SneerClub

If I may refer you back to the book cited, the (made up) fears of that time in fact incorporated the difficulty of obtaining fissile material during that period, when amongst the worries was that obtaining fissile material would not actually be that difficult. To simply state that biological and chemical warfare bear no resemblance is to depart from the lesson being related here to making excuses for that object of which you happen to be afraid. In each case the fear being constructed will make its own allowances for the real or supposed facts on the ground, and in this case there was no need to assume that a bombmaker would have to make his own plutonium - you’re drawing attention to an irrelevant distraction.

Another point which you’re glibly avoiding, with tellingly unnecessary recourse to insulting language, is that “CBRN” the construct cannot be so easily distinguished from the “practical and technical application” that the real enterprise has. Indeed the existence of the real enterprise is often driven in part by the made-up fears (which does not licence the fears) - this happened, for example, with security protocols around the management of fissile material. I refer you back to the same book and to the rather famous data point about Bill Clinton’s interest in manufactured diseases.

For more on stuff like this, although again not on the subject of bioterrorism because I don’t have that material in front of me, I recommend the confluence of two chapters in The Merger of Knowledge with Power by Rabitz (as well as the whole book), namely “Recombinant DNA Research: Whose Risks?” and “Hardware and Fantasy in Military Technology”. This isn’t paranoid soapboxing from a teenage Chomsky fan, it’s just part of the fabric of industrial science and technology as a social phenomenon.