Why should Department of Homeland Security officials worry more about biological weapons than chemical and nuclear weapons?

Answer 1

The effects of even the largest nuclear devices and the most virulent and persistent chemical weapons are containable and finite. That is, with relatively simple efforts, the effects of the crisis can be managed and the casualty rates will fall at a predictable rate with time after the weapon is used.

Biological weapons attacks are not manageable in this way. Bio-weapons attacks can cause long-term, unmanageable outbreaks, with casualty rates growing exponentially or by orders of magnitude as time passes from the attack. The resulting death rates from an attack are potentially so high that a properly designed weapon, properly deployed, could produce casualty rates so staggeringly high that it could kill a substantial proportion of the global population, and remain a persistent high level cause of death for centuries to follow.

To put it in perspective, the Hiroshima bomb killed between 90,000 and 166,000 people, most of whom died instantly or within a few hours or days of the attack; long term casualties from cancer due to radiation exposure were less than 600.

In WW1 (the only major war where chemical weapons were used), fewer than 90,000 men were killed by poison gas throughout the entire course of the war. This amounts to less than 3% of battlefield casualties.

Spanish influenza on the other, a naturally occurring and non-weaponized disease, killed an incredible 50 million people in (3% of the global population at the time and more than 3 times the entire casualty number of WW1) in less than a year and sickened another 500 million (1/3 of the global population at the time- a number so massive that, to put in perspective, is nearly double the current population of the United States).

Smallpox, which was eradicated in 1979, killed between 300-500 million people world-wide in the 20th Century alone (a number so astoundingly, catastrophically high that the only way to put it in perspective is to say that if you added every death from war, genocide, natural disasters, homicide and tobacco use in the entire 20th century the number wold be approximately 200 million. An even better frame of reference is that approximately 510 million people died worldwide in the entire decade of the 1990's from ALL CAUSES COMBINED). It is fair to say, in fact, that previous to 1979 smallpox was the leading cause of death in all of human history.

That, in the end, is why bio-weapons are so worrisome. You're talking about unleashing scourges on the population of the planet that cannot be controlled, are utterly devastating, and can produce casualty numbers that stagger the imagination.