There's a reason that people in military and political circles refer to certain weapons as "weapons of mass destruction," or "WMD." They aren't like launching a bullet downrange in the hopes of punching a bad guy's ticket; they aren't even like yanking the cord on a howitzer or releasing a JDAM from an F-15E to try to turn a whole bunch of bad guys into a fine pink mist. A bullet may have your name on it, but an artillery shell or a JDAM is addressed "To Whom It May Concern."
Weapons of mass destruction, though, may be addressed to an entire city or even an entire country.
Or the entire planet.
There are three primary types of weapons in the WMD triad, and our military refers to them with the initialism NBC: Nuclear, Biological, Chemical. Of the three, biologicals are far and away the most frightening - and the easiest, perhaps, to smuggle.
See Also: Legacy Media Fails: Biological Materials Are No Joke, and This Scientist Was Smuggling Them.
So let's take a look at the three.
Nuclear
Nuclear weapons are no joke, as the United States demonstrated in 1945. The devices used to hit Hiroshima and Nagasaki are firecrackers compared to the nuclear devices sitting in arsenals today. Modern nukes, fusion rather than fission warheads, can have yields measured in megatons, not kilotons. These are city-erasers, and perhaps even worse, a big crowd-pleaser detonated over the central United States at the edge of the atmosphere could do inestimable damage to our electrical grid. This has the potential to toss the continental United States back to pre-Civil War technology.
But once a nuke detonates, the worst is over. Granted, the worst is pretty bad, and there will be lingering radioactivity for months or years. Cities consumed by the fireball will be years in the rebuilding. It is, however, possible to recover from a nuclear explosion. As evidence, granted, those 1945 devices had much lower yields - Hiroshima and Nagasaki today are prosperous, flourishing, modern cities. My wife has a friend in Nagasaki and has visited that city and seen that for herself.
Chemical
When talking about chemical weapons, much depends on the specific agent. There are blood agents, nerve agents, blister agents; some are persistent, some are designed to be non-persistent; that is, to break down quickly, to allow friendly troops to quickly occupy an area. Some agents have to be inhaled, some kill or incapacitate by contact. Some nerve agents, which do damage by blocking nervous system signals in the body, are frighteningly lethal; a tiny drop on the skin anywhere on one's body can incapacitate or kill. What's more, persistent agents, in places like the undersides of fence rails, can last for months. Winds can also carry these agents for considerable distances, and if large areas are affected, it's not just people that are affected, but entire ecosystems.
But even these aren't the worst.
Biological
These are the ones that scare the stuffing out of me. They should scare the stuffing out of anyone, especially given recent events.
See Also: Dr. Double Mask: White House Exposes Fauci and the COVID Lab Leak Theory
Biological agents are frighteningly easy to produce, especially given modern gene-editing technology. A devastating dose of a biological agent is easy to smuggle; it can even be done by infecting a person or persons to act as mobile vectors. Much depends on these alpha cases; the more initial infections, the faster and farther the biological agent will spread.
And spread they will. That's what makes bugs so horrifying. They are self-perpetuating, self-disseminating. They breed, they mutate, they spread themselves, and they have the potential to have a civilization-ending effect if a large enough portion of the population is affected. Health care systems could rapidly break down, overwhelmed by the infected; civic order would fall apart, people would flee the cities, but a portion would likely take the bug with them.
Of the three, biologicals are unique in this respect. For a nuclear war to end human civilization, it would take a massive exchange by major nations. The same applies to chemical weapons. But bugs? A few hundred infected useful idiots infiltrated into a nation to circulate among the population could do it. A few small vials of agent released into major airport ventilation systems could do it.
I'm not giving anything away here. There are many novels, television shows, and films that describe precisely these methods.
Weapons of mass destruction are no joke. We should be aware, keenly aware, of the dangers of all three. But of the three, it's bugs that keep me awake at night. And our national experience with COVID and the likliehood that this bug was released, accidentally or not, from a Chinese laboratory - and the presence of Chinese laboratories operating illegally in the United States right now - should be keeping our national leadership up at night, as well.
