Is Biological weapons enough for destroying whole country or world?
A biological weapon, sometimes known as a germ weapon, is any of a variety of disease-causing organisms, such as bacteria, viruses, rickettsiae, fungi, toxins, or other biological agents, that can be used against humans, animals, or plants as a weapon. The direct use of infectious agents and poisons against enemy people is a long-standing military practice. Indeed, in numerous conflicts, viruses had killed more people than all of the combat arms combined, even when they were not knowingly deployed as weapons.
Biological weapons, like chemical, radiological, and nuclear weapons, are usually referred to as weapons of mass destruction, even though the word is not entirely relevant in the case of biological armaments. Lethal biological weapons can kill a lot of people, but they can't destroy a lot of infrastructure, buildings, or equipment. Nonetheless, due to the indiscriminate character of these weapons, as well as the risk of causing broad pandemics, the difficulty of managing disease impacts, and the mere dread that they instil, most countries have agreed to outlaw the entire class.
As of 2013, 180 countries and Taiwan had joined the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), with 170 of those countries and Taiwan having signed and ratified the pact, which was available for signing in 1972. The BWC forbids member states from employing biological weapons in conflict, as well as creating, testing, producing, storing, or deploying them. However, several states have continued to develop biological warfare capabilities, preferring a less expensive but still lethal strategic weapon to the more difficult and costly path to nuclear weapons. Furthermore, the potential of a demented individual or terrorist organization manufacturing or stealing biological weapons is becoming a significant security worry.
Biological warfare agents
The type of organism or toxin utilised in a weapons system, lethality, time of incubation, infectiousness, stability, and capacity to be treated with current vaccines and treatments all varies significantly. Biological agents are classified into five types that potentially be weaponized and utilised in conflict or terrorism. These are some examples:
Bacteria are single-celled organisms responsible for diseases such as anthrax, brucellosis, tularemia, and plague.
Rickettsiae are microorganisms that look like bacteria but are intracellular parasites that multiply inside cells. Diseases caused by rickettsia organisms include typhus and Q fever.
- Viruses:- intracellular parasites roughly one-hundredth the size of bacteria that can be weaponized to produce diseases like Venezuelan equine encephalitis.
source:- dnaindia.com
- Fungi:- pathogens that can be weaponized and used to produce diseases such as rice blast, cereal rust, wheat smut, and potato blight in crops.
Source:- kidsdiscover.com
- Toxins:- poisons extracted from snakes, insects, spiders, marine organisms, plants, bacteria, fungus, and animals that can be weaponized. Ricin, which is generated from the seed of the castor bean, is an example of a toxin.
source:- wired.com
Some of these biological agents have qualities that make them more plausible candidates for weaponization, such as lethality, incapacitating ability, contagiousness or non-contagiousness, toughness and stability, and others.
Biological weapons in the World Wars
During World War I (1914–18), Germany launched a covert campaign to infect horses and cattle belonging to Allied soldiers on both the Western and Eastern fronts. It was reported that the glander infectious agent was utilised. For example, German operatives infiltrated the United States and secretly infected animals before transporting them over the Atlantic to aid Allied soldiers. Furthermore, a German attempt to spread disease in St. Petersburg in 1915 was allegedly made to weaken Russian resistance.
Because of the atrocities of World War I, most countries signed the 1925 Geneva Protocol prohibiting the use of biological and chemical weapons in warfare. Nonetheless, Japan, one of the protocol's signatories, embarked on a huge and covert biological warfare research, development, production, and testing programme, and it violated the treaty's ban when it employed biological weapons against Allied forces in China between 1937 and 1945. Not only did the Japanese utilise biological weapons in China, but they also experimented on and killed over 3,000 human subjects (including Allied POWs) in the testing of biological warfare agents and various biological weapons delivery devices. Among other things, the Japanese experimented with infectious agents for bubonic plague, anthrax, typhus, smallpox, yellow fever, tularemia, hepatitis, cholera, gas gangrene, and glanders. Even though there is no documented proof of any additional use of biological weapons during WWII, both sides had active research and development (R&D) programmes.
