having worked in public health emergency preparedness for a couple years puts an interesting slant on my current interest spiral around chemical weapons, and now biological also. like.. one of the primary raisons d'être for the very existence of public health emergency preparedness as a field is concerns about 'bioterror.' anthrax, tularemia, plague, botulism. we would run simulation exercises and make plans about how to mass distribute doxycycline and ciprofloxacin to the local population. we would talk about what was the closest location with a cache of atropine to treat nerve gas (or just organophosphate) poisoning. still, the CBRNE plans where I worked were the absolute weakest link in our preparedness arsenal, bar none. there barely was a plan. there was a document with an outline.
and then with that background, I'll read about the history of US experiments with weaponizing anthrax, tularemia, plague, botulism, q fever, crop molds and diseases, etc. not that it comes as a surprise, but it's nonetheless remarkable how much money and effort the federal government pours into doing bioterror, and how little into managing its health effects. and it's ironic to think how much public health emergency preparedness feeds into notions of shoring up 'national security' and never imagines that the threats they would face could come from the hallowed halls of the national security state itself.
like. experimenting with diseases you can inflict on your enemies? intentionally increasing the lethality of those diseases? all blatantly appalling ethics aside, is infecting people whose governments you don't like or killing their crops or their livestock or poisoning their air or water or soil really worth introducing new threats that may very well come back to bite you? diseases spread; that's perhaps one of their hallmark qualities. I know that blowback does tend to come as a lamentable surprise, somehow, to the actors who engender it, but. jfc. it's like pouring gasoline on both your enemies and yourself while all the while designing better matches, and, I suppose, holding a small cup of water in your free hand.
