Biological & Chemical Weapons: News & Discussion

[rsingh]

All five permanent members of UN SC are known to have stockpiles of biological & chemical weapons. Subject is taboo. It is not discussed in mass media and I do not recall reading about this topic. Here I am going to post relevant information.

Which country have a stockpile of biological & chemical weapons? How big is stockpile? What is their doctrine regarding use of such weapons? What are the thresholds, if some country decides to use It? Declared or not declared. How it will look like? What are the measures taken to counter biological & chemical weapons?

[ArjunPandit]

India ratified the biological weapons convention we also destroyed our chemical weapons in 2009. UPA era love. SoKO and albania are only other countries. rest all is speculation. I dont think we will see much evidence of it. that said, both bio and chemical warfare are well within our reach given our massive production capacity.

[rsingh]

https://www.un.org/disarmament/biological-weapons/

https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/bwc

FAS on China
https://fas.org/nuke/guide/china/cbw/

Detailed study about Chinese BW
https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/Wild-B ... navirus-o/

https://www.who.int/health-topics/biological-weapons

The history of germ warfare and how prepared India is?
https://www.newindianexpress.com/magazi ... 18975.html

[vipins]

National Security Advisor Ajit Doval on Thursday said "deliberate weaponization of dangerous pathogens" was a matter of serious concern, and called for the need to build comprehensive national capabilities and bio-defence, bio-safety, and bio-security.

Link

[ricky_v]

necro bump
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/ne ... id-biology

At the end of the last decade and the beginning of this one, human society itself was subject to a kind of penetration test: COVID-19. The virus, an unthinking adversary, probed the world’s ability to defend against new pathogens. And by the end of the test, it was clear that humanity had failed. COVID-19 went everywhere, from remote Antarctic research stations to isolated Amazonian tribes. It raged through nursing homes and aircraft carriers. As it spread, it leveled the vulnerable and the powerful—frontline workers and heads of state alike. The draconian lockdowns imposed by autocracies and the miraculous vaccines developed by democracies slowed, but did not halt, the virus’s spread. By the end of 2022, three of every four Americans had been infected at least once. In the six weeks after China ended its “zero COVID” restrictions in December, over one billion of the country’s people were infected. The primary reason for the pandemic’s relatively modest death toll was not that society had controlled the disease. It was the fact that viral infection proved to be only modestly lethal. In the end, COVID-19 mostly burned itself out.

Humanity’s failure against COVID-19 is sobering, because the world is facing a growing number of biological threats. Some of them, such as avian flu, come from nature. But plenty come from scientific advances. Over the past 60 years, researchers have developed sophisticated understandings of both molecular and human biology, allowing for the development of remarkably deadly and effective pathogens. They have figured out how to create viruses that can evade immunity. They have learned how to evolve existing viruses to spread more easily through the air, and how to engineer viruses to make them more deadly. It remains unclear whether COVID-19 arose from such activities or entered the human population via interaction with wildlife. Either way, it is clear that biological technology, now boosted by artificial intelligence, has made it simpler than ever to produce diseases.

Averting such a disaster must be a priority for world leaders. It is a problem that is at least as complex as other grand challenges of the early Anthropocene, including mitigating and managing the threat of nuclear weapons and the planetary consequences of climate change. To handle this danger, states will need to start hardening their societies to protect against human-made pathogens. They will, for example, have to develop warning systems that can detect engineered diseases. They must learn how to surge the production of personal protective equipment and how to make it far more effective. They will need to cut the amount of time required to develop and distribute vaccines and antiviral drugs to days, instead of months. They will need to govern the technologies used to create and manipulate viruses. And they must do all this as fast as they can.

But progress can be a double-edged sword. If scientists’ growing understanding of microbiology has facilitated great advances in human health, it has also enabled attempts to undermine it. During World War I, the Allies studied the use of bacterial weapons, and German military intelligence operatives used such pathogens to attack animals the Allies used for transport. They sickened horses and mules in France and Romania. In Norway, they attempted to infect reindeer used by the Sami to deliver weapons to Russian forces. German officers even managed to infect corrals and stables in the United States that were full of animals headed to Europe.


By the time World War II began, these initiatives had matured into weapons designed to kill humans. In Japanese-occupied Manchuria, the Japanese military officer Shiro Ishii had his forces preside over the dystopian Unit 731, in which they tested biological weapons on humans. They infected and killed thousands of prisoners with anthrax, typhoid, paratyphoid, glanders, dysentery, and the bubonic plague. During the final days of the war, Ishii proposed a full-on biological-warfare operation—titled Cherry Blossoms at Night—in which Japanese seaplanes would disperse bubonic-plague-infected fleas over major American West Coast cities. But the plan was vetoed by the chief of the army general staff. “If bacteriological warfare is conducted,” the chief noted, “it will grow from the dimension of war between Japan and America to an endless battle of humanity against bacteria.”

In the 1960s, the U.S. Department of Defense launched Project 112, which experimented with how to mass distribute offensive pathogens. To do so, the army dispersed spores in the tunnels of the New York City subway and bacteria in aerosols from boats in San Francisco Bay. It sprayed chemicals from army planes over thousands of square miles, from the Rockies to the Atlantic and from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. As U.S. officials saw it, these weapons were a kind of insurance policy against a Soviet nuclear attack: if Moscow hit the United States and neutralized Washington’s own nuclear arsenal, the United States could still devastate the Soviet Union by counterattacking with deadly pathogens. By the middle of the decade, the department committed to developing lethal and incapacitating biological weapons. As the 1960s drew to a close, government scientists were producing sizable quantities of deadly bacteria and toxins that were devised, in the words of the microbiologist Riley Housewright, to “confound diagnosis and frustrate treatment.”

But Washington’s main adversary was not persuaded. In 1971, as the world haggled over a treaty, the Soviet Union released a weaponized strain of Variola major—the smallpox virus—on an island in the Aral Sea. It resulted in a smallpox outbreak in present-day Kazakhstan. The outbreak was contained through heroic efforts by Soviet public health officials, but those efforts succeeded only because of the affected region’s sparse population and because most Soviet citizens had been vaccinated and possessed some immunity.

Later that year, the Soviet Union and the United States agreed to a treaty banning biological weapons, called the Biological Weapons Convention. The UN General Assembly universally commended the agreement, and in 1972, it opened for signing in London, Moscow, and Washington. But the Soviets ultimately defied the agreement. In 1979, 68 people died in the city of Sverdlovsk—present-day Yekate­rinburg—after spores from a clandestine anthrax project were released. Moscow did not have any other clear-cut accidents, but the Soviets maintained a biological weapons program until their country fell apart—a program that, according to defectors, employed 60,000 people at its height. In 1991, U.S. and British representatives visited some of the program’s facilities, where they saw rows of vessels and bioreactors capable of producing thousands of liters of high-titer smallpox. Those vessels could then pump the virus through refrigerated pipes and into bomblets, which could, in turn, be loaded onto missiles.

In 1984, the Rajneesh religious movement, based in Oregon, contaminated salad bars with salmonella. (Its goal was to incapacitate opposition voters so that Rajneesh candidates could win a Wasco County election.) No one died, but hundreds of people became ill. In 1995, the apocalyptic Aum Shinrikyo group injured thousands of people in Tokyo with the chemical nerve agent sarin; it had previously attempted, without success, to make anthrax weapons. In 2001, anthrax attacks in the United States targeting journalists and two U.S. Senate offices—which the FBI believes were carried out by a lone American scientist—killed five people.

There is a historical template for how societies can make biological weapons unsuccessful: the end of major urban fires. For most of recorded history, the cities of the world were periodically consumed by massive conflagrations that razed their cores. But in the nineteenth century, the frequency of these fires decreased dramatically. This diminution was, in part, the product of developing better response systems, such as professional firefighting forces and fire hydrants. But mostly, the reduction was driven by mundane steps, including the introduction of less combustible building materials, the imposition of engineering standards and building codes, and requirements for liability insurance—which discouraged risky behavior. When states created sharper definitions of negligence, making it easier to launch civil suits for accidental fires, people became even more cautious.

Today’s authorities can take a page from this playbook. Governments built fire departments and hydrants to respond to urban fires. Now, they need to construct systems that can rapidly develop vaccines, antiviral drugs, and other medical interventions. Yet just as with urban fires, governments need to understand that rapid responses won’t be enough. The world could, and must, develop the ability to vaccinate its eight billion people within 100 days of an outbreak—faster than it took the United States to fully vaccinate 100 million people against COVID-19. Yet this would still not suffice for a pathogen that spread at the pace of the coronavirus’s Omicron variant.