A somewhat related thought I had while reading this post: Several of the nuclear-weapon states (including the US for all I remember) retain the right to retaliate with nuclear weapons against an attack with bioweapons, chemical weapons, and even cyber weapons. On the one hand, this might make the overall situation more stable because hostile actors (at least states, probably not so much terrorist groups) are deterred from using these other weapons types. On the other hand, it may be destabilising since many more actors (including non-state ones) may trigger a nuclear conflict.
Interesting point. Note that a requirement for retaliation is knowledge of the actor to retaliate against. This is called “attribution” and is a historically hard problem for bioweapons which is maybe getting easier with modern ML (COI- I an a coauthor: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19149-2)
A somewhat related thought I had while reading this post: Several of the nuclear-weapon states (including the US for all I remember) retain the right to retaliate with nuclear weapons against an attack with bioweapons, chemical weapons, and even cyber weapons. On the one hand, this might make the overall situation more stable because hostile actors (at least states, probably not so much terrorist groups) are deterred from using these other weapons types. On the other hand, it may be destabilising since many more actors (including non-state ones) may trigger a nuclear conflict.
Interesting point. Note that a requirement for retaliation is knowledge of the actor to retaliate against. This is called “attribution” and is a historically hard problem for bioweapons which is maybe getting easier with modern ML (COI- I an a coauthor: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19149-2)