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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 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.
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 people of San Francisco had no idea. ... [the use of biological weapons] ... or whooping cough, in 1955. State records show that whooping cough cases in Florida spiked from 339 (one death) in ...
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.
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]
Kim Jong-un's regime is believed to have the third-largest chemical weapons supply in the world with at least 13 different types of biological weapons.
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.)