Wait until Maldives, Heard Island, Liechtenstein etc decide that they cannot rely on the status quo for defence of their interests, they need an independent WMD for their own survival. In all truth, the N of NBC is just one of 3 letters of options that exist to any nation on the planet. Of these, the B makes the N and the C pale into insignificance, but it tends to be rather indiscriminate.
[My emphasis]
The prospect of the 'Big Big
B' (the use of which the famous Captain Corquoran sought to deny ;-) ) being deployed has haunted me since long before a Chinese lab, allegedly affiliated with the PLA and the recipient of some US funding, engineered a deadly hybrid pathogen which escaped and went on to torment the world.
The doctrine of MAD worked - given a couple of close shaves - because both sides knew there would be nothing left to 'win' in the end.
Conversely, a suitable pathogen enables the destruction of the adversary population whilst keeping its infrastructure and resources intact, and ripe for the picking - and does not require fancy air assets or expensive rocketry for delivery.
(We were somewhat lucky - the biography of the Soviet bugmaster, who defected west with the impending collapse of the USSR, makes horrifying reading).
Consider the scenario:
- bad guys have developed very deadly and very transmissible bug.
- bad guys have kept that secret whilst producing ample stocks of an effective vaccine.
- bad guys deliver their 'surrender-or-die' ultimatum - "Nuke us, and destroy the only vaccine stocks?"
=> Checkmate?
What makes the
B option so scary now is that we have seen - perhaps belatedly - that custom lethal bugs can be produced in very modest facilities - no need for an aviation industry, or vast stocks of munitions, and such facilities could very easily be hidden underground if not even within an apartment block.
This makes the
B option potentially available on the cheap not only to rogue nations but even to well-funded smaller entities (the nutcases who dispensed nerve agents on the Tokyo metro were subsequently found to be extremely well-funded).
So, I do hope that the
B option is not amongst the 'surprises' with which the IRGC seeks to threaten the world.
(and I'm no longer sure that B-weapons are going to remain 'indescriminate' for long, given the diabolical emergent biotechnology which may enable specific genetic groupings to be targeted).
... and apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln ... happy Easter