Originally posted by Deepblue
Surely a nuclear weapon would be an effective way of stopping a biological weapon if said weapon existed?
Well... lemme think of the problems;
1) Fallout;
Radiation......sure, you may not give a **** about other countries civillians, but other people do; that's assuming the storage is not within a major city, which is kind of a sensible hiding place if you want to deter nuclear attack
2) Precedence;
Once you use a nuke 'defensively', you're likely to establish a precedence for anyone else to use it; a bona fide excuse for first strikes. This is a bit of a biggie; I bet China would love to be able to really threaten Taiwan, for example, or maybe Pakistan and India will decide to have a bit more sabre-rattling.
3) Fallout (2);
Political, this time. Not only will the world be really, really ****ing narky about nuclear weapons deployment (especially as the countries likely to be hostile and have bio-weapons are all much, much smaller than the US in terms of military capacity), you're also encouraging countries to develop 'defensive' WMD; seeing as the Us would have shown a willingness to first strike, a lot of countries would be a mite nervous and anxious to build up a big CBW arsenal to threaten global/regional devastation if attacked.
4)Defense
Sensible enemy will already, as a matter of course, have hidden and dispersed CBW locations just in case of some form of attack, nuclear or otherwise. And that would definately be deployed in the event of a nuclear attack, even if in a SCUDs-to-Israel type way rather than a direct attack.