Jeroen wrote:
> At 16:27 20-7-01 -0500, Dan Minette wrote:
>
> >What I read was not that it would get away and travel around the world to
> >kill one's own population, but that even conventional bombing would do a
> >much better job of killing people in a city than biological weapons.
>
> Then wouldn't biological weapons be more humane (or rather: less
in-humane)
> than conventional bombs?
>
> Suppose you can develop a biological weapon that when dropped on enemy
> troops would cause, say, massive diarrhea. It wouldn't kill anyone (or
> hardly anyone), but it would nevertheless disable those troops, giving you
> the chance to overtake them, put them in a POW camp and send them home to
> their loved ones after the war.
There's actually some interesting work being done in the US on non-lethal
weapons. The problems I keep hearing about are that non-lethal weapons are
either too slow-acting or easy to counter to be much use in a combat
setting. If one side is trying as hard as possible to incapacitate the
other side, while the other is trying to give them diarrhea, the odds favor
the former.
Adam C. Lipscomb
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
ICQ# 32384792
