Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The Geneva Protocol of 1925 prohibited the use of chemical weapons and biological weapons among signatory states in international armed conflicts, but said nothing about experimentation, production, storage, or transfer; later treaties did cover these aspects. Twentieth-century advances in microbiology enabled the first pure-culture biological ...
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.
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 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 ...
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.
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.
However, there is an argument that nuclear and biological weapons do not belong in the same category as chemical and "dirty bomb" radiological weapons, which have limited destructive potential (and close to none, as far as property is concerned), whereas nuclear and biological weapons have the unique ability to kill large numbers of people with ...
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.)