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The Mongols under Jani Beg besieged Caffa in 1343 and the Venetian territory of Tana, the cause of which was a brawl between Italians and Muslims in Tana. [7] The siege of Caffa lasted until February 1344, when it was lifted after an Italian relief force killed 15,000 Mongol troops and destroyed their siege machines.
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 ...
De Mussis apparently recorded an early example of biological warfare in describing how the army of the Golden Horde hurled plague-infected cadavers over the city walls during the Siege of Caffa in 1346.
The Army Biological Laboratory tested each agent and the Army's Technical Escort Unit was responsible for the transport of all chemical, biological, radiological (nuclear) materials. Biological warfare can also specifically target plants to destroy crops or defoliate vegetation.
It was one of the first large-scale biological weapon trials that would be conducted under a "germ warfare testing program" that went on for 20 years, from 1949 to 1969.
The U.S. Army Biological Warfare Laboratories (USBWL) was a suite of research laboratories and pilot plant centers operating at Camp (later Fort) Detrick, Maryland, United States, beginning in 1943 under the control of the U.S. Army Chemical Corps Research and Development Command.
The 1972 Biological Weapons Convention supplements the Geneva Protocol by prohibiting the development, production, acquisition, transfer, stockpiling and use of biological weapons. [13] Having entered into force on 26 March 1975, this agreement was the first multilateral disarmament treaty to ban the production of an entire category of weapons ...
While the history of biological warfare goes back more than six centuries to the Siege of Caffa in 1346 CE, [14] international restrictions on biological warfare began only with the 1925 Geneva Protocol, which prohibits the use but not the possession or development of chemical and biological weapons. [15]