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The use of bees as guided biological weapons was described in Byzantine written sources, such as Tactica of Emperor Leo VI the Wise in the chapter On Naval Warfare. [9] There are numerous other instances of the use of plant toxins, venoms, and other poisonous substances to create biological weapons in antiquity. [10]
Biological weapons (often termed "bio-weapons", "biological threat agents", or "bio-agents") are living organisms or replicating entities (i.e. viruses, which are not universally considered "alive"). Entomological (insect) warfare is a subtype of biological warfare. Biological warfare is subject to a forceful normative prohibition.
In July 1995 documents were confirmed by defectors who ran Iraq's biological warfare program; that the biological weapons program produced a large variety of biological weapons, including anthrax, which was able to be delivered by missiles, bombs and aerosols. It was also discovered that there was an arsenal of these weapons in 1991. [3]
The Geneva Protocol, signed by 132 nations on 17 June 1925, was a treaty established to ban the use of chemical and biological weapons during wartime. As stated by Coupland and Leins, "it was fostered in part by a 1918 appeal in which the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) described the use of poisonous gas against soldiers as a ...
A 1972 treaty theoretically prohibited developing biological weapons, but this program justified it with the argument that new weapons needed to be studied in order to develop adequate defenses.
Unit 731 (Japanese: 731部隊, Hepburn: Nana-san-ichi Butai), [note 1] short for Manchu Detachment 731 and also known as the Kamo Detachment [3]: 198 and the Ishii Unit, [5] was a covert biological and chemical warfare research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army that engaged in lethal human experimentation and biological weapons manufacturing during the Second Sino-Japanese War ...
Military biodefense in the United States began with the United States Army Medical Unit (USAMU) at Fort Detrick, Maryland, in 1956.(In contrast to the U.S. Army Biological Warfare Laboratories [1943–1969], also at Fort Detrick, the USAMU's mission was purely to develop defensive measures against bio-agents, as opposed to weapons development.)
The Japanese biological weapons program, which was run by the secret Imperial Japanese Army Unit 731 during the Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), became infamous for conducting often fatal human experiments on prisoners and producing biological weapons for combat use. [88]