The Poor Man’s Bomb

Discuss the concept of the “poor man’s bomb.” How effective are biological and/or chemical weapons in allowing weaker nations to develop a level of strategic deterrence?

The “poor man’s bomb” refers to a weapon that is capable of inflicting mass casualties without the expense of a nuclear weapon. The most common examples of this are chemical and biological weapons. To many countries it may seem that these chemical and biological weapons are the best chance they have, short of acquiring nuclear weapons, of deterring the threat of invasion other nations. It’s interesting to note however, that historically, once a state acquires nuclear weapons, they almost always stop any attempts at developing chemical or biological weapons. The reason for this, as I will discuss shortly, is that chemical and biological weapons are almost always significantly worse options for state actors than nukes in almost every context.

Chemical weapons for example have been used all throughout history, but they are extremely difficult to control.  The poison gas that was used in WW1 as a way to combat the stagnation of trench warfare had to be carried in containers that, if damaged, could cause the gas to spread and kill one’s own troops. Even if the containers were successfully brought all the way to the front line where it could be deployed, there was also no control over the wind, and so there was always a risk of the gas killing the attacker’s own soldiers. There is also the risk that if one side starts using chemical weapons that will cause the other side to retaliate in kind, leading to an escalation of war that discourages it use. The threat of retaliation and the memory of the horror of World War 1, was the main reason chemicals were not used in World War 2. Because of this, chemical weapons are almost always used in asymmetrical contexts, where the other side is not able to retaliate in kind.

In order for a weapon to be useful for the purpose of strategic deterrence it has to be deployable, undefendable, and threatening enough to seriously damage the enemy.  Chemical weapons struggle in all three of these categories. Because of the sheer amount of chemicals needed to take out a city for example, large storage facilities are needed. In the face of a first strike these facilities could be taken out with bombs rendering the weapons useless. Even if the weapons aren’t destroyed, the country is still faced with the problem of deploying mass amounts of chemicals into a foreign country, a difficult and infeasible task for most countries facing up against a more powerful attacker. This means that for the purpose of strategic deterrence it’s not a very useful weapon.  

Biological weapons on the other hand are a significantly bigger threat to powerful militaries around the world than chemical weapons, however they are still unreliable and unpredictable. Biological weapons are living things, and as the common phrase goes, “life finds a way”. The way that a country could use a biological weapon as a strategic deterrence would be if they were able to create a disease that either only targets people of other countries or, as is more likely, they also create a vaccine to go along with the disease. This way the country that is trying to prevent invasion can create strategic deterrence by threatening to release the deadly disease if any outside nation interferes with their government.  Unlike chemical weapons, a country wouldn’t need to have large stores of the weapon and deployment would be easy and inescapable.

With biological weapons however, there is always the threat of mutation, or errors in the disease that could cause it to end up killing one’s own population as well as the people that were targeted. Vaccines aren’t perfect and often it’s impossible to predict what happens to a virus when it’s released into the world and allowed to spread. There is also the issue of vaccinating one’s whole population secretly, because if outside forces realize that a country is developing a biological weapon there would be international outcry and could actually be the catalyst for invasion.

The unreliability and serious danger that come from biological weapons makes them significantly worse weapons to possess compared to nuclear weapons, however their ease of deployment and effectiveness at causing mass casualties does make it a significantly better deterrence measure than chemical weapons.