to see if it'd work, the Soviets considered similar methods but found it impossible to keep the fleas or other insects alive long enough to be practical).

Of course that's reality, if you want to do a lot of handwaving and stuff you can fantasise away all those problems, but you lose believability.