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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.
The Mongol Empire established commercial and political connections between the Eastern and Western areas of the world, through the most mobile army ever seen. The armies, composed of the most rapidly moving travelers who had ever moved between the steppes of East Asia (where bubonic plague was and remains endemic among small rodents), managed to keep the chain of infection without a break ...
Anthrax weaponization is the development and deployment of the bacterium Bacillus anthracis or, more commonly, its spore (referred to as anthrax), as a biological weapon.As a biological weapon, anthrax has been used in biowarfare and bioterrorism since 1914. [1]
The goal "was to deter [the use of biological weapons] against the United States and its allies and to retaliate if deterrence failed," the government explained later. "Fundamental to the ...
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.)
In 1944 it was converted to produce biological agents for the U.S. bio-weapons program. Although the plant never actually produced bio-weapons before the end of World War II, it did produce 8000 pounds of an anthrax simulant. After the war, the plant was transferred to Pfizer, who operated it until the plants closure in 2008.
The 1972 Biological Weapons Convention is an international treaty banning the development, use or stockpiling of biological weapons; as of March 2021, there were 183 states parties to the treaty. [3] Bio-agents are, however, widely studied for both defensive and medical research purposes under various biosafety levels and within biocontainment ...
The Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare, usually called the Geneva Protocol, is a treaty prohibiting the use of chemical and biological weapons in international armed conflicts.