1/4/2024 0 Comments Tiddlydesktop 32bity![]() To illustrate why considering usage plans is valuable, note that many sophisticated BW programs did not in fact make war plans that incorporated their weapons. Any new categorization system should factor in historical strategies and motivations as a reference class to understand possible future uses. On the other hand, three abstract categories are not enough to be predictive, and many usages could plausibly be described as affecting multiple theaters. This categorization system is broadly applicable and not agent-based, and thus may apply to future weapons with novel agents as well as to past programs. Most commonly found is the sorting of BW strategies into the theater of war – strategic, tactical, and operational uses ( Koblentz 2009, Leitenberg et al 2012). Categorizations of weapon usage are also uncommon. No literature thus far has focused on this middle ground between these extremes, or analyzed the strategic goals of such usages in depth.Īddressing BW under a framework of planned usage is rare. The latter would include many plans that were impractical or undesirable and eventually abandoned. Note two failure modes which are common in existing literature which tries to extrapolate from past bioweapons plans: first, an overly narrow reference class limited to weapons that were actually used in combat, of which there are very few second, an overly broad class composed of every pathogen or plan that programs ever experimented with. This has another bonus: understanding what biological weapons were ever made in mass quantity, or were ever seen to have particular strategic value. The strategies they were intended for were were generally vague and retaliatory to offensive uses of biological or nuclear weapons. The claim I assert is that since the 1940’s, there have been no instances of the sort of large-scale usage of BW in international warfare, like that which the imagination conjures upon hearing the phrase “biological weapons.” My research suggests, more tentatively, that not only were there no such uses, but there were no close calls – that even in major state programs that created and stockpiled weapons in quantity, these weapons were virtually never included into war plans, prepared for usage or, especially, used. These incidents and possibilities are concerning, but are rare and on small scales. There are also a few ambiguous incidents, and the possibility of unnoticed usage. More recently, the Rhodesian BW program used weapons against their own citizens on small scales in the 1970’s, and South Africa program operatives attempted to sicken a refugee camp’s water supplies with cholera in 1989 (but failed). Was a similar situation unfolding there, behind the scenes like the nuclear near-misses? Were any biological apocalypses-that-weren’t quietly hidden in the pages of history? What were the actual usage plans for biological weapons, and how close did any of them come to deployment?įirst, to note that there are a few examples of state uses of BW in modernity – the most major being the Japanese BW program’s use of lethal weapons against Chinese civilians in the 1940’s. As described in Part 1, there were quite a few large state biological weapons programs after WWII. Then that happened several dozen more times. I’ve heard a lot about “nuclear close calls.” Stanislav Petrov was, at one point, one human and one uncomfortable decision away from initiating an all-out nuclear exchange between the US and the USSR. Others will be linked here as they come out:Ģ.1 The empty sky: A history of state biological weapons programsĢ.2 The empty sky: How close did we get to BW usage?ģ.3 Filters: The shadow of nuclear weaponsĤ.0 Conclusion: Open questions and the future of state BW The functionality of this release barely matches that of the previous v0.0.This is the third post in a sequence of blog posts on state biological weapons programs. ![]() The advantage of this approach is that the user interface and functionality of the desktop application can now be customised and extended with exactly the same techniques that are used in regular TiddlyWiki. TiddlyWiki HTML files are run within embedded, sandboxed iframes with the "backstage" TiddlyWiki providing services such as saving to the file system. TiddlyDesktop itself is now an instance of the Node.js edition of TiddlyWiki. This will be remedied soon! New Architecture Note that there is currently no way to hide the toolbar for TiddlyWiki windows. Reveal original file in Finder/Explorer.Warning message when closing windows with unsaved changes (TWC and TW 5.1.8 and above only).Please report any problems or suggestions via GitHub issues, or post to the TiddlyWiki discussion group: This release includes a major reworking of the internals of TiddlyDesktop.
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