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Comment by drzaiusapelord | Hacker News Reader

Chemical weapons are world-killers, absolutely. You could gas out every human city and end civilization as we know it.

Biological weapons can probably do this 10x faster and via weaponized viruses meaning no ICBM's needed, just a good enough virus to be carried by human and animal hosts that infect the world. Or infect common crops and watch the world burn as everyone starves.

A total war between the US/NATO and USSR sans nuclear weapons would also probably have ended western civilization and probably drawn in everyone else too. World-killer? Maybe, maybe not, but the world left over would have been one no one wold want to live in. The same way a post-nuclear world would be.

If anything nukes kept US/NATO and the USSR from going hot. That conflict could very much been a world-ender and was itching to happen for decades.

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Chemical weapons are shit, sorry. They're expensive to produce, dangerous to store, and their mortal enemy is... weather. Biological weapons could, if they were properly designed and released, didn't mutate, etc... etc...

Nukes just... work. You twist a couple of keys, flip a switch and 45 minutes later human civilization ends.

This reminds me of a moment from the book "Against All Enemies," where Colin Powell, when asked behind closed doors about the dangers from chemical agents if the Iraqis had them, rolled his eyes a bit, and said that they were "goofy." He elaborated along the lines of: chemical weapons are completely at the mercy of the wind and dispersal patterns, and while they might be nasty in isolation, they simply weren't an operational concern.

Exactly. Chemical weapons are mostly good at terrifying and murdering civilians and the otherwise unequipped and untrained. Nuclear weapons just.. kill.

Technology has improved chemical weapons quite a bit from the stuff used in World War One though (and chemical weapons were pretty effective then.) Modern weapons can kill in terrifyingly small doses. I mean, sure, they aren't as dangerous as nuclear weapons. But that isn't saying a lot...

I think this is the key difference. Conventional wars, regardless of the weapons, are awful, but they take time, and resources, and constant decision making. Things can change, one side withdraws or surrenders and the killing stops.

A weaponised virus doesn't have these constraints, and could destroy humanity, but at least it takes some time, and can probably be somewhat mitigated.

In nuclear war, a split second decision could annihilate every living human, erase all evidence of our existence, and maybe cause a big enough climate shift to permanently end life on this planet.

> In nuclear war, a split second decision could annihilate every living human, erase all evidence of our existence, and maybe cause a big enough climate shift to permanently end life on this planet.

Not to take too much from the argument, but that line is way overblown. I think it's hard to believe a nuclear war would kill all humans (it would certainly destroy civilization, but killing everybody is way harder) but nobody can be sure of that. Anyway, the Earth has survived meteor strikes larger than humanity's entire arsenal and life is still here.

You've taken nothing at all from the argument. If human civilization fails, then it's just a matter of time before the species does as well. More importantly, what value would there be in a handful of devastated humans scratching out a "bang the rocks together" life until the next extinction event finished the job?

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