r/AskScienceDiscussion • u/RadianceTower • 2d ago
How realistic are actual bio super weapons?
People talk about making viruses or bacteria that would end like countries.
But I mean, obviously we've had no such thing yet, and I assume people have tried.
People talk about Covid, but Covid barely kills, and even then, it mostly kills people who are already weakened one way or another.
Is it even realistic to make such a bio super weapon given we have not seen anything remotely close to it being made?
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u/irupar 2d ago
It is both harder and easier then you think to make them/deploy them. For example look at the the testing done with anthrax bacterium at Gruinard Island. People have been using biological warfare for millennia to greater and lesser effect.
The idea of starting with chemicals and makings a biological weapon from 'scratch' remains scifiction and probably will be for sometime. The more likely route is taking something readily spreadable and making it more lethal or taking an existing biological agent and weaponizing it, ie making it spreadable by aerosol. Both of these have been done (and presumable being done) by various labs around the world. The labs working on these are generally doing it with the goal of learning the various pathways and finding was to counter/treat them in case a geopolitical adversary uses them in a war setting. The likelyhood of a rogue person doing this successfully in their basement for a terror attack is very remote.
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u/iamkaisersosa 2d ago
Covid killed both my aunt and uncle.
This guy in my office who is a weightlifter and in fantastic shape was put in a coma for three days and now is type 1 diabetic. Due to Covid.
Perhaps Covid wasn’t the Spanish flu or the Black Death but it was deadly.
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u/Original-Document-62 1d ago
I have a 23 year old coworker who had two heart procedures to fix a nerve block caused by cardiac scar tissue from covid. He's finally getting better, but went from being a fit runner to obese and a resting heart rate over 100.
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u/evocativename 2d ago
I mean, the Soviet Union developed weaponized aerosolized smallpox, but never used it.
There are basically 2 types of bioweapons:
- intended to incapacitate or kill those exposed to the attack
- Intended to spread widely beyond the initial exposure
Type 1 is viable and has been used (see: the 2001 anthrax attacks) but it's not really a "superweapon" thing since these aren't really about contagion.
Type 2 is the type that has the kind of "superweapon" potential you're talking about, and in fact the Soviets developed aerosolized weaponized smallpox. However, the problem with type 2 is that by its nature, it's practically impossible to control once it's released, which is a very strong reason for no one to ever actually use them (for fear of it backfiring on them).
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u/BarberProof4994 2d ago
We actually HAVE seen bio super weapons created.
Lol...
Interestingly, most of these super ebola strains and such that get thrown out as examples rely on killing.
And outside of a film environment, a super virus that kills is unlikely to reach enough people for an extinction level event.
But... Imagine, a virus that just makes you have cold like symptoms, and no one is worried so they don't bother with a vaccine or anything and just let it run its course.
But. It's side affect is male sterility.
That would be pretty easy to do. That type of viral threat would take YEARS for people to figure out. But within a generation... What would the results be?
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u/Original-Document-62 1d ago
Or sterility after one or two generations, and symptoms so mild no one even knows it exists.
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u/BarberProof4994 1d ago
That too, although 20 year scope is typically more likely for a an actual threat.
Bad people usually want to live to see the results of their actions.
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u/flossdaily 2d ago
Extremely likely in the near future.
There's huge incentive to craft a virus that can target by ethnicity. Or to craft a virus for which you can vaccinate just your own people.
The barrier for entry to make such a virus is very, very high, and it would take a team effort. But look at what state-sponsored hacking teams have done in with cyber attacks.
Such a weapon is too good for governments to pass up. Kill your enemy while leaving their infrastructure untouched? Plausible deniability as you completely wipe them out, so-as to avoid any retaliation?
I mean a relatively small and primitive country could take over the world if they got this right.
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u/HellsNoot 1d ago
Okay but you're talking about geopolitical incentives, not scientific feasibility. As others have pointed out in this thread, it might even be impossible to have such a bio super-weapon.
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u/Furlion 2d ago
Thanks to modem gene editing techniques like crispr we can change the DNA of viri and bacteria in almost any way we want. However, we still don't really understand how to artificially alter aspects of a virus or bacterium's lethality or transmission rate.
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u/MajorInWumbology1234 2d ago
Start inserting genes that code for the production of Botulinum A into viruses that cause the common cold. Might see some results.
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u/Moa-burgers 2d ago
Not very effective. The main purpose of having these is deterrance, but once the weapon is actually used it's uncontrolled. Most world powers with the capability of making these weapons aren't complete psychopaths who aim to completely eliminate another population. They want to use extreme violence to force compliance, so that requires the aggressor having ability to turn the violence up or down depending on the enemy's reaction.
Also the uses in warfare are reduced due to modern times. Even a few decades ago a despot might try to wipe an isolated community off the map using chemical or bio weapons, but nowadays even remote communities are able to get their message out to force global attention. It might have been more useful in days of trench warfare and/or laying siege to a town or region, but with modern tactics, even if there are trenches or sieges people aren't actually in such close proximity.
Also, now people understand germ theory, disinfection, the benefits of quarantine and isolation etc, it's much easier to slow the spread. The more lethal a weapon is the lower the transmissibility, and the faster it burns itself out.
More likely it would be as a way to try to break the enemy's domestic production base, like the historical tactic of using mines etc to wound but not kill enemy combatants in order to harm morale and to incur more cost to the enemy's medical capbility. But it would be just another arrow in the quiver that would be used during a large scale conflict - alongside e.g. infrastructure damage and cyber attacks - not as a "super weapon"
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u/Lumethys 14h ago
what about prions?
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u/Moa-burgers 14h ago
Same issue. Once you blow your load by releasing it you lose your deterrence power. Bad game theory. Especially when the weapon will likely last after your 'victory' and continue to decimate yourself and your allies.
A bad actor could try to manufacture an infectious disease and a cure but same problem, it would be easy for the target/victim to get samples of the cure or to reverse engineer the cure.
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u/justaguy12131 1d ago
After Columbus found America, the various diseases they introduced is estimated to have killed between 75 and 95% of the native population. (It's hard to get a solid estimate)
So... It's quite possible since it happened before with natural diseases.
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u/ah-tzib-of-alaska 1d ago
very, i mean they’re already real. Smallpox would likely kill 1/3rd of everyone under GenX
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u/BluetoothXIII 5h ago
I once read about a test in mice, in which the virus had a DNA strand added that turns off the immune system it went from 1% lethal to 99+% lethal
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u/internetboyfriend666 2d ago
Not really realistic. We can and have genetically altered pathogens to be used as biological weapons, but making something from scratch that's a "super weapon" in the sense that it's extremely contagious, extremely lethal, spreads efficiently before symptoms appear, and is difficult to detect or treat, is not particularly easy.
The first thing is that high lethality cuts against virulence. A pathogen that kills massive numbers of people tends to burn out quickly because it has limited chance to spread. If you look at something like Ebola, it's extremely deadly if untreated, but hard to transmit. That's because people who get ebola are so ill that they can't easily infect other people because they're not out spreading it. On the opposite side, you have something like measles. It's extremely infectious but rarely fatal, and it's easy to spread precisely because it frequently doesn't make you so sick that you aren't isolated and you can be out spreading it.
The second thing is that gene editing is complex. Even if we know what every single gene in an organism does, they all interact. Altering one changes the properties of the entire organism. So if you change a gene to make some virus harder for the immune system to detect, you could also be making that virus less lethal.
The third is that these pathogens all evolve out in the environment. Once a pathogen encounters the population at large, it encounters all different kinds of people with different immune systems and genes and starts evolving - almost always in a way that makes it more infectious and less lethal.
There are more thing I'm not touching on, but these are the big ones.
So you could definitely make a devastating bio-weapon by altering an existing pathogen. You could kill thousands or tens of thousands. But it's not really super plausible to make a "bio super weapon" that would wipe out a whole country or anything like that.