BIOWARFARE AS A WEAPON OF MASS DESTRUCTION:

I've now engaged in two sets of discussions about Gregg Easterbrook's TNR article: in comments to this entry and here.

I was distressed to see the estimable Matthew Yglesias, whom I considerably respect, say:
Gregg Easterbrook makes the excellent point that chemical weapons don't really work [...] Similarly, bioweapons, though they seem to have the potential to cause mass suffering on a scale exceeded only by, well, regular plagues have a record that, in practice, is not very impressive when compared to that of bullets. His argument is that in the case of Iraq it's really only nuclear weapons that we need to be worried about. [...] [the international] bans [on chemical and biological warfare are] not really as well-motivated as one might have thought.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden, one of the most brilliant people I've ever known, and there is no one I respect more, thought Easterbrook's piece "interesting," and apparently took away from Easterbrook that:
biological and chemical weapons are overrated as "weapons of mass destruction." I observe that Easterbrook's piece is a tissue of misleading falsehoods, omissions, minimalizations, and distortions.

Patrick said of Easterbrook's piece:
It pointed out that, by and large, they haven't been anywhere near as efficient at quickly killing large numbers of people as nuclear weapons are. Well, yes, what else could kill hundreds of thousands of people in an instant? I wasn't aware that this was even remotely a point anyone needed clarifying.

But, as I pointed out to Matthew Yglesias, influenza killed more people in 1918 than everyone killed in WWI. Without the intentional aid of a single human being. Without any genetic engineering. Without any refining.

Here we see:
Between September 1918 and March 1919, an epidemic of Spanish influenza swept through the United States and the world. The flu virus caused the deaths of more than 500,000 Americans and 25 million people worldwide. And they had a working flu vaccine.

Here it is said:
The influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 killed more people than the Great War, known today as World War I (WWI), at somewhere between 20 and 40 million people. It has been cited as the most devastating epidemic in recorded world history.

[...]

It infected 28% of all Americans (Tice). An estimated 675,000 Americans died of influenza during the pandemic, ten times as many as in the world war. Of the U.S. soldiers who died in Europe, half of them fell to the influenza virus and not to the enemy (Deseret News). An estimated 43,000 servicemen mobilized for WWI died of influenza (Crosby).
No one has ever said biowarfare could kill even tens of thousands of people in an instant. Or a day. That's not the question. The question is: could biowarfare kill tens, or hundreds, of thousands of people, in a month, or a few months? And the answer is: yes, yes, yes.

Why this is reassuring, I do not understand. What comfort, of any sort, or what information of any value, was in Easterbrook's piece, I'm utterly failing to get. That's why I'm completely puzzled at people citing it as "interesting" and "worthwhile."

What Easterbrook said, in many cases, wasn't true. From his piece:
Chemical weapons are dangerous, to be sure, but not 'weapons of mass destruction' in any meaningful sense. False. They can, and have, killed hundreds of people at a time. That's "mass" enough for me. Drop ten missiles loaded with the right gas, at the right time and place, and you can kill thousands. That's mass enough for me. Let alone twenty or thirty missiles, or more.

In World War I, casualties from gas were:
Total British Empire: Non-Fatal: 180,597; Deaths: 8,109; Total: 188,706

France: Non-Fatal: 182,000; Deaths: 8,000; Total: 190,000

United States: Non-Fatal: 71,345; Deaths: 1,462; Total: 72,807

Italy: Non-Fatal: 55,373; Deaths: 4,627 60,000

Russia: Non-Fatal: 419,340; Deaths: 56,000; Total: 475,340

Germany: Non-Fatal: 191,000; Deaths: 9,000; Total: 200,000

Austria-Hungary: Non-Fatal: 97,000; Deaths: 3,000; Total: 100,000

Others: Non-Fatal: 9,000; Deaths: 1,000; Total: 10.000

Grand Total: Non-Fatal: 1,205,655; Deaths: 91,198; Total: 1,296,853

If that's not "mass," I don't know what is.

Let's not forget, as well, the other mass use of chemical weapons in war in modern times. Who did that? Oh, yes, Saddam Hussein.
Similarly, biological weapons are widely viewed with dread, though in actual use they have rarely done great harm. This is a dishonest side-step. It's like declaring in July, 1945, that not a single human being has been killed by a nuclear weapon, so obviously they are not a weapon of mass destruction. I've already dealt, briefly, with why this is an irrelevant point above, and I'll deal below with why it's also false. I'd like to presume Easterbrook isn't deliberately underplaying, but I don't understand why he's making such an irrelevant, and misleading, point that adds up to an (deliberate or not) untruth from one angle, and is outright false from another.
Japanese attempts to use biological weapons against China during World War II were of limited success. Cite:
Before making their escape at the time of Japanese surrender, Japanese in Unit 731 set free scores of thousands of infected rats that caused widespread plague in 22 counties of Heilungchiang and Kirin provinces that took more than 20,000 Chinese lives. Either 20,000 people are "a limited success" and not "mass," or Easterbrook is telling a monstrous lie, whether deliberately or somehow ignorantly.

Note: Here is a statement that
Sheldon Harris, a historian at California State University, in Northridge, estimates that more than 200,000 Chinese were killed in germ warfare field experiments. Hams - author of a book on Unit 731, 'Factories of Death' also says that plague-infected animals were released as the war was ending and caused outbreaks of the plague that killed at least 30,000 people in the Harbin area from 1946 through 1948. But I'm less sure of these figures.

Easterbrook's piece is full of smaller misleading statements leading up to a terribly untrue set of conclusions which it's important people not believe.
Deliberate, systematic distribution of weapons-grade anthrax in the United States in 2001 killed five people--terrible, but hardly "mass destruction...." Technically true, it's close to a untruth by omission. He implies that this is somehow relevant to a serious enemy unleashing anthrax in any sort of mass, or even significant, way on a civilian population, but, of course, it was no such thing. It was five letters. Imagine if 5,000, or 50,000, had been mailed out. Which is scarcely a truly unusually huge bulk mailing. Imagine any number of other possible forms of delivery. Worse, imagine a contagious disease being deliberately vectored, which anthrax is not.
Because actual attempts to use bioweapons have been few, it's hard to be sure; but it may well be that, like chemical weapons, biological agents will prove less dangerous than conventional arms, as well as more difficult for armies or terrorists to use. "It may well be," and "it may not be," and then again, what does this actually mean? Conventional arms have slaughtered hundreds of millions of people in the 20th Century. This is reassuring? And most non-small arms are "difficult" to use; use of an M1 tank is darned "difficult"; not to mention use of an F-117; particularly, kids, don't try planning your own large-scale coordinated aerial bombing raid, or armored division assault, or artillery bombardment, let alone coordinated full-scale all-arms attack, at home.
The phrase "weapons of mass destruction," then, obscures more than it clarifies. It lumps together a category of truly terrible weapons (atomic bombs) with two other categories that are either less dangerous than conventional weapons (chemical arms) or largely an unknown quantity (biological agents). Not really, no, and no. It lumps together nuclear weapons whose primary effect is instantaneous and kills thousands then, and an order larger over time, with chemical weapons whose primary effect may be an order smaller, or may not, over an hour or several hours, and with biological weapons, whose effect very well could, over a couple of orders of time larger, also be a couple of orders more deadly than nuclear weapons.
This conflation, moreover, muddies the American rationale for military action against Iraq. That rationale should be to prevent Saddam from acquiring atomic weapons. This alone is reason to go to war. I can't see at all how. I'm sorry, but I'll be just as upset at a hundred thousand, or ten thousand, or one thousand, people killed by biowarfare, as the same number killed by nuclear warfare. I'll also be just as upset at ten thousand, or one thousand, killed by nerve gas.

I won't even be very happy at dozens of missiles with chemical weapons raining down on Israel, or, heck, even Saudi Arabia, or Jordan, or another neighbor of Iraq. I wouldn't even be happy to see it happen to Syria . I'm just funny that way, and think preventing that, if that's what it were to come down to (which is a stipulation, and an entirely separate discusion), sounds like it's a likely candidate for being worth risking war.
Fewer than 1 percent of battle deaths during World War I, the only war in which chemical arms were extensively employed, were caused by gas. This ignores how horrible it is to have been blinded for life by gas, to have lost most of your lungs, to be scarred for life.

Know why they called it mustard gas?
The most lethal of all the poisonous chemicals used during the war, it was almost odourless and took twelve hours to take effect. Yperite was so powerful that only small amounts had to be added to high explosive shells to be effective. Once in the soil, mustard gas remained active for several weeks.

The skin of victims of mustard gas blistered, the eyes became very sore and they began to vomit. Mustard gas caused internal and external bleeding and attacked the bronchial tubes, stripping off the mucous membrane. This was extremely painful and most soldiers had to be strapped to their beds. It usually took a person four or five weeks to die of mustard gas poisoning. One nurse, Vera Brittain, wrote: "I wish those people who talk about going on with this war whatever it costs could see the soldiers suffering from mustard gas poisoning. Great mustard-coloured blisters, blind eyes, all sticky and stuck together, always fighting for breath, with voices a mere whisper, saying that their throats are closing and they know they will choke."
But it took twelve hours to take effect, and four or five weeks to die, and lots of victims didn't die, so it's neither truly a "weapon of mass destruction" or a "truly terrible weapon." Check. And that's not getting on to the nerve gasses.
Then there are biological agents. Supposedly these weapons kill very rapidly in huge numbers. This is a classic straw man argument. No one serious has ever thought that the threat or point, so by knocking down the straw man, we're supposed to learn that bio-agents aren't "weapons of mass destruction," or worth worrying about in the same way as nuclear weapons. But, of course, they could potentially kill far more people than nuclear weapons. Not as rapidly as blast effect, but possibly more quickly, and in larger numbers, than radiation effects.

The same uncertainty of effect that Easterbrook cites in a negative fashion also applies in a positive fashion.

So Easterbrook's argument that bioweapons are not "weapons of mass destruction" or "truly terrible weapons" worth considering as serious a threat as nuclear weapons is utterly false.

And on and on it goes in his piece, with untrue statements, omissions, straw men, and wrong-headed comparisons. I'll bore you to death if I pull each later one apart, if I've not already, so I'll stop here.

In summary: Easterbrook's claim that nuclear weapons are inherently several orders of magnitude more dangerous than biological weapons is false. His claim that chemical weapons aren't serious weapons of mass killing is false. His claim that only nuclear weapons are worth going to war over: well, you'll have to decide for yourself. I don't buy it, myself.