What if a virus were ever used as a WMD?

What if there were a virus with the infectiousness of coronavirus but the lethality of Ebola? There may be a number of such viruses or similarly dangerous bacteria frozen in government laboratories around the world, developed as biological weapons or to help defend against them. Most states have signed the treaty outlawing biological weapons but some — such as Israel — haven’t, and a number of signatories — such as Russia — may not be observing the ban. A report last year by the Belfer Center at Harvard said that North Korea could produce a ton of biological weapons a year and has weaponized 13 different germs. These included anthrax, cholera, typhoid, yellow fever, botulism, Korean hemorrhagic fever, smallpox and the bubonic plague.

It has been said that pound for pound, biological weapons are more lethal than nuclear weapons. A gallon of weaponized anthrax could kill every human being on earth. (It would contain enough spores for eight billion doses, if correctly distributed.) The peculiar evil of biological weapons is that once deployed, they cannot be contained. They spread, like any living thing. And biological weapons are the poor man’s WMD. Making germ weapons can be done on a small scale, without much of an industrial base, and is far cheaper than making even a single hydrogen bomb. It is foolish to think that they would never be used.