Long ago humans discovered that certain animals and plants were capable of causing severe illness or death if anyone consumed them. Some were clever enough to extract liquids from these poisonous plants and tip their arrows with the poison before hunting. It was inevitable that these natural poisons would be used on the battlefield. In 600 b.c. Greek soldiers fighting against Greeks from another city became mysteriously ill after drinking water that their enemies had poisoned with rotting animal carcasses. In the 1400s, Tartars captured a town by catapulting the bodies of plague victims over the walled city. In eighteenth-century North America, British military leaders sent blankets containing smallpox germs to Indian camps in the hopes of causing outbreaks of the dreaded disease. The twentieth century has seen an increase in the sophistication of biological warfare. During World War I, the Germans were accused of inoculating horses and mules with glanders, a very infectious disease that occurs among animals. They also were charged with infecting cattle with anthrax, an infectious disease that can be transmitted to humans. There are also stories of German spies caught attempting to spread plague bacteria in Russia. The fear and revulsion of biological weapons were so great that several nations outlawed their use. However these were often ignored. For example, the Japanese built the first known major biological warfare installation in 1937, where they experimented with such bacteria as typhus, typhoid, anthrax, cholera, botulism, and smallpox as potential weapons. And, since bacteria become effective by the chemical poisons they secrete, technically, the "soldier" or "assassin" is neither alive (biological) nor chemical (like chlorine). As a result, they are not covered by treaties dealing with biological and chemical weapons. The Japanese may have put their research to use on the battlefield; spies supposedly carried biological agents to Chinese towns. Since the Allies feared large-scale biological warfare during World War II, they set about creating their own weapons. The British developed and tested anthrax bombs, 4 lb. (1.8 kg) small bombs loaded into 500 lb. (227 kg) cluster bombs.
They proved that fragile living organisms could withstand being produced, transported, loaded into munitions, and exploded. In the United States, a secret operation was set up to research, test, and produce biological weapons. After the war, experiments in biological warfare continued. In the United States, for example, the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) wanted to find a better suicide pill for its agents to swallow if captured. Researchers came up with saxitoxin, a poison given off by a tiny marine plankton and able to kill a human within ten seconds. The Soviets developed a fungal poison that was apparently used in Laos, Yemen, and Afghanistan.
An international treaty banning the production of biological weapons was signed by 140 countries in 1972. The United States apparently ceased investigating offensive biological weapons at this time. However, the peak of the Soviet Union's biological weapons research is said to have come in the twenty years after the treaty was signed. Hundreds of biological agents were stockpiled for use in missile attacks. Soviet scientists also developed genetically altered strains of plague, anthrax, glanders, smallpox and other bacteria to make them resistant to antibiotics. They also cultivated rare but particularly virulent viruses such as Marburg virus, which causes uncontrolled bleeding.
The actual feasibility of a battlefield biological weapon attack is uncertain, since many biological agents are vulnerable to weather conditions, and their dispersion may be difficult to control. But a number of countries, including Iran, Iraq, Israel and Egypt, are known to have biological weapons capabilities in the 1990s. Biological weapons programs are feared to be proliferating because they may be cheaper to obtain and more lethal than conventional weapons. Defense against a biological attack in a densely populated area is extremely problematic. Vaccines usually take months to develop, and so would be no use after the event of an attack. Another difficulty would be gathering enough antibiotics to treat a massive outbreak of infection caused by biological weapons. American scientists began work in 1998 on advanced vaccine manufacturing methods to counteract possible biological attacks. The technique involves attaching antigens to harmful bacteria to the common bacteria present in the nose or mouth, thus triggering the bodyÕs immune response. This method could speed up the time needed to develop a vaccine from several months to just a week. But even assuming the success of this research, possible biological weapons attacks still inspire terror. In the late 1990s there is increasing pressure to enforce the existing biological weapons treaty, which has essentially been ignored since 1972.
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