Unconventional Weapons

Good news to start the week! We have a better way to talk about chemical and biological weapons than “weapons of mass destruction!” (WMD)

Annie Jacobsen has another disaster porn book in which she mangles pretty much everything about biological weapons, lab accidents, and pandemics, maintaining her run after doing the same for nuclear weapons. She did manage to upset George Will, but the people who actually know about these things have something to say. This article doesn’t mention her explicitly, but it’s part of the pushback.

And best of all, it introduces that new term, unconventional weapons.

WMD started out as a designator of nuclear weapons, to include both fission and fusion weapons. Chemical and biological weapons were added later. But the difference in the scale that might be called “mass destruction” is enormous. Nuclear weapons are thousands of times more destructive, maybe more. But all three are icky and unpleasant in ways that simply being blown apart by explosives or shrapnel are not.

All three also are seldom used. We keep nuclear weapons because, well, others have them, but the inconvenience of production, storage, and use of chemical and biological weapons have led to their downgrading. Most of the chemical weapons in the world have been destroyed.

And now the Trumpies have suggested designating fentanyl a WMD, probably in the hope of developing more excuses to kill more people, or just generally fogging up people’s thinking. So the term WMD has never been precise or useful except to scare people.

I’ve always avoided using the term WMD, but now I can use unconventional weapons when I refer to chemical and biological weapons together. Which probably won’t be frequently, but I hope we can eliminate WMD altogether.

If you’d like to read more about Jacobsen’s book, here’s something from one of the authors of the piece linked above.

Clarification: I misread the first article I linked, by April Arnold and Al Mauroni. They use the term unconventional weapons to include nuclear weapons. But the article emphasizes biological and chemical weapons, so I took the change in terminology to indicate weapons other than nuclear weapons. I think that is not correct, after a short conversation on Bluesky, but I think that change is worth doing, and I intend to use nuclear weapons for that class and unconventional weapons for others, mainly but not exclusively including chemical and biological weapons. Drone weapons are no longer unconventional and have their own name. It’s possible some applications of AI would fit in the unconventional weapons category. It’s a useful catchall for technology that is neither conventional arms nor nuclear weapons.