Quote:
Originally Posted by Raellus
Targan suggested a Chinese biowar attack on the CONUS as a way of creating the instability needed to give a Mexican invasion hope of any degree of success, however temporary. For our purposes, it's certainly an option. If China attacked the U.S. with a strategic weapon of that magnitude, the U.S. would certainly be compelled to retaliate, if not in kind (I don't see the U.S. using bioweapons), then with an alternative strategic weapon, no? But why would China unleash that genie of deadly pestilence?
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How would the US know who had used a bioweapon against them? Certainly if there was an ongoing conflict with China, the US would consider China a likely culprit, but how could they be certain? I guess it's possible that there might be genetic markers in the pathogen that suggested the involvement of Chinese geneticists, but there might not. It may even be possible to create the pathogen in such a way that the other side couldn't be sure it wasn't just a random mutation of an existing disease. Realistically though, the more specialised and specific the pathogen, the more obvious it would be that it was deliberately created.
As for "unleashing the genie of deadly pestilence", as I've indicated earlier it is theoretically possible to create weaponised pathogens that pose little to no risk to the side that created them. The main risk to China would be retaliation in kind or with other WMDs. But we're already assuming an escalation to the use of nukes at some point in the conflict anyway, so for story purposes escalation isn't really an issue.