'World War III Will Be Fought With Viruses' (benzinga.com) 194
Long-time Slashdot reader hpickens writes: Richard A. Muller Has an interesting op-ed in the WSJ that asserts that World War III may not be what you expect (Source paywalled; alternative source) and that a two-front biological and cyberattack could lead to a U.S. defeat before we know what hit us. Muller paints a picture of what such a dual attack would look like. "The great value to the attacker of a two-pronged biological and cyber attack is the possibility of achieving destructive goals while keeping the whole operation covert," writes Muller. "Covid wasn't a deliberate attack, but it quickly and successfully damaged the American economy. Any nation thinking of using a deadly virus as a weapon of war would first need to immunize its own people, perhaps under the guise of a flu vaccination. Long-term population-level immunity would require the virus be sufficiently optimized, before release, to reduce the probability of further mutation."
The second prong of the attack would target hospitals with ransomware viruses. "Ransomware could simultaneously target energy grids, power plants, factories, refineries, trains, airlines, shipping, banking, water supplies, sewage-treatment plants and more. But hospitals would be the most salient targets. Avoiding obvious military targets would enhance the illusion that World War III hadn't begun."
"Deterring such an attack will require a clear, credible and articulated promise to respond to aggression. It can't be covert. If China, Russia or both attacked the U.S. this way, how would we react? Policy makers need to come up with an answer. An economic embargo seems suboptimal. Many would interpret nuclear retaliation as disproportionate. Developing a retaliatory virus would take time, and responding this way would clearly violate the Biological Weapons Convention."
The second prong of the attack would target hospitals with ransomware viruses. "Ransomware could simultaneously target energy grids, power plants, factories, refineries, trains, airlines, shipping, banking, water supplies, sewage-treatment plants and more. But hospitals would be the most salient targets. Avoiding obvious military targets would enhance the illusion that World War III hadn't begun."
"Deterring such an attack will require a clear, credible and articulated promise to respond to aggression. It can't be covert. If China, Russia or both attacked the U.S. this way, how would we react? Policy makers need to come up with an answer. An economic embargo seems suboptimal. Many would interpret nuclear retaliation as disproportionate. Developing a retaliatory virus would take time, and responding this way would clearly violate the Biological Weapons Convention."
Look out (Score:4, Insightful)
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COVID and vaccine conspiracy posts incoming!
I was thinking along the same lines. Something about a certain group of people who would deny reality and refuse to get a shot would be the first ones to die off. Which would be a good thing because it would leave those who want to solve the problem and strike back free to do so.
You know what, that doesn't sound like such a bad thing. Let's do it.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Too late. Article already does that. (Score:5, Informative)
Though article it is paywalled, audio version can be listened to. [wsj.com]
At around 1 minute and 10 seconds our boy Dick makes that argument up there in the summary, about the need for a virus sufficiently optimized before release.
Followed by a claim that "The novel corona virus was sufficiently optimized that no serious mutations occurred for nine months."
Freudian slip or a deliberate claim of a planned viral attack? You be the judge.
I'm just gonna point out that it is patently wrong.
Our boy Dick not finding three previous mutations "serious" doesn't magically erase them NOR does it reduce the +30%, +50% and ~60% increase in transmissibility, hospitalisation and mortality (respectively) of Alpha mutation alone.
Incidentally, Dick the Wonderboy is a physicist.
No credentials nor credibility regarding immunology, virology, biology, medicine... hell... even regarding bullshit claims about being a "National Security Adviser" - which is a specific position of the Executive Office of the President [wikipedia.org].
And his bullshit claims don't stop there. [wikipedia.org]
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Covid wasn't a bioweapon. Covid, at BEST was China doing what it does best and lying about things for propaganda reasons, and at worst it was a lab-engineered virus possibly for developing a vaccine against bird flu.
What we should have learned from that is we should not trust China to do EVER do the right thing, they are more interested in propaganda and pretending to be successful, than being successful.
In the event of a biological weapon (eg viruses) actually being deployed, there will be no declaration
Nope (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Nope (Score:4, Interesting)
It won't happen through a virus as they can never be sure it won't kill its own citizens.
You're assuming the people who control bio weapons don't also control the cure / inoculation against them.
So only if the specific government has a death whish themselves
The human race has a long history of employing disease as weapon. We have managed to already use the black plague, smallpox, anthrax and glanders in warfare before the Geneva Protocol outlawed such practices.
But as Ukraine has shown the very first thing that happens when a country goes to war is that they tear up the Geneva Protocol and do whatever they think they can get away with.
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It won't happen through a virus as they can never be sure it won't kill its own citizens.
You're assuming the people who control bio weapons don't also control the cure / inoculation against them.
You know that viruses have been know to mutate rendering the original vaccine ineffective, right?
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But as Ukraine has shown ...
The USA did this too during the war on terror, exempting itself from parts of the Geneva Convention.
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As we have seen, it WILL kill their own population because there's always people who will refuse vaccination.
Then again... that would only mean that these non-compliant people would perish...
Never mind. Carry on.
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Getting rid of all anti-vaxxers? Sounds like a noble goal to me, no war required. Of course things like that never stay limited.
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A bit of collateral damage is to be expected. Unfortunate, but necessary for the greater good.
Re:Nope (Score:5, Insightful)
Everybody who starts a war thinks they can win it, so delusions are par for the course. Don't count on rationality in clearly irrational people.
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Historically that was untrue. But around WW2 it stopped that you could actually win a war, you would at the very least lose it later. It did not even take the bomb for that. Today, everything is so interconnected that you will do damage massive enough that even if only a smaller part of it affects you, you lose.
But there are always the insane that managed to get too much power.
Re:Nope (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is well studied. First, germ warfare will bring the hammer of God on you because suddenly the whole planet is against you. Second, it is not actually that easy to make deadly germs that also spread well and that can be weaponized. Even getting to 10% deadliness is almost impossible. Sure, you only need something like 5% to collapse a civilization, but there is a high risk your own will be affected and then there is the above mentioned hammer that will be applied to you.
Also, how do you test it? SUre, if you are North Korea, doing some Mengele-Style experiments is probably doable, but you must keep that secret. Not something you can do below nation state and it needs to be a fully fascist one.
In other words, germ warfare is pretty self-destructive, pretty hard to do and hence entirely stupid. The only reasonable application is terrorism, and there it will be mostly the panic that does the damage. If it even works for that. We have observed a few failed attempts now.
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Mmmm... I read a study (public info) on a variant of influenza that was tested on ferrets. It was 100% lethal. Ferrets were chosen because their reaction to influenza is quite similar to the human reaction. This was readily spread via aerosol and presumably also by bodily fluids. The study was reported to have been funded by the CIA.
Well, this was in the popular press. It could be wrong. And it was long before CRISPR was available. Believe this as much as you want to, but the evidence I have is that
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You do not need proof. Nations can be eradicated on just enough suspicion. Hence nobody sane will even touch this type of research.
Also, good job on ignoring all the _other_ problems with it!
Assume sanity? Hell No! (Score:2)
Indeed. Nuts reign. I don't want to name names, but some leaders are or were clearly missing screws upstairs.
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Currently I can only think of one major leader who would be likely to risk getting himself killed. But there sure have been others in the past. And for some approaches it wouldn't take a major leader.
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There is another reason also. We can sequence virus RNA in days, we can create vaccine code in an hour. Rest of the time is production and testing of the vaccine, but if you are in a hurry, you can skip the testing. You could try to overcome this by engineering a virus spreads without revealing itself and then activates everywhere at the same time, but we don't have public knowledge of such technology at the moment.
I think that it is more likely that we won't have WW III at all, because war has become way t
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Well maybe not viruses, but I've played with scenarios where you could introduce a known biological agent and decimate a geographical area over time and render it unfit for life.
It plays as a big game of Pandemic 2. As long as you have tight control over your boarders (Madagascar), you can cause havoc world-wide with little risk to yourself.
You don't think like a fascist... (Score:2)
Here's how it's done. [wikipedia.org]
If China, Russia or both attacked the U.S. this way, how would we react?
writes Muller. "Covid wasn't a deliberate attack, but it quickly and successfully damaged the American economy.
Any nation thinking of using a deadly virus as a weapon of war would first need to immunize its own people, perhaps under the guise of a flu vaccination.
Long-term population-level immunity would require the virus be sufficiently optimized, before release, to reduce the probability of further mutation."
See?
Your enemy should be "them" [wikipedia.org] enough, preferably distinctly [wikipedia.org] racially but some concessions [wikipedia.org] can be, and have been, made.
That way, when talking about a "sufficiently optimized" virus, it is clear, though unstated that it will be a virus to eliminate the "white people".
Then, you need to think in conspiracy.
Connect them vaccines with attacks on "US". Say things like "not a DELIBERATE attack" to cover your ass - your audience will get that dog whistle.
Also, work that cognitive dissonance a
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Indeed. This cannot be done reliably. A real MAD strategy. On the other hand, the nuclear deranged still believe MAD is a good idea and works just dandy. Until it does not.
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It won't happen through a virus as they can never be sure it won't kill its own citizens. So only if the specific government has a death whish themselves, as in the final move because its gonna loose, no country is gonna use a virus.
In war the leaders send our own people to fight and die. Why is this different?
It's a question of what does winning mean. Your opponents don't even need to be declared. You only need to figure a mild edge and advantage.
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It won't happen through a virus as they can never be sure it won't kill its own citizens. So only if the specific government has a death whish themselves, as in the final move because its gonna loose, no country is gonna use a virus.
As someone who has been to both China and Ukraine (but not actually Russia) a good number of times, I can assure you that in both China and Russia, the government looks at all citizens as expendable if the person/people in power survive, so this won't stop them from doing it.
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It's been done before. It's usually been rather ineffective, partially for the reason you suggest, but this hasn't kept it from happening.
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It won't happen through a virus as they can never be sure it won't kill its own citizens.
The idea is to find a section of DNA that largely matches your target, but not your side. For example, if you went to war against Poland, you would try to find a DNA fragment that is mostly in Polish people, but not other people. If the virus finds that fragment, only then does it activate. Matching ethnicity is essentially what 23andMe and a bunch of other companies are doing, so that part is mostly taken care of.
We don't have the technology to do this yet, but we're learning how to make stuff like this [youtube.com]
Re: Nope (Score:2)
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So they'd never issue disease-laden blankets, or a vaccine that includes the herpes virus? This conspiracy nut has already given you the answer: Vaccinate your own people first.
But you are correct on a basic level: Any man-made virus will mutate and decimate its inventors.
Not probable (Score:2)
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Well, it needn't wipe out the opposing population. Just like a conventional attack doesn't have to wipe out every soldier to make an army unable to fight back.
Even the most battle-hardened soldiers will crack when a considerable amount of people in their platoon dies in short time. A green platoon is routed with just over 10% losses.
Now ponder what would happen if 10% of the population croaks in a short time. Fuck, just remember how braindead people acted in 2020 when just about 0.1% of the population died
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And for bonus points, do not kill them, cripple them and economically ruin the target.
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Sure, sure. We'd do that. We wouldn't just roll over, blame our politicians and instantly surrender to whoever promises us that it stops immediately.
Say, where were you the past 3 years? Fuck, we can't even be assed to fight because our prices got jacked up, we'd roll over just to have cheap crap again.
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You can't get an unmutating virus, but don't assume that a useful vaccination can be quickly produced. We got a quick vaccine for COVID because SARS had been extensively studied. Figure on AT LEAST doubling the time for a novel virus. And remember that there are some that have been around for multiple centuries and still have no useful vaccine. It isn't all because there wouldn't be much payoff.
Or we could just ensure there is clean indoor air (Score:2)
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We couldn't even get people to follow simple and easy procedures to protect themselves and others. You think we could actually enact some kind of air filtering processes that everyone follows?
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>"We couldn't even get people to follow simple and easy procedures to protect themselves and others."
You mean like mask mandates, plexiglass shields, and X-foot rules that were very ineffective? You kinda proved the point- having actually effective passive systems like HVAC/UV air handlers wouldn't require trying to manipulate people, they just do their job in the background. To me, that looks like a huge win for everyone, all the time, and for any types of infections and even allergies and smells.
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Masks had quite the effect. No, they were not 100% effective. Nothing is. Also, the effect was that you would not infect others more than they protect you from getting infected, but of course, if people had been told that, they would not have worn them at all. Because, if I'm already infected, why bother protecting someone else, right?
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>"Masks had quite the effect."
Respirators had quite an effect, masks no. But respirators are complicated, expensive, in short supply, and extremely annoying/inconvenient. And to be effective, they have to be fitted correctly, used correctly, and replaced correctly.
>"No, they were not 100% effective. Nothing is."
My conclusion was more like 10% to 15%, overall for typical/average individual use, and much, much lower when comparing mixed/mass population mask mandates.
My point was that passive things li
Re:Or we could just ensure there is clean indoor a (Score:5, Interesting)
Even cloth masks lowered transmission chance about 50%, N95 by over 80%. That you "feel" like it's 10% means jack.
And I think you might have a hard time convincing people that they should invest a couple thousands into filtering the air in their building when a simple mask costing like 2 bucks would have at the very least the same level of virus spread reduction.
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>"That you "feel" like it's 10% means jack."
I assure you, my opinions are not based on feelings. They are based on research, observation, experience, and reasoning. I am also always willing to change them.
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CDC on mask effectiveness [cdc.gov].
Your turn.
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CDC on mask effectiveness.
CDC reports are not the best source of information. Their studies are not peer reviewed and "Early Release" is troubling.
Your turn.
"Wearing masks in the community probably makes little or no difference to the outcome of laboratory-confirmed influenza/SARS-CoV-2 compared to not wearing masks (RR 1.01, 95% CI 0.72 to 1.42; 6 trials, 13,919 participants; moderate-certainty evidence). Harms were rarely measured and poorly reported (very low-certainty evidence)."
https://www.cochranelibrary.co... [cochranelibrary.com]
I should note that there a
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I have to ask, what benefit to society would you see in them aside of their ability to avoid a spread of a disease? I mean, yes, I do appreciate that I had to deal with a far lower level of halitosis attacks by people talking to me, but while I do appreciate the lack of stinking cloud attacks, I usually prefer avoiding people altogether, which has about the same effect.
But seriously, how do you want to gauge the masks' "benefit to society" independent of their ability to avoid the virus spread?
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>"CDC on mask effectiveness. Your turn."
Sorry, not playing the game. I did that for long enough already.
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I was hoping I could see some of that
research, observation, experience, and reasoning
that contradicts this.
But ok.
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Masks had quite the effect.
Show the data that proves this please. Otherwise, maybe you might want to review what virologist said before COVID because it isn't exactly what you think.
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Specialists change their analysis results when new data becomes available? Who would have thought. Since science is not religion, that's actually allowed, ya know? You can (and often do) get to different results with improved data. And yes, after Covid we have more data about Covid than before it. And of course that means that with more data, we can provide a more detailed and accurate analysis.
I thought that's obvious, but apparently it needs to be stated.
Here [science.org] would be a pretty elaborate analysis of transm
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We did? I thought we had populist politicians that did anything they could to oppose pretty much anything virologists said would be sensible. With predictable results, which was then used by the same populists to claim that the measures don't work.
Well, they can only work if you actually enact them.
As for changing standards, yes, that's what you get with a new disease. We don't know jack about it and we start testing how we can deal with it. And recommendations will change accordingly when we get more and b
Re: Or we could just ensure there is clean indoor (Score:3)
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>"Or we could just ensure there's clean air through ventilation and filtration everywhere"
This is something I argued for doing. It isn't THAT difficult to retrofit HVAC systems to circulate air continuously through HEPA and/or UV systems. This could have a huge impact on reducing the spread of not only viruses but also bacteria, fungus/mold, and allergens as well. It would be a good idea on so many levels.
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Even simple filters are fairly effective. We had bad wildfire smoke a couple of years ago. Putting in a MERV13 filter and running the fan all the time made a huge difference. Probably not stopping a virus but helps.
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I have allergies and asthma. In my house, I have two stand-alone HEPA air filter systems, one near the bed, and one in the utility room/kitchen. Plus I have a MERV13 system in the central air, with the fan always running.
MERV13 isn't very effective on viruses (that takes a whopping MERV19), but it is helpful, since viruses are often stuck to larger particles. But 13, is very effective on almost all dust, dander, mites, most bacteria, some smoke. 0.3 to 1 um.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
https://www.m [mechreps.com]
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To do it right is more difficult than it looks. You need to change air circulation patterns so that you get vertical air flows, so air from one person doesn't flow on to the next before it ever hit filtration. But, yeah, intermediate steps would help a lot.
OTOH, that's assuming that the virus tends to spread via air transmission. Other forms of transmission require other approaches. Fungi can be some of the worst, not only because they can be incredibly durable, but also because we have very few decent
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>"You need to change air circulation patterns so that you get vertical air flows, so air from one person doesn't flow on to the next before it ever hit filtration."
Ideally, yes. But that is so impractical it is never done, except in extreme circumstances, like clean rooms.
>"But, yeah, intermediate steps would help a lot.
A whole lot, yes. Because it is all about reducing the amount of airborne pathogens and how long the person exposure is. As long as the air is moving reasonably well, it will greatl
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Or we could just ensure there's clean air through ventilation and filtration everywhere, making virus distribution and airborne threats something of the past instead of making up wargames.
Would such actions result in a healthier population or would it ultimately prove harmful?
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Or we could just ensure there's clean air through ventilation and filtration everywhere, making virus distribution and airborne threats something of the past instead of making up wargames.
I totally agree with you but have to reluctantly let you know that ventilation systems are getting worse rather than what you rightly propose. I recently became aware that I am mediumly affected by air pollens. I became aware of this after my work moved my department (we are a very large defense contractor) to a newly built building. The new buildings ventilation system is totally crappy and does not even filter out pollens well (compared to the 30 year old building we had come from), let alone viruses and
Dr Strangelove (Score:2)
Yeah, I'm sure some enemy nation state somewhere is planning such clearly unhinged attacks on the USA as we speak. If so, why haven't we heard about them? e.g. Dirty bomb threats have been wildly exaggerated in both their likelihood & their impact.
Please remember that the
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Universal Healthcare (Score:2)
After seeing the shitshow COVID wrought, it seemed you could make the argument of universal healthcare as a part of national defense.
The only real argument against is taking the dumpster fire of US healthcare and adding the military-industrial complex to it.
We're fucked.
highly unlikely (Score:2)
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^^^ This/Bingo
It is almost impossible to contain a highly contagious novel virus once it has escaped into the populous in the modern, connected world. Even easier if it can find a non-human species to infect as well. It might take time, but it will eventually mutate and come back around. It makes for a very poor weapon, unless your target is just everyone, everywhere.
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Yeah, same thought here, that article is just hystery.
And I want to add the 10-15% part of the population with hereditary, acquired, or medically induced immunodeficiencies, and the part of the population where a vaccination will just fail. That would create on the one hand a breading ground for a virus meaning time to reproduce - and therefore to mutate and on the other hand the rising death toll would not come unnoticed.
However I do not argument against general propper preparation for a future virus outbr
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Maybe. Or maybe the top of the government would just need to be convinced that they were safe, and that there were too many disruptive "commoners" anyway. So the disease could be spread anonymously.
Politics has lots of really unusual people making decisions when you look through history.
MAD (Score:2)
How would you contain this? It will most likely inevitably spill over into the rest of the world and everyone gets fucked, unless you have a vaccine for it at the same time. And viruses may mutate in ways you haven't predicted and render your vaccine useless.
In short, this looks like 12 Monkeys reimagined.
No WW3 (Score:2)
There are far simpler way to crush an enemy nowadays.
Take the US for instance. Most of their citizens are weak as fuck already. ..., and a good chunk of them will either die or be incapacitated enough to be utterly useless. And by taking away, you dont even have to do it literally. Just disrupt the energy
Especially those that like to play it tough because they have a gun at home and a big guzzling car that they think can go offroad.
Just take away their heart medicine, their AC, their elevators, their cars,
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You don't even have to go that far. Look what's going on. The big and bad US of A is already more than willing to roll over and let Russia do as it pleases just because prices went up and they can't have cheap crap anymore.
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just because prices went up and they can't have cheap crap anymore.
We don't need Putin for that. We have Governor Inslee.
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That was in the PAST when Americans weren't the delusional snowflakes they are today (and I'm referring to all parties; especially, the small dick gun owners who will harm themselves with a good ad campaign; or shoot their eye out by mistake...)
Glass & Glow (Score:2)
> If China, Russia or both attacked the U.S. this way, how would we react?
I don't know, but I'm pretty sure all the janitors would be using Mop n' Glow to clean the floors, and they would have plenty of glass after. We could just rename the territories "Glass & Glow" for funsies.
What if it's temporarily debilitating not lethal? (Score:2)
A lot of the arguments presume the attack bio-agents having high death rates and coming around to bite the initiator after mutation. The bio-agent is essentially the whole attack, or the bulk of it, so the mutants that escape the attackers' immunizations hit him about as hard as he hit his enemies in the first strike.
What if it's not? What if it's just one or more new variants on a (primarily) temporarily debilitating thing with only minor mortality? What if it's just, say, a bad cold or flu variant, or
Would obviously backfire (Score:2)
The problem with a viral attack is that it wouldn't just impact the attacked nation. It would also impact the nation of the attacking country.
That would be a pretty dumb tactical maneuver.
asymmetric legalisms (Score:2)
Developing a retaliatory virus would take time, and responding this way would clearly violate the Biological Weapons Convention."
So an attack that would violate the Biological Weapons Convention is OK, but a response is not? "Laws of war" only work to the degree that combatants agree to restrict -their own behavior-. Look at all the 'laws of war' that Russia has broken in Ukraine, with no additional consequences for each violation.
The recent debate on delivering cluster munitions to Ukraine is another ex
world war 4 (Score:2)
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WW3 was ALREADY fought!
It couldn't be a conventional war so it was a cold war made up of many smaller proxy wars and civil wars, coups, resistance fighters etc. More people died in the cold war than WW1. No nukes were used but more test nukes were detonated than at any other time.
WW4 will also not likely be conventional either.
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No. That will be World War 5. I've got plenty of ammo stocked up for #4.
Re: world war 4 (Score:2)
WWJD?
Die hard (Score:2)
The very notion of a conventional World War III is unrealistic.
Just nuke them (Score:2)
This is just a MAD attack, expecting anything less than a nuclear response is fanciful.
Talking like there would be any less than a nuclear response dangerously stupid.
Precisely (Score:2)
WWIII, to the extent such a thing is possible, will be fought with autonomous drones.
Re: Just nuke them (Score:2)
But my right wing newspaper said otherwise!
This _still_ hurts _both_ sides... (Score:2)
Crippling a super powers economy will have an almighty blow back impact globally which will impact the country which implemented such an attack.
We saw how much damage Covid did to the global economy.
The way I see the next world war happening is through the lens of modern human history.
An escalation, but no side actually wanting a war, due to the negative impacts for both sides.
Then something triggers the balance and the war starts. Could be a mistake, could be crossing a red line due to a foolhardy hotheade
Must be the weather,. (Score:2)
The guy is hallucinating when he thinks viruses are controllable.
First of all, how would you convince people to take the 'vaccine' if there is no real heavy flue outbreak? Then, how do you prevent the rest of the world from noticing? You just need one person from that country to donate a drop of blood to an outside actor to foil that whole plan. Also, how do you prevent a virus from mutating. Makes no sense.
It's a stupid unrealistic fantasy that is only designed to make people scared.
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The particular scenario is absurd, but there are related scenarios that aren't. And in those scenarios you can't tell (for certain) who initiated the attack...or possibly even that it was an attack.
Consider COVID. I'm rather certain that it was natural, but there's no way to prove it. I do think that if it had been an attack it would have been more lethal, though perhaps not quickly. And China would have lost a large part of it's populace, say 1/3. Possibly 1/2. There would have been a successful vac
Stupidest speculation I've ever seen. (Score:2)
Good luck with that ... (Score:2)
Riiiight ...
The first false premise is that there are precise viruses that can be 'created' and guaranteed not to mutate significantly during the course of the 'war'.
The second false premise is that the aggress
Man with wild imagination (Score:2)
Racial Purity Virus (Score:2)
Imagine a virus that was specific enough to avoid bodies that carried a genetoc marker, like eye/hair colour...
Covid wasn't a deliberate attack (Score:2)
Don’t take such an assertion at face value.
Not a thing about SARS CoV-2 has held under scrutiny. The least of which, its origin!
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If it was an attack, it was done incompetently. And there's no evidence that it was. I don't think there CAN be any proof that it wasn't. Even finding an exact copy circulating in the wild wouldn't constitute proof of that. (And that would really not be something we should expect to find. Covid had obviously evolved to spread in humans by the time we noticed it.)
If you can predict it, you're wrong (Score:2)
If one side thinks the other side is prepared for some particular attack, they'll use a different one. Currently subversion via media nudges seems to be popular, but I'm not sure how successful it will be/has been. The US has favored economic warfare over the last several decades. Not very successfully. And nobody's putting all their bets on one horse.
Silly (Score:2)
The WSJ makes terrible toilet paper (Score:2)
It keeps smearing off to the right.
Never realized (Score:2)
Obligatory Einstein (Score:2)
https://www.snopes.com/fact-ch... [snopes.com]
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One word: lol
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US policy has always been: one hint of nuclear, chemical or biological warfare and we'll respond massively, totally disproportionally and with no targeting limitations. This has been, is and will always been the best deterrent ever: you attack us, we execute your whole population and glass your territory. So, don't even think about it.
While the article dismissed a nuclear response, I do not think it is out of the realm of possibility that a US President, faced with a biological attack that killed millions and shows no signs of being slowed, would launch a retaliatory nuclear strike. And that is the key the realm of possibility that a strike would be launched; as long as it is a plausible response it would give a country's leaders pause before they strike.
However, I do think the economic disruption as well as possibility the strike goes b
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While the article dismissed a nuclear response, I do not think it is out of the realm of possibility that a US President, faced with a biological attack that killed millions and shows no signs of being slowed, would launch a retaliatory nuclear strike.
Why? When you can destroy your enemies on the battlefield using conventional means, why would you go nuclear? That doesn't make any sense at all. You have been playing too many strategy games I think.
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This, and the article assumes that vaccine hesitancy is unique to the US. It's not. Many nations that did a very good job maintaining social mitigations had lots of trouble convincing their populations to get vaccinated. China was one of these nations.
We have a winner: Whole World (Score:2)
So the only completely-impossible-never-to-occur-on-this-earth scenario where it might occur is if the whole world gangs up on one single country to try and stomp them into the ground, leaving them with nothing to lose.