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Chemical and Biological Weapons: Possession and Programs Past and Present", James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, Middlebury College, April 9, 2002, accessed November 12, 2008. "Biological Weapons", Federation of American Scientists, updated October 19, 1998, accessed November 12, 2008.
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 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]
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 realization that biological weapons may become the poor man's atom bomb also contributed to the end of the U.S. biological weapons program. [21] Subsequently, President Nixon announced that the U.S. was unilaterally renouncing its biological warfare program, ultimately signing the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention in 1972.
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 United States is known to have possessed three types of weapons of mass destruction: nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.As the country that invented nuclear weapons, the U.S. is the only country to have used nuclear weapons on another country, when it detonated two atomic bombs over two Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II.
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.