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I've often felt engineered disease is underrated as a human apocalypse scenario. Largely, I think, because they didn't exist when nuclear mass annihilation first came into concept.
In WWII it seems, to my non-expert contrarian eye, that the "good guys" had started to descend into a philosophy where mass murdering "enemy" civilian populations to simply brute force attrite the rival society into nothing was taken to be valid. It's probably a good thing the war ended when it did. Since winners write the history books, and people like to justify "their side," everyone just kind of ignores this, or says it wasn't a big deal, or even tries to justify it. Also mostly fortunately, nuclear MAD means the taste of it has never since been realized again in a protracted war between two fully developed industrial powers where leaders would again descend into (mass) murderous impatience. But if that did happen I feel like it would be a countdown until some idiot sociopath in the top brass started suggesting that maybe a strategic disease could be controlled, and if it could then it would end the conflict with ease that no bomb could. Disease is such a more efficient killer than bombs, and cost effective too. The longer a protracted war goes, the more likely people will start listening to the idiot.
I don't think that's very likely for normal orthodox war these days because of old fashioned nuclear deterrence. But what about a civil war? Some gambler in an American civil war gets ahold of the disease library in Atlanta. The CPC loses legitimacy and China descends into power struggle chaos.
"Here me out: ethnically targeted diseases. Almost none of our armed forces are [enemy ethnic group]."
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Two positive factors here from the point of view of wanting to restrain such destruction are:
Anyone who is at least of average intelligence is probably capable of realizing that it would be very difficult to restrict biological weapons in such a way that they would only destroy the enemy.
Given the proliferation of communication technology since WW2, any modern attempt to annihilate enemy civilians would probably see a bunch of footage released quickly that would cause people on the attacking side to feel at least some degree of revulsion at what their government is doing. Whereas during WW2, Allied civilians had very limited media exposure to what their military forces were doing. Extreme nationalism and/or a feeling of having been attacked first could override the feeling of revulsion, but still I think that nonetheless, in the developed world at least, the threshold for being ok with annihilating enemy civilians is higher now than it was during WW2.
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