--Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, 1932 

Biological warfare is nothing new. In the summer of 1347, the Tartar siege of the Genoese trading outpost of Caffa on the Black Sea entered its third fruitless year. Without warning, an epidemic broke out among the besiegers, killing hundreds and rapidly reducing the assembled force. Driven by both desperation and frustration, the Mongol general ordered that the bodies of the newly dead be placed in catapults and thrown over the walls into the city. The residents, upon whom were "projected mountains of dead" from whom "the Christians could neither hide nor flee or be freed from such a disaster," began to die as well. While Caffa fell to the plague, some survivors fled, carrying the disease with them to Constantinople, Messina and Venice, starting the Black Death. Within three years; at least a third of Europe died.

In 1763, Lord Amherst, the British commander-in-chief of the American colonies, responded to an Indian rebellion during the French and Indian War by attempting to annihilate them. He ordered that blankets taken from the beds of smallpox patients be given to the natives. A few months later, smallpox broke out and, lacking immunity, the Indians were ravaged by disease.

By 1925, bacteriological methods of warfare were finally banned by the Geneva Protocol. Concern by the scientific community that the search for a replacement for mustard gas might lead to the next generation of indiscriminate weapons being biological rather than chemical spurred the decision. The development of mass immunization techniques seemed to offer the chance of overcoming one of the major disadvantages of disease as a weapon - the "boomerang" effect on one's own troops and civilians. Chemical weapons had already been viewed as a "horror weapon" and the possibility of biological weapons was seen as even more horrific. It took little to convince the politicians. A solemn covenant against their first use was added to the Geneva Protocol.

In an ironic twist, the prohibition came at a time when no nation in the world had a biological weapon, nor was there a single laboratory researching into the possibility of developing one. So, instead of forestalling it, the ban led to the start of the biological arms race. In fact, some leaders were motivated by the ban, reasoning that biological warfare must be very important to have been banned by the Geneva Protocol!

America, Britain, the Soviet Union and Japan developed biological warfare programs before World War II. Many Third World countries began to experiment with the same. The construction of a chemical and biological warfare complex near Rabta in Libya and the recent Gulf conflict have since focused public attention on what has been referred to as the "poor man's atomic bomb." At least eight other nations - including Vietnam, North Korea and Iran are rumored to have developed or to be in the process of developing biological weapons.

The appeal of such weapons to a Third World nation is obvious. Sophisticated technology is not a prerequisite of weapons development, as is in the case of nuclear devices. In addition, in the grim ledger sheets of death, biological weapons are cost effective. For a large scale operation against a civilian population casualties might cost $2000 per square kilometer with conventional weapons, $800 per square kilometer with nuclear weapons, $600 per square kilometer with nerve gas and $1 per square kilometer with biological weapons. As nuclear proliferation continued, nervous dictatorships saw them as a valid response to the perceived threat of their nuclear weapon possessing neighbors. It was also a great way to prove to the other dictators that they had "arrived".

As Iraq made painfully clear, long-range delivery systems also proliferated and continue to proliferate. Aging "obsolete" short range ballistic missiles cast off by the superpowers have been acquired by Third World nations. Some of these could be adapted to the delivery of biological or chemical weapons, though the technological requirements and questions of their effectiveness might forestall this. 

The manufacture of biological organisms is not very difficult. The techniques of growing bacteria are over a hundred years old and well known to any first year microbiology student. The only limiting factor is the quantity of bacteria and the size of the manufacturing facility needed to produce large enough quantities of the organisms.

Targets include not only people, but also agricultural products and livestock. Some potential weapon organisms, such as anthrax, can wreak long term damage on an agricultural or livestock producing area by rendering it unusable so long as the organism in the soil. Biological weapons need not kill to be effective. Some, such as brucellosis, can cause a long term debilitating illness, sapping the strength of the opposing army. 

There is no credible defense against a biological warfare attack. The available choice of agents, methods of dispersal and varied delivery systems make it reasonably simple for any nation or group wishing to launch a biological attack to do so. There is no use arguing over the potential of any given nation or people to launch a biological attack, for the potentials of biological warfare are virtually unlimited. But in a world where all things are possible, probability should be measured more than capabilities. This is because, despite the ease and cost-efficiency of biological warfare, the likelihood of the deliberate spread of disease remains low, if not virtually non-existent. The reasons for this are rooted in science, history and psychology.

While biological weapons can terrorize their victims with ghastly effectiveness, they are far from the ideal weapon. Their value as a tactical battlefield weapon is nonexistent. Using them against an enemy imposes serious problems that must be overcome. Troops of the user would have to operate in a contaminated environment and be supplied with appropriate medicines or vaccines.

Accidents at production facilities could threaten enormous numbers of people. Similarly, the persistent ecological consequences of producing and testing biological weapons are potentially more harmful and certainly less understood than the radiological effects of nuclear weapons tests. The myxomatosis inoculation of a few rabbits in France in 1952 resulted in the spread of disease over an entire continent in a matter of months. On Gruinard Island, scene of the World War II anthrax bomb tests, a 1979 survey still detected viable spores despite an effort at decontamination by burning off the heather. By 1983, the area of significant contamination was small enough to make effective decontamination feasible using sporicides such as potassium permanganate, formaldehyde, glutaraldehyhe and peracetic acid - although use of these chemicals also raises serious ecological concerns.

Psychology also plays a large part. One of the ironies of the Gulf War was the relief expressed that the Iraqi Al-Hussain (Scud) missiles were "only carrying high explosives". Dead is dead…but death as a result of high explosives is accepted more readily than death via biologically warfare. Biological weapons are, like chemical weapons, weapons of terror. They are viewed with a sense of repugnance that is not felt towards conventional high explosives. They are perceived as heinous, indiscriminate and immoral and are universally taboo. Biological and chemical weapons are, without a doubt weapons that demand retaliation without limit, because their very use is considered to place the user outside the realm of restraint.

Potential users of unconventional weapons, whether biological or chemical, seem to recognize this. Since World War I, neither chemical nor biological weapons have been used against an opponent with a capacity to respond in kind or by other unconventional means. Every recorded instance - from proven chemical attacks by the Italians on the Ethiopians to suspected biotoxic warfare in Southeast Asia - has involved the use by a have on a have not. Saddam Hussein, the "Chemist of Baghdad" made a statement underscoring this reality. On August 23, 1990 after several weeks of boasting about his chemical weapons, the Soviet foreign minister visited the Iraqi President in an attempt to end the crisis. What they specifically talked about is unknown, but the next day, the Iraqi president stated that Iraq "would only use its chemical weapons if the United States used its nuclear weapons first." Saddam Hussein, for all his braggadocio, understood the reality of annihilation.

While it is possible that biological weapons can be delivered and dispersed against a target secretly, the consequences of their presence are readily apparent. Disease surveillance is a component of public health and occurrence of diseases outside of the normal pattern are easily detected where public health is good. Ironically, the crown jewel of the Center for Disease Control's (CDC) epidemiological program is the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS), established in 1948 by Alexander Langmuir. Langmuir developed the program after his involvement in biological warfare policy in World War II. The EIS was conceived as a deliberate placement of highly trained disease investigators in fifteen strategic regions of the United States in order to investigate and determine if any unusual disease outbreaks were due to biological warfare. While this function of the EIS has all but vanished in the ensuing years, it has had the fortunate side effect of greatly enhancing U.S. epidemiological capabilities.

The same bioengineering techniques and understanding of genetic and molecular biology that make it possible to design organisms of particular virulence can also be used to determine the source of the organism. Gene sequencing and DNA homology studies can determine whether organisms are the same and where they came from. In a celebrated investigation in the 1980's, investigators used molecular biology to determine that seemingly unrelated cases of Salmonella bacterium in various parts of the U.S. were related to contaminated marijuana purchased and distributed from the same vendor. In other words, anyone using biological weapons will eventually be identified. It is not possible to conduct biological warfare with a reasonable degree of anonymity and retribution can be the expected end.