Biological warfare is distinct from
nuclear warfare, chemical warfare and radiological warfare, which
together with biological warfare make up CBRN , the military acronym for
chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear, warfare using weapons
of mass destruction (WMDs). None of these are considered conventional
weapons.
Biological Warfare (BW), also known as germ warfare, is the use of
biological toxins or infectious agents such as bacteria, viruses and
fungii with intent to kill or incapacitate humans, animals or plants as
an act of war. Biological weapons (often termed bio-weapons, biological
agents or bio-agents) are living organisms or replicating entities
(viruses are not universally considered "alive", neither are prions),
that reproduce or replicate within their host victims, or toxins derived
from living organisms. Entomological (insect) warfare is also considered
a type of biological weapon, however insects are far more likely to be
used as vectors of biological agents, than as weapons themselves, they
might also be used to attack crops. There is an overlap between BW and
chemical warfare, as the use of toxins produced by living organisms is
considered under the provisions of both the Biological
Weapons Convention and the Chemical
Weapons Convention.
A country or a terrorist group that can pose a credible threat of mass
casualties has the ability to alter the terms on which other nations or
groups interact with it. Biological weapons allow for the potential to
create a level of destruction and loss of life far in excess of nuclear,
chemical or conventional weapons, relative to their mass and cost of
development and storage. Therefore, biological agents may be useful as
strategic deterrents in addition to their utility as offensive weapons
on the battlefield. The effects of such a weapon are now more evident,
perhaps than any time previously, because of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.
Whole nations had their manufacturing capacity reduced to virtually
nothing for many weeks, international travel virtually came to a halt,
and the financial impact is still unknown but, in the case of the USA
alone estimates range from runs into 10 to 22 trillion US dollars.
As a tactical weapon for military use, a significant problem with a BW
attack is that it would take days, weeks or even months to be effective,
and therefore might not immediately stop an opposing force. Some
biological agents have the capability of person-to-person transmission
via aerosolised respiratory droplets. This feature can be undesirable,
as the agent(s) may be transmitted by this mechanism to unintended
populations, including neutral or even friendly forces. While
containment of BW is less of a concern for certain criminal or terrorist
organizations, it remains a significant concern for the military and
civilian populations of virtually all nations.
It has been suggested that rational state actors would never use
biological weapons. The argument is that biological weapons cannot be
controlled, meaning that the weapon could harm the offensive forces. An
agent like smallpox or other airborne viruses would almost certainly
spread worldwide and ultimately infect the user's home country.
It has also been suggested that the development of BW agents requires a
degree of sophisticated science and technology. However, this argument
does not necessarily apply to bacteria. For example, an anthrax agent
can easily be produced and controlled in a high school laboratory at a
very small cost. Also, using standard microbiological methods, bacteria
can be suitably modified to be effective in only a narrow environmental
range, and be rendered antibiotic resistant.
A biological weapon may be further used to bog down an advancing army
making them more vulnerable to counterattack by the defending force.
Note that these concerns generally do not apply to biologically derived
toxins which while classified as biological weapons, the organism that
produces them is not used on the battlefield, so they present concerns
similar to chemical weapons.
History
As early as 400 BC, Scythian archers
infected their arrows by dipping them in decomposing bodies or in blood
mixed with manure. Greek, Persian and Roman authors from 300 BC quote
examples of the use of animal bodies to contaminate wells and other
sources of water.
In the 12th century AD, during the Siege
of Tortona, Barbarossa used the bodies of dead soldiers to poison
wells. They also used primitive chemical warfare agents including sulfur
dioxide. In the 14th century AD, during the Siege
of Caffa (1346), the attacking Tarter force hurled the bodies of
plague victims into the city to attempt to inflict a plague epidemic
upon the enemy.
During the French
and Indian War (1754-1763) the British gave blankets from smallpox
patients to the Native Americans to transmit the disease to the native
tribes who would have had no immunological defence as the disease was
unknown in North America.
During the American
Civil War, a Confederate surgeon was arrested and charged with
attempting to import yellow fever-infected clothes into the northern
partsGruinard Island sign, 1986 of the United States, again as a crude
attempt at biological warfare.
During World War I, the Germans developed anthrax,
glanders, cholera,
and the wheat fungus Claviceps
spp. for use as biological weapons. They used Burkholderia
mallei (the cause of glanders in horses) to infect horses
being shipped from neutral countries to the UK and to France. They
allegedly spread plague in St. Petersburg, Russia,
Despite the fact that the Geneva
Protocol of 1925 forbad the use of biological warfare
agents; the Germans, Japanese, UK, USSR and USA all experimented
with a variety of germ warfare agents during WWII. Anthrax
and botulinum toxin
initially were investigated by the USA for use as weapons, and
sufficient quantities of botulinum toxin and anthrax cattle cakes were
stockpiled by June 1944 to allow limited retaliation if the Germans
first used biological agents. The USSR developed Francisella
tularensis as a weapon and used it in 1942 against German
troops during the Battle
for Stalingrad, there were over 100,000 victims, significantly
extremely large numbers of Soviet troops were also infected. Unit
731 operated Japan's secret germ warfare program. Rumours of the
unit's activities in northern China had been circulating in Russia and
the West since the late 1930s, but the details finally emerged through
captured documents and the testimony of Japanese prisoners of war, when
the unit was captured by the Soviets in 1945. The unit, commanded by Lieutenant
General Shiro Ishii, experimented with anthrax,
dysentery, cholera,
and plague on as
many as 3,000 U.S., British, and Commonwealth POWs. The Japanese had
used crude BW weapons against the Chinese when they invaded Manchuria,
causing some 6,00 deaths. They
also attempted to attack the US mainland using balloons carrying fleas
infected Yersinia pestis. It was not until 1988 that the
Japanese acknowledged what had happened.
The British certainly experimented with Bacillus
anthracis the cause of anthrax, most famously with anthrax
spore bombs on Gruinard
Island off the coast of Scotland in 1942. They exploded bombs
containing B.
anthracis on the island near restrained sheep, the sheep
started to die after three days. This demonstrated the effectiveness of
the weapon, unfortunately the island was then heavily contaminated with
anthrax spores and couldn't be used for nearly 50 years, in fact it took
several years to decontaminate the soil using formaldehyde (formalin
diluted in seawater to give a 4% formaldehyde) solution.
At the same time the Ministry of Agriculture were making large volumes
of anthrax vaccine at the Central
Veterinary Laboratory at Weybridge in Surrey (in C-Block, framed
in red, this is a recent picture and most of the buildings shown did not
exist at that time, the webmaster actually worked in this building in
the 1960s, but on animal health issues, not BW.
The UK also experimented with several other agents during WWII,
including glanders. The work on glanders had been ongoing since the 1st
World War, and was primarily concerned with the development of
diagnostic tests and vaccines, and was conducted mainly at the Central
Veterinary Laboratory under the leadership of Norman H. Hole, in the
Pathology Department.
Gruinard Island Experiments
Cold War
The development of BW agents continued
into the Cold War in the UK, USSR, USA, and certainly other countries.
The UK unilaterally stopped biological weapon development in 1956, but
continued work of a defensive nature at the Microbiological
Research Establishment, Porton Down.
In 1969, the UK and the Warsaw Pact, separately, introduced proposals to
the UN to ban biological weapons, and US President Richard Nixon
terminated production of biological weapons, allowing only scientific
research for defensive measures. The Biological
and Toxin Weapons Convention was signed by the US, UK, USSR and
other nations, as a ban on "development, production and stockpiling of
microbes or their poisonous products except in amounts necessary for
protective and peaceful research" in 1972. Signatories to this agreement
are required to submit information annually to the United Nations
concerning facilities where biological defense research is being
conducted, scientific conferences that are held at specified facilities,
exchanges of scientists or information, and disease outbreaks. The
United States terminated its offensive biological weapons program in
1969 for microorganisms and in 1970 for toxins. American stockpiles of
biological weapons were destroyed completely by 1973. However, the
Soviet Union continued research and production of offensive biological
weapons in a program called Biopreparat,
despite having signed the convention. Currently some 165 countries have
signed the treaty and none are proven, though ten are still suspected,
to possess offensive BW programs. The Soviet Union continued to develop
biological weapons from 1950-1980. In the 1970s, the USSR and its allies
were suspected of having used "yellow rain" (trichothecene
mycotoxins) during campaigns in Loas, Cambodia, and Afghanistan.
During the Vietnam War, the Vietcong used punji
stakes dipped in faeces to increase the morbidity from wounding by
these stakes.
In 1985, Iraq began an offensive biological weapons program producing anthrax, botulinum
toxin, and aflatoxin.
During Operation
Desert Shield, the coalition of allied forces faced the threat of
chemical and biological agents. Following the Persian Gulf War, Iraq
disclosed that it had bombs, Scud
missiles, 122-mm rockets, and artillery shells armed with botulinum
toxin, anthrax, and aflatoxin. They also had spray tanks fitted to
aircraft that could distribute 2000 Litres over a target.
Currently some ten or so countries are suspected of having an offensive
biological warfare program.
Bio-terrorism
Since the 1980s a number of terrorist
organisations have used biological agents. The most frequent
bioterrorism episodes have involved contamination of food and water. In
September and October of 1984, 751 persons were infected with Salmonella
typhimurium after an intentional contamination of
restaurant salad bars in Oregon by followers of the Bhagwan
Shree Rajneesh.
During 1998 and 1999, multiple hoaxes occurred in the USA, involving the
threatened release of B.
anthracis. Nearly 6,000 persons across the United States
have been affected by these threats.
According to a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
(CDC), an intentional release of anthrax by a bioterrorist in a major US
city would result in an economic impact of $477.8 million to $26.2
billion per 100,000 persons exposed.
Categories of agents
The US Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention (CDC) classify biological agents based on the ease of
transmission, severity of morbidity, mortality, and likelihood of use,
into 3 categories.
Category A includes the highest priority agents that
pose a risk to national security because of the following features:
They can be easily disseminated
or transmitted person-to-person causing secondary and tertiary
cases.
They cause high mortality with
potential for major public health impact including the impact on
health care facilities.
They may cause public panic and
social disruption.
They require special action for
public health preparedness.
Category B Agents
contains the second highest priority agents because they:
They are moderately easy to
disseminate
They cause moderate morbidity
and low mortality
They require specific
enhancement of CDC's diagnostic capacity and enhanced disease
surveillance
Category C Agents
contains agents with the third highest priority include emerging
pathogens that could be engineered for mass dissemination. The
characteristics that render them amenable to bioterrorism are:
Availability
Ease of production and
dissemination
Potential for high morbidity and
mortality and major health impact.
Possible BW Agents
N.B. The classification and naming of
organisms (taxonomy) changes over time, perhaps more frequently in
microbiology than many other areas of the biological sciences. As an
example the cause of glanders
in man and animals has been known as: Glanders bacillus,
Corynebacterium mallei, Mycobacterium mallei, Bacillus
mallei, Actinobacillus mallei, Pfiefferella mallei, Malleomyces
mallei, Loefflerella mallei, Acinetobacter mallei, Pseudomonas mallei
and is now known, at the time of writing, as Burkholderia
mallei.
The letters in (brackets) represent the NATO military codename(s). The
letters in [square brackets] represent the National Center for
Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases (NCEZID) classification of
organisms., as described above. Several groups of organisms could be
used in biologic warfare:
Bacteria (singular: bacterium) are
microscopic, single-celled organisms that thrive in diverse
environments. They can live in soil, the ocean, thermal springs and
inside and on the human body. Human relations with
bacteria are complex. Sometimes bacteria, are helpful such as by turning
milk into yogurt or cheese. In other cases, bacteria are destructive,
causing diseases like pneumonia and tuberculosis.
Bacteria are classified as prokaryotes,
which are single-celled organisms with a simple internal structure they
lack a nucleus, and contain DNA that either floats freely in a twisted,
thread-like mass called the nucleoid, or in separate, circular pieces
called plasmids. Ribosomes are spherical units in the bacterial
cell where proteins are assembled from individual amino acids using the
information encoded in ribosomal RNA.
Bacterial cells are generally surrounded by two protective coverings: an
outer cell wall and an inner cell membrane. Certain bacteria, like the
mycoplasma, do not have a cell wall at all. Some bacteria may even have
a third, outermost protective layer called the capsule. Whip-like
extensions often cover the surfaces of bacteria - long ones called
flagella or short ones called pili - that help bacteria to move around
and attach to a host.
Protozoa are eukaryotic
unicellular organisms, which together with single-cell algae and slime
molds belong to the Protista kingdom. The protozoans contain a
membrane-surrounded nucleus and cellular organs. Most protozoa have, at
least in some stage of their life, structures such as flagella or cilia
that enable them to move and, for some species, to obtain nutrients.
Most protozoa are microscopical. They live in moist conditions and only
a few are parasites. Protozoans usually multiply asexually by binary or
multiple fission. Some are capable of sexual reproduction. Intestinal
protozoans infect faeco-orally and cause gastrointestinal signs to dogs.
Some vector-borne protozoans may cause generalized clinical signs that
involve many organs.Infections caused by protozoa can be spread through
ingestion of cysts (the dormant life stage), sexual transmission, or
through insect vectors.
Protozoa are broken down into
different classes:
Sporozoa
(characterized by being one-celled, non-motile, parasitic, and
spore-forming)
Flagellates
(characterised by having tail-like structures that flap around to
move them)
Amoebae
(which move using temporary cell body projections called pseudopods)
Ciliata
(which move by beating multiple hair-like structures called cilia)
Many common -and not so common -
infections are caused by protozoa. Some of these infections cause
illness in millions of people each year; other infections are rare and
may be disappearing.
Viruses are infectious agents that can
only replicate within a host organism, in other words they are obligate
parasites. They can infect a variety of living organisms, including
bacteria, plants, and animals. They are extremely small, most being too
small to be seen under a light microscope, they have a very simple
structure. When a virus particle is independent from its host, it
consists of a viral genome, or genetic material, contained within a
protein shell called a capsid. In some viruses, the protein shell is
enclosed in a membrane called an envelope. Viral genomes are very
diverse, since they can be DNA or RNA, single or double-stranded, linear
or circular, and vary in length and in the number of DNA or RNA
molecules.
The viral replication process begins when a virus infects its host by
attaching to the host cell and penetrating the cell wall or membrane.
The virus's genome is is released from the protein and injected
into the host cell. Then the viral genome hijacks the host cell's
control mechanisms, forcing it to replicate the viral genome and produce
viral proteins to make new capsids. Next, the viral particles are
assembled into new viruses. The new viruses burst out of the host cell
during a process called lysis, which kills the host cell. Some viruses
take a portion of the host's membrane during the lysis process to form
an envelope around the capsid.
Following viral replication, the new viruses may go on to infect new
hosts. Many viruses cause diseases in humans, such as influenza, chicken
pox, AIDS, the common cold, SARS, and rabies. The primary way to prevent
viral infections is vaccination, which administers a vaccine made of
inactive viral particles to an unaffected individual, in order to
increase the individual's immunity to the disease.
Fungi (singular fungus) are eukaryotes
and are an extremely diverse group including yeasts, moulds and
mushrooms. They, unlike most other organisms have chitin in their cell
walls. Fungi are heterotrophs, absorbing their food by directly from
their environment. Typically they secrete digestive enzymes into their
surroundings. They are non-photosynthetic. Except for the flagellated
spores of a few species, fungi are non-motile. Fungi are separate from
structurally similar slime moulds. Most fungi are inconspicuous due to
their small size and their lifestyles, many only become visible during
the fruiting or reproductive phases. Fungi have long been used as a food
source - mushrooms - or in the making of food and drink - as yeasts in
the making of bread and alcoholic beverages.
There are an estimated 2.2 million species, most of which have yet to be
studied.
Relatively few fungi are pathogenic to man, although some produce
mycotoxins which can cause fatal consequences. Fungi do cause
considerable impact as agents of plant disease and spoilage of
food products.
Biological toxins are poisonous
by-products of microorganisms, plants, and animals that produce adverse
clinical effects in humans, animals, or plants. A toxin has been defined
as "a poisonous substance that is a specific product of the metabolic
activities of a living organism and is usually very unstable, notably
toxic when introduced into the tissues, and typically capable of
inducing antibody formation" (Merriam-Webster Dictionary). Biological
toxins include metabolites of living organisms, degradation products of
dead organisms, and materials rendered toxic by the metabolic activity
of microorganisms. Some toxins can also be produced by bacterial or
fungal fermentation, the use of recombinant DNA technology, or chemical
synthesis of low-molecular-weight toxins. Because they exert their
adverse health effects through intoxication, the toxic effect is
analogous to chemical poisoning rather than to a traditional biological
infection. Biological toxins are produced by certain bacteria, fungi,
protozoa, plants, reptiles, amphibians, fish, echinoderma (spiny urchins
and starfish), mollusks, and insects.
Biological weapons
Infectious agents or toxins are not of
themselves biological weapons, they have to be weaponised. This means
three things chiefly:
they must be made available in a
form that may be stored, in the case of spore forming
organisms this is relatively easy. Freeze-drying (lyophilisation)
may well be an option using technology commonly used in vaccine
production.
they must be capable of being
delivered to the target in such a way as to be effective.
a delivery system has to be
available, this could be simply an atomiser, or in the case of dry
spores it could be an explosive device as was used in the UK's
Gruinard Island experiments shown in the video above. Probably the
simplest delivery system used in recent years was the post.
From 1950 until 1978 UK scientists,
occasionally in collaboration with the USA, conducted numerous trials in
the UK, where biological agent simulants were sprayed or otherwise
disseminated over large areas of the UK. Such simulants included
fluorescent powder and dead or living bacteria (Serratia
marcescens, Bacillus globigii (now known as B.
subtilis ) and Escherichia
coli). Other experiments subjected animals to infection with
biological warfare agents. Similar tests were conducted by the USSR
using Serratia
marcescens and Bacillus
thuringiensis, including tests on the Moscow Metro with the
latter organism.
Film of a secret Biological Warfare
Trial in 1952. The tests were conducted jointly by the Microbiological
Research Establishment (Porton Down) and the Royal Navy near the Isle of
Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. Live bacteria of several species, including
Yersinia pestis (plague) were sprayed into the air exposing guinea pigs
and monkeys to infection. The reference to this experiment on Wikipedia
refers to an airport in Venezuala as a source of some material, this is
due to a confusion over the letters NRD (probably miss-heard MRD,
Merida) which actually refer to the Naval Replenishment Depot. The
pontoon was part of the "Mulberry" floating harbour scheme used in WWII.
WARNING you may find some of this film disturbing.
The
Lyme Bay Trials (1966)
Biological Warfare trials undertaken
by the UK Government in 1966. The trials were performed by the
Microbiological Research Establishment, Porton Down. They involved
spraying viable bacteria into the air, and tracing their spread over
Dorset and the surrounding areas.
Civil Defence Corps
The Civil Defence Corps continued BW
protective training until 1968. This was quite basic as the rapid
identification of organisms, or even the identification that an attack
had taken place was not possible at that time. They worked on the
assumption that if there had been an explosion of relatively low power,
and no chemical agent had been identified, that a BW attack had taken
place. Of course this ignores the fact that there are other methods of
disseminating BW agents, e.g. spraying, or polluting water supplies. In
any case the basic protection was the same, one wore a respirator which
protected against inhalation of agents, and underwent the same
decontamination procedures as for chemical agents. If there was a high
risk an NBC suit would have been worn.