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Comment by tw04

17 hours ago

>We didn’t ban these because they’re an extinction threat. (They’re not.)

Sorry what? Biological weapons are absolutely an extinction level threat. If you haven't watched the spread of the flu and covid every year and quickly realized that in the modern day a properly engineered bio-weapon would functionally end the human race, I'd like some of what you're having.

>We banned them because they’re only useful asymmetrically.

That's simply not true and shows either a lack of understanding of history, or an intentional perversion. The Taliban don't care about the Geneva convention, but is functionally incapable of utilizing chemical warfare to any significant degree despite the fact I'm sure they'd have loved to use it to wipe out the US military in Afghanistan for the last 20 years and the Russians before that. On the flip side, their deployment in WWI wasn't asymmetrical, both sides used the weapons and both sides agreed after watching the end result that nobody should be using them.

*If anything, drones are far, far more useful for asymmetric warfare. They can be easily acquired for cheap, there are no export controls, there's very little expertise required, and you can attach something as basic as a pipe bomb to them to do significant damage.

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tw04

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JumpCrisscross  15 hours ago

> Biological weapons are absolutely an extinction level threat

They may or may not be. That’s not why we banned them.

> simply not true and shows either a lack of understanding of history

Here’s an accessible summary: https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch...

The contemporaneous sources are vast and point in one direction: these weapons aren’t useful for the winners of wars, are annoying to deal with, have a bit of a notion of novel horror to them, and so were bannable. Nobody was talking about extinction.

> their deployment in WWI wasn't asymmetrical, both sides used the weapons

Not what asymmetric warfare means.

> drones are far, far more useful for asymmetric warfare

Sure. But they’re also useful for large military states. So not going to be banned.

Like, someone is free to cosplay a ban. But the incentives to circumvent it are too great. There are no incentives to make illegal chemical or biological weapons because they’re just not that great as weapons.

(I’ll note that your reading of history, while wrong, is far from unique. It’s unfortunately counterproductive as it implies a moral crusade against a category of weapon can get it banned. It might be able to. But chemicals and biological arms aren’t a precedent for it.)