Noncompositional

The word nuclear has already undergone a process of extended metonymy (or you could just say “specification”), from pertaining to the core of some object (nuclear region of a star, first OED cite 1833), to the core of an atom (nuclear scattering/bombardment, 1914), to the fission or fusion of such nuclei, and especially the energy produced thereby (nuclear power, 1945, nuclear submarine, 1957), and especially weapons using such energy (nuclear bomb, 1945, nuclear warhead, 1957), and then to basically anything having to do with weapons, including creating them (nuclear industry), storing/possessing them (nuclear nation), centrally involving them (nuclear war/stalemate), or resulting from them (nuclear annihilation).

But other sorts of weapons have enjoyed some degree of this sort of pertainymification, including weapons involving volatile chemical and biological agents. They’re called, unsurprisingly (?) chemical and biological weapons. But you don’t often, or even ever, see phrases like chemical stalemate or biological holocaust (except in the sense of natural, non-weaponized diseases), but that’s probably because these aren’t plausible given the current range of weapons available to inflict damage. In fact, the OED lists the compounds chemical/biological weapon in their 1993 and 2006 additions, although they are actually cited back to 1914 and 1933, respectively (and respectively). And in addition to these, you do get uses of chemical/biological to not mean “pertaining to chem/bio substances,” but “pertaining to chem/bio weapons,” as in chemical defense and biological delivery system.

That’s all good and fine. But slightly more surprising to me was the existence of adverbs derived from this. As in, Another teacher comes upon a group of old refugees who want to return to their village in Kurdistan, which was chemically attacked by the Iraqis (link), or I wonder how feasible it would be for enemies of America to biologically attack us through a porcine vector (link). I’m still waiting for instances of biologically threaten or chemically defend. I have my doubts about nuclearly, though.

And finally, after I discovered those uses of chemically and biologically, I was spurred to look elsewhere for new derivational tricks. I found, for instance, Sudjadnan confirmed that Indonesia should collaborate with other countries to prevent the spread of mass destructive weapons. (link). Ah, the joy of morphology.