Biological Warfare: The Deadliest of All WMD's

The art of biological warfare is nothing new, in fact the history of biological agents in our world is something that started log ago and has continued to this day. From the time of Kings and Queens, the settlement of America, through both world wars, and into the next century biological warfare is nothing new.

The first reported attacks using biological agents came during the medieval period of history. Armies would load disease ridden corpses, both human and animal alike, into catapults and launch them over city walls during a siege. These corpses would spread horrible bacteria throughout the cities population, and eventually killing its people, or debilitating the army. The water supply, food sources, everything would be infected by the use of this dishonorable, yet very effective method of warfare. The use of dead corpses in European warfare continued and gave rise to the Black Death, the disease that wiped out most of Europe's population.

When Americans wanted to settle their new country nothing seemed as though it could stop them, and in fact nothing could, not even the Native Americans that had lived here for thousands of years prior. So settlers had to come up with a way to rid the land of the "Indians" and so generals in charge of clearing the land of the Indians gave blankets that had been used to cover small pox patience to the Indians. The Indians had never been exposed to this kind of sickness so it spread like wildfire killing many of the native tribes of America, reducing the population of the Indians to a number the settlers could manage. This was another example of early germ warfare.

In the years before World War II Japan realized the potential of biologic warfare, and developed a special weapons program with the soul purpose of developing, testing and efficiently manufacturing bio agents for military use. Thus the notorious organization 713 was formed, testing their biological agents on prisoners of war. Some of agents were very effective at killing and were loaded into bombs and used during the war. After the fall of the Axis powers Japan's members of Organization 713 and those who ordered its creation were to be charged with war crimes, but received immunity for exchange of their research to the Americans. The documents received in the exchange remain classified to this day.

During the height of the cold war between Russian and the United States we see a boom in the production and testing of "Bio Toxins" by both parties. Bio Toxins are the agents selected to be the most effective killing devices for a biological war. It was during this time that Anthrax was altered, mutated to be resistant to the antibiotics we have created to fight the sickness. The United States had a large Bio Toxin development team and a large scale biological warfare department, but that all was small in comparison with the biological development of Russia at the time. Luckily neither country attacked the other and a full scale biological war was avoided.

To date the most recent biological weapon that has been used was the strain of Anthrax developed during the cold war. In the days after 9/11 some unknown source sent Anthrax in a powdered form to officials around the United States. These attacks made dozens sick and killed five people, nobody has been charged with the crime.

It's amazing that will all the technology and the ways in which mankind has found to destroy one another it would be an unseen force, a creation of Earth itself that might be our biggest undoing. We may possess thousands upon thousands of Nuclear weapons, but it is the smallest of life that we fear above all else.