Trope-a-Day: Biological Weapons Solve Everything

Alistair Young

Jul 10, 2016 — 1 min read

So, um, first some words of apology for the last week’s silence (due to feeling sicker than a dog, mostly, along with various other impedimenta that made it hard to write), especially to those new patrons who must surely be wondering what they signed up in time for…

Sorry.

But anyway – I’m back on stream, and new content should be with you very shortly, starting with this!

Biological Weapons Solve Everything: Well, not everything, but they do solve certain highly specific problems – ironically enough, usually those scenarios in which the answer is not, in fact, killing everything.

But if you want to paralyze the enemy’s army by inducing several million cases of hemophilia, just to take the military option off the table for a while so that affairs can be resolved via some better method, or just slow things down generally with the highly contagious common cold from hell, or degrade infrastructure with a handy mycoid that feeds on asphalt, or target a virus against one highly specific genetically-identified individual or group…

Subtle, highly specific tools. That’s what bioweapons and their nanoweapon cousins are good for.

(You’ve got to be bloody sure about the anti-mutation and limited-propagation safeguards you build in, though.)

← Trope-a-Day: Biodata | The Contract That Is Not →

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