User blog comment:Drgyen/Worlds at War/@comment-21519-20120116215334/@comment-21519-20120117030815

The Race's jingoism makes sense based on what they understand of the universe at the beginning of the series, and their slowness to accept the new situation makes sense based on what we know of them at the same point. (For the first seven books, anyway; their rigidity in the face of obviously changed circumstances as portrayed in HB was overkill. One almost wonders if HT had forgotten to write them on his four-year break from the series.)

I lost interest in the Posleen long ago, but wasn't the premise around which that series turned the fact that all kinds of aliens were turning up at our doorstep begging us to defend them because every species in the galaxy except ours and the Posleen was physically incapable of violence? How can they appear in a universe that also includes the Race?

The species of bacteria which Ishii weaponized developed in ecosystems that did not include the Lizards or any related species. So unlike the chemical weapons the Brits used, which worked because the two species' biochemistry was similar (witness the fact that characters of different species were able to eat one another's food), it's highly unlikely they could be induced to attack the Lizards, just as pathogens from Home left humans alone. (See Down to Earth; I don't remember the page or chapter, but Ttomalss happens to mention it when he's asking Kassquit whether she would be interested in meeting Jonathan Yeager.) At the very least, it would require a great deal of engineering. That would mean years' worth of experimentation, and probably thousands of Lizards as test subjects, Lizards who could then not be pumped for information on how the Japanese could defend against and/or duplicate Race weapons technology. The Japanese didn't have all that many prisoners; Lizard land forces booted them out of continental East Asia with ease, and they never attempted an invasion of the Home Islands.

Also, they may have conquered Manchukuo so quickly that Ishii couldn't get his stuff back to Japan; the Manhattan Project barely got out of Chicago in time, and they had a far more extensive infrastructure to use for the evacuation, though to be fair they were in a city that would have offered a far more compelling target than Harbin itself, let alone some impoverished outpost deep in the hinterland of a poor, sparsely populated country. I wonder if Ishii destroyed his facilities before they were captured; the Race never mentioned discovering the Unit 731 camp, and it would surely have made as great an impression on them as Treblinka did.

I'm not sure what purpose poisoning the ginger would serve. It could be useful in the short term, as a way of depleting Lizard manpower right before a counterattack, similar to the GFF poisoning the booze at the Soviet New Year's Eve party in MwIH. But you'd only be able to use that trick a few times. Soon all the ginger addicts who'd been on the front lines would be dead or disabled, and after that you'd start discouraging non-addicted Lizards from taking up the habit. In the long term it was definitely to the humans' advantage to have half the Conquest Fleet getting high all the damned time, even before the females showed up and skewed the Race's natural sexual behavior.