Like the British policy staff, MacEachin had long assumed the Soviets would not build germ weapons if they had nuclear ones. "We also had authoritative information that the common view amongst the professional Soviet military, the line officers, was that biological weapons and chemical weapons are not weapons, they're terrorism devices," MacEachin said. "You know, they're no good in the battlefield. How are you going to deploy a BW weapon on the battlefield?" He said that while biological weapons would cause mass casualties in a “city, "bugs and gas are not the weapons that professional soldiers use. And we had plenty of evidence the Soviet military was very professional. One of the major arguments against putting a BW weapon on a SS-18 was: what a waste of time. It didn't track.
Excerpt From: Hoffman, David. “The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy.”











