Imagine a super-plague resistant to antibiotics, or a smallpox variant resistant to vaccine.

That's the contemporary bioweapons threat we must confront. The expanding COVID-19 epidemic has frayed a lot of nerves and caused the stock market to lose more than $1.5 trillion in the space of a few days. But that should not be our main concern. The minimal death rate for otherwise healthy individuals with the coronavirus means that we'll get through this, likely without great suffering.

That won't be the case if we suffer a successful modern-era bioweapons attack.

Considering the coronavirus panic affecting global civil society, the United States should articulate a new deterrent posture against biological attacks. This should involve a presidential statement that any bioweapons attack will justify a nuclear counterstrike. Depending on the level of American casualties and suffering, that counterstrike might involve one lower-yield nuclear weapon or many higher-yield weapons. But the aggressive statement is necessary.

Coronavirus is one thing — the dark secrets being developed in biowarfare labs around the world are quite another.

Most of the specifics of current threats are highly classified, but a 2002 paper by Dr. Michael Ainscough (then a U.S. Air Force colonel) accurately identified the trends that shape the current threat. Two specifics stand out as particularly prescient.

First, the growing competency of Russian biological warfare capabilities. Whether or not the coronavirus epidemic is a result of China's messing around with bioweapons, the Russians are very advanced. They developed a vaccine-resistant anthrax 30-years ago, and that's just the start of it.

Ainscough notes the corroborated testimony of a British MI6 agent, codename "Temple Fortune," who served in a Russian bioweapons facility in the early 1990s. Temple Fortune explained that the Russians had developed a "super-plague" that "would be non-virulent in its stored form, but could easily be converted into a deadly antibiotic-resistant form when needed for weaponization." The methodology: "benign bacterial plague cells would be mixed with virulence-enhancing plasmids immediately before loading on a weapon, and the transformation would take place in a small bioreactor on the weapon itself."

Ainscough also observed how "A viral vector has already produced a lethal strain of mousepox virus. The genetically manipulated virus completely suppressed the cell-mediated response (the arm of the immune system that combats viral infections) of the lab mice. Even mice previously vaccinated against the natural mousepox virus died within days of exposure. Mousepox (which does not infect humans) and smallpox are related viruses. If smallpox were to be similarly genetically manipulated, our current vaccine may not protect against it."

That was in the 1990s.

I am confidently led to believe that Russian President Vladimir Putin has supervised Russia's expanded development of bioweapons, in total breach of the Biological Weapons Convention. These efforts are prioritized around designing boutique weapons, which can overwhelm countermeasure treatments. In short, Putin has made sure that his ability to kill us, and in rather nasty ways, has sustained in the face of our research into antidotes and vaccines.

Some would suggest that this is all a moot point because Putin would never use these weapons in fear of retaliation. That just isn't so. Less than two years ago, in Salisbury, England, a Russian GRU team ran around a small English town with an exceptionally high-toxicity nerve agent variant, Novichok. They tried to murder an MI6 agent and his daughter but ended up killing an innocent woman when they discarded their weapon platform, a fake perfume bottle, without adequate care. The Western response seems not to have worked. The GRU continues to run riot, and Russia responded to the pain of the innocent woman's family by trolling them online.

The question, then, is whether we think that a super-plague resistant to treatment is an acceptable threat?

If we do, we should accept that coronavirus is a piece of cake in comparison. If a real 2020 super-plague hits, we're screwed.

While Russia and China would be unlikely to use these weapons outside the context of a full-scale war, that threat cannot be discounted. Moreover, terrorist groups will likely attain the capability to use some of these enhanced bioweapons in the relatively near future (al Qaeda and ISIS have put resources into these efforts). Even if they cannot totally disarm our treatments, they can wreak havoc.

I suggest the best response is twofold: to rapidly increase our research into countermeasures (especially in regards to human genetic coding), and to make clear that any biological weapons attack against America, whether by state actor or otherwise, will invite a nuclear counterstrike.