A thread about a racial bomb has been bandied about on this list with the
more forceful participants saying that it cannot be done.
I would like to say that they might be right,
but that they should clarify their position by saying that it cannot be
done ... anymore.
In the post-Columbian age Eurasian diseases caused as much as a 90% decrease
in the baseline population in a score of decades. Some epidemiologists think
that this may be the practical limit to the demographic effect of a pandemic.
Simmilar scenarios played out when Europeans contacted other isolated
populations, most notably in the pacific. It is still not quite done.
Isolated populations in the Amazon and other remote parts of South America
will still be devastated when exposed to the diseases of the Global
Population.
American Indians were decimated by a race bomb. (QED).
Note that with a globally networked population this sort of scenario is no
longer likely.
However, it merely requires that population A be resistant to a disease
D[a] that is contageous and leathal and that population B has never
encountered (and therefore has no resistance).
If population A' were to cook up some leathal contageous microbe D[a'] that
could be vacinated against using a complex and high-tech serum V[a'], then A'
and any allies F[a'] it chose would be in a position to release a defacto
race bomb against its enemy B and with massive collateral casualties among
any populations not in the set {A' U F[a']}
So a race-bomb is doable (QED).
