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Biological warfare
contents
- holocaust
- Protection against biological weapons?
- Destruction of the infrastructure
- anthrax
- routes of infection
- Antique fountain poisoner
- The Middle Ages - bees and plague
- The modern era - smallpox and smallpox
- The First World War - Deadly Animal Feed
- The second World War
- Japan
- The Soviet Union
- Great Britain
- Bioweapons of our time
These include viruses, bacteria, fungi and toxic substances. Biological weapons are characterized by the fact that after a short incubation they have a lethal effect on humans, livestock or plants and at the same time are largely immune to drugs or prophylaxis. Also possible biological weapons include rats, mice, grasshoppers, ticks, lice, fleas, mosquitoes, wasps, tapeworms, bark and potato beetles.
Biological warfare is now generally outlawed in view of its catastrophic effects. (Image: MamabaB / fotolia.com) Firstly, biological weapons can be directed directly against humans. As weapons of mass destruction are then suitable pathogens that act fast and deadly, and against which there is no vaccine. From a military point of view are perfect epidemics against which the enemy has no means, while the own soldiers are protected. For example, the US Army was planning to use smallpox against the Viet Cong in the Vietnam War because the American GIs were vaccinated, and the Soviet Union even developed a modified anthrax virus that was resistant to the known antibiotics and at the same time produced a new antibiotic that would kill the Viet Cong protected Russian soldiers.
Slow-acting viruses and bacteria, which only occasionally kill and are well-medicated, are unsuitable for committing genocide - but to make them an enemy of the war, they are well suited.
holocaust
The most dangerous biological weapons not only kill people on the ground, they also threaten the inhabitants of entire states. Firstly, such diseases are easily transmitted and, secondly, almost certainly fatal. First and foremost, this applies to anthrax, but also to the botulinum or pneumonic plague.
Internationally banned and known as the most dangerous pathogens today are: anthrax, plague, smallpox, tularemia, Queensland fever, snot, enze-pesticides, hemorrhagic viruses, ricin and botulinum (bacteria-produced poison), as well as staphylococci. They are either highly fatal or spread easily, are highly infective or all at the same time.
The botulism poison produces the bacterium Clostridium botulinum. It leads to food poisoning. Victims who inhale or eat the poison suffer from diarrhea, nausea, drowsiness, and respiratory paralysis hours or days later. The death toll is high, but there are antidotes.
Yersinia pestis, the bacterium of pulmonary plague, was the most dreaded epidemic in the Middle Ages. When the bacteria enter the bronchial tubes, there is shortness of breath, coughing attacks and feverish delirium; Pulmonary edema is formed. Pulmonary plague is almost always deadly, but there are vaccinations and antibiotics today.
Particularly suitable as a weapon of mass destruction are pathogens that can be distributed with "bombs" or as a spray over the air. In the aviation era, such "pest pots" and anthrax sprays caused the greatest damage; they killed hundreds of thousands of people.
Protection against biological weapons?
The WHO calculated in 1970 that the spraying of 50 kg anthrax spores in a city with 500,000 inhabitants would result in 95,000 deaths and 125,000 patients. Such a biological weapon has as bad effects as a nuclear bomb. In addition, it is much cheaper to have, and even nuclear weapons are not much better control.
Potential targets for bioweap attacks are generally large cities, as well as areas where crowds of people reside, such as city centers, football stadiums, airports or train stations. Particularly suitable are subway stations, since the contaminated air can hardly escape.
There is a suspicion of a biological weapon attack when suddenly unexplained illnesses occur on a large scale, and those affected show the same symptoms, this disease is atypical for the country or the pathogen does not even occur in the country, if the diseases are fatal and unusually transmitted , For example, anthrax usually spreads through the skin; but when masses of people receive anthrax through the air, it is strange.
Bioweapons almost always spread without sound, and without being visible to the naked eye, at least that applies to viruses and bacteria, but not to rats or mice. Military Guardian programs do not detect pathogens.
The bioweapon is usually only recognized if it is already successful, ie an unusually large number of people are dying from a scarcely common disease.
Those affected must be removed from the contaminated area as soon as possible. Rescue teams are only allowed to stay in contaminated terrain for as long as necessary and must wear protective clothing. When they leave the area, they give the protective clothing to destroy it.
Every doctor, paramedic and nurse who comes in contact with the bodies of the sick and enters the contaminated area is at risk of infection.
The vehicles must be disinfected after transport, the sick must be taken to appropriate care facilities.
Destruction of the infrastructure
Military is often not about destroying the civilian population of a defeated country, but forcing its leadership to capitulate, and it is suitable for biological weapons that deprive those affected, ie kill the cattle or destroy the crop.
The animal diseases that historically served as a weapon of war include snot, foot and mouth disease, bovine and swine fever. In times when dogs played an important role in war, be it as detection dogs, combat dogs or messenger dogs, rabies was also an option. However, there are very few traditions in which this virus was used.
In the long run, that is to say in protracted wars, fungi are also available that attack food crops or "cash crops" and insects that eat the plants.
In addition, there are biological weapons that destroy material, thus damaging neither humans nor livestock. These range from termites destroying wooden structures to bacteria that decompose the protective layer of military vehicles.
Anthrax bacteria are among the most dreaded biological weapons. (Image: royaltystockphoto / fotolia.com) anthrax
Specifically, anthrax should be discussed, as this bacterial infection claimed the most fatalities in biological warfare.
Anthrax is internationally known under the term anthrax, after its pathogen, the Bacillus anthracis. Of course, it mainly affects animals, in Europe, Africa and Asia.
Anthrax forms spores, and these cause the disease in three different ways: As a skin, lung or intestinal spasms, with only the pulmonary anthrax suitable for biological warfare.
"Normally", however, the Hautmilzbrand is the most common. It occurs primarily in humans when their skin comes in contact with spores that adhere to dead animals, for example in the coat. For this, the person affected must have a skin injury, but can also be tiny, so that the pathogen penetrates into the skin. 95% of all people who contract anthrax naturally suffer from skin cellulite. This form of anthrax can be combated with antibiotics.
Even without treatment, 7 to 9 out of 10 patients survive the disease. Days after penetration of the pathogen bubbles form, which fill up with fluid, then scabs develop on the bladder and finally lymphangiitis can follow, combined with sepsis.
Very rare is the intestinal spleen. It arises when people eat the flesh of diseased animals, which moreover is not even. Today, this form of anthrax affects almost exclusively the natives in non-industrialized countries, in the early modern period, however, this infection was also common in Germany, because the poor bought from the skinner infected meat at low prices and in starvation times also took carrion.
In the meantime, the naturally rare lung mite fire is interesting for biological warfare. Here, those affected breathe in the spores. The lung anthrax is the deadliest form of the disease and can be excellently spread through aircraft aerosols.
This form of anthrax usually breaks out days after inhalation, but when the aerosol is abundant, as in war missions, the incubation is reduced to a few hours. Fever, headache, nausea, and appetite, as with a flu infection, are the first symptoms.
Then it goes downhill rapidly: The fever rises sharply, the sweat breaks out, the person in question wallowing in shivering attacks. This is followed by severe pneumonia combined with a bloody cough, pathological noises during breathing, and the space between the two halves of the lungs widened pathologically. Untreated people die one hundred percent in a few days.
Also, the lung mite can be treated with antibiotics today, but still die many of those affected.
routes of infection
Not all dangerous pathogens are suitable for biological warfare as mass weapons. Not only is the lethality essential, but also the type of infection.
Diseases that are transmitted by droplets, that is to say by the moisture exhaling, are militarily interesting because few pathogens can infect masses of humans, but at the same time they have the disadvantage that they can not be controlled well if they spread. Epidemics that spread via droplet infection include plague, smallpox, Ebola, influenza and herpes simplex. Pest and smallpox were among the most used biological weapons in the past.
Animals serve as hosts or intermediate hosts for pathogens; So the plague bacteria sat in the rat flea, and this on the domestic rat and brown rat, while the Anopheles mosquito carries the malaria carrier in itself. Consequently, infected animals can also be used as biological weapons, for example, by exposing rats suffering from plague in hostile cities.
Other pathogens can only enter the body orally, especially through food, food and drink. The botulinum bacterium belongs to this type of pathogen. Such epidemics are excellently suited as biological weapons: if the food of the enemy is poisoned, only those who eat it will die of land and air if they are conquered.
Many pathogens are transmitted through bodily fluids, ie via the blood, semen, vaginal secretions, tears, saliva or nasal mucus. This transmission is unlikely to be genocidal, but it can have disastrous consequences if infected blood enters blood donations.
Antique fountain poisoner
Biological weapons are "natural products" and therefore the oldest means to wage wars. Thousands of years ago, before scientists discovered viruses and bacteria, our ancestors observed that exposure to humans and animals that had died of disease triggered the plague on the living.
Presumably, many burial rites and taboos of touching the dead body stem from the experience of epidemics, in which the dead, figuratively speaking, dragged the living to their graves.
Since ancient times, the well poisoning is known; The easiest thing was to throw corpses or animal carcasses into the enemy's waterholes. The body poison contaminated the water and those who drank it. Persians, Greeks and Romans knew the well poisoning as a regular part of warfare.
It is reported that the Hittites already 1000 BC. Chricked cattle drove into the country of the opponent. The ancient Assyrians allegedly poisoned the wells with fungal spores, and the Romans threw human excrement into the enemy ranks. The Scythians smeared their arrows with feces, the blood of the sick and offal of rotting corpses. King Prusias of Bithynia finally left in 184 BC. Throw clay jars filled with poisonous snakes onto the ships of Eumenes II.
The Middle Ages - bees and plague
The rulers of the Middle Ages were no less imaginative when it came to using biology as a weapon. Richard the Lionheart besieged the fortress of Akkon in the Third Crusade. To force the locals to surrender, his soldiers threw hundreds of beehives over the walls.
The most effective use of biological weapons in the Middle Ages was in 1346 in the city of Kaffa on the Black Sea, a trading post of Genoa. The Tartars besieged the city for three years - without success. Then a plague broke out among them. In all likelihood, it was the bubonic plague that the Tartars had dragged from their home in Central Asia.
Shared suffering is not only half suffering, but in this case also a very effective weapon: The Tartars catapulted the bodies of the infected over the city walls and shortly thereafter, the plague broke out among the besieged. The Genoese then fled to their ships to escape the "black death". But it was in vain. They dragged the pestle to Genoa, and in a few years the hitherto largest plague wave devastated the European continent.
Smallpox viruses played a significant role in the conquest of South America and the extinction of indigenous peoples. (Bld: royaltystockphoto / fotolia.com) The modern era - smallpox and smallpox
In the early modern era, the use of biological weapons reached a new peak: The Native Americans had developed against the viruses and bacteria of Europe no antibodies, the European conquerors recognized this quickly and used pathogens against the natives - with tremendous success.
Fransisco Pizarro, the conquistador of the Inca empire, gave the Indians blankets that were infected with poxviruses, and the Anglo-Americans killed Indians by also giving them blankets, but infested with pollen viruses.
1763 raged in the east of present-day US, a large uprising of natives under the leadership of Chief Pontiac. The front lines not only ran between British and Indians, but also among the insurgent tribes and Indians who remained loyal to the immigrants.
Pontiac's troops devastated the settlements of the colonists; they burned down one village after another, which was easy, for the British built their houses out of wood, and the civilians had little means to defend themselves. So they fled to Fort Pitt, which was soon bursting at the seams. The hygiene was catastrophic, the people were weakened, and soon the smallpox broke out.
Colonel Henri Louis Bouquet, the commander, quarantined the sick. On June 23, 1763, two delegates from Pontiac's army came to the fort to summon the British to surrender. Bouquet declined, but gave the Indians two blankets of smallpox patients.
To this day, it is unclear whether these two blankets gave the trigger, anyway, under pontiacs people immediately broke out the smallpox and ripped the insurgents there. To this day, we do not know whether the British commander in chief gave the order to infect the Indians through the blankets with pox viruses, but he toyed with the idea, because Jeffrey Amherst wrote on July 7 in a letter to Bouquet if it was not possible was to "send the smallpox to these unfaithful Indians".
In the American Civil War also pox viruses are said to have been used. Inoculation at that time replaced vaccination as a primitive form; The pathogen was then exposed to open wounds, the infected then fell ill, but much less severe than a "normal" infection.
The Americans believed that the British had infected the rebels with smallpox by inoculating British soldiers, rendering them immune and then spreading smallpox among the Americans.
In 1781, rebels encountered several dead African slaves who had died of smallpox. These slaves had actually sent the British to spread the disease in American settlements.
The First World War - Deadly Animal Feed
Modern medicine has increased the murderous potential of biological agents. Until well into the 19th century, it was only possible to target already common diseases targeted at the enemy - without a smallpox epidemic, for example, the British Pontiacs warriors could not contaminate.
In the 20th century, however, succeeded in producing the pathogens artificially. During World War I, the enemy powers were already able to breed various deadly bacteria. In particular, Germany had a large arsenal of biological weapons, including Pesterreger, and the German army command wanted to use this against the English. However, she decided against it - for humanitarian reasons, because the plague could not be specifically used against soldiers.
These humanitarian reasons, however, were not for animals, and the German Reich deliberately infested animals in enemy countries to destroy the infrastructure necessary for warfare. In the first world war horses in particular still had an important meaning, if not more in the battle, because they were necessary to transport the equipment of the troops, among them also the artillery.
But also sheep and cattle were the focus of these secret attacks. German agents smuggled animal feed, bred with bred pathogens, into enemy countries. How many animals of which species fell victim to these attacks is unknown.
Such virus and bacterial attacks became known in the US, Norway, Spain, Romania, Iraq and Argentina. In 1918, a few hundred mules died in Argentina after an anthrax attack, and in 1916 the authorities in Bucharest found exciters of the rotten disease - in the German Embassy.
In Norway, the police arrested 1917 Baron Otto Karl von Rosen because he had no passport. They were not astonished: in his suitcase were sugar cubes that were infected with anthrax. Von Rosen was to infect Norwegian reindeer carrying British arms. Fortunately for him, the baron had not only a German, but also a Finnish and Swedish citizenship. The Swedish government put the neighboring country under pressure and Norway rejected the saboteur.
Germany was considered a leader in the development of biological weapons, but the other nations did not sleep. Between 1922 and 1941 various other states launched bio-weapons programs: France, probably because of the trauma of German poison gas attacks in 1922, the encircled Soviet Union in 1926, Japan in 1932, the fascist Italy in 1934, the United Kingdom in 1936 and the United States in 1941. There Germany was under Nazi rule but again among the global players, as far as mass destruction from the medical laboratory was concerned.
The second World War
In the Second World War, all the great powers were thinking of using biological weapons. Aircraft that sprayed or dropped bombs increased the spread of the disease to a level never seen before in history. In addition, the research ran at full speed: More and more pathogens could breed in the laboratory and spread across regions in entire regions.
Ironically, however, Hitler banned their use and acted in a conflict with Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the SS and second man in the Nazi state, a. The Supreme Command was initially against biological weapons, not for humanitarian reasons, because this rejected the fascist regime consistently; the German military, on the other hand, considered biological warfare agents uncontrollable.
In 1940, however, the Nazi government took over an institute for biological warfare in Paris and conducted research under the physician Heinrich Kliewe on plague and anthrax pathogens. In 1942, however, Hitler finally prohibited research on biological weapons during the war of aggression.
His calculation was that German research on biological weapons could inspire the Allies to use biological weapons against Germany, and thus decide the war: Germany was a densely populated country, and epidemics would probably have had even worse consequences here than in the sparsely populated areas of the Soviet Union - and in 1942 the front line was still far from the German borders.
The Nazi concept of the "Lebensraum für den Volksgemeinschaft" may also have played a role in Hitler's decision. The Nazis wanted to create a Eurasian empire, a "new Germania" in which German modern feudal lords had millions of citizens of Eastern Europe and Russia as country slaves.
However, viruses do not separate between the elites who murdered the Nazis as well as Jews or Roma and Sinti and the other Eastern Europeans who were to survive to serve as slaves; Bacteria had also met the SS officer, who as a landlord oversaw his robbery in the Ukraine.
Himmler, however, was keen on the use of biological weapons and supported Heinrich Kliewe to contaminate raw food with bacteria and to circulate them in the areas to be conquered.
As much as Hitler rejected the offensive bioweapons research, so much did he promote the defensive. Since 1943, the "Arbeitsgemeinschaft Blitzableiter" has been researching how attacks with biological weapons could be averted.
Japan
No other state in modern times murdered people in such masses with biological weapons like Japan in World War II. For testing alone, a special Japanese unit killed more than 3,500 people.
In 1932, Japan conquered Manchuria and planned biological weapons to use against China's troops and the Red Army. Later, Japan used anthrax, typhoid, plague, cholera and dysentery.
In 1940, the Empire tried such weapons for the first time. Japanese airmen dropped pottery pots with plague fleas over Chinese cities. In 1941, Japanese soldiers infected 3,000 Chinese prisoners of war with typhoid fever and then released them, infecting the Chinese military with the disease as well as the civilian population. The exact numbers of victims are unknown. In the same year, the Japanese army used plague fleas in Changde, whereupon about 7,600 inhabitants died.
In 1942, Japanese troops withdrew from the Chinese provinces of Zhejiang and Jiangxi. Soldiers followed them closely to unit 731, which had previously tested the pathogens on prisoners, and they introduced anthrax pests into drinking water; At the same time, Japanese airmen sprayed the virus over Chinese cities. More than 250,000 Chinese died in this mass murder alone.
In 1943, the Japanese army wanted to take Changde. Unit 731 sprayed pest viruses from aircraft. In total, there were 50,000 Chinese soldiers and at least 300,000 civilians. But as the Japanese also used all other types of weapons, including chemical warfare agents, it is impossible to say how many died of the plague.
Seldom are people as ingenious as in war, and Japan was planning to attack America. To this end, the Empire experimented with balloon bombs. These were to carry pathogens with the winds to the US to release their deadly cargo there.
Japanese physicians were doing human experiments on Americans who would have done Mengele honor: they infected the prisoners of war with various pathogens to test the susceptibility of the "white race".
The Soviet Union
The Soviet Union understood itself from the beginning in a state of siege of the capitalist states, and Stalin gave the motto, within ten years, the industrial backlog Russia over the West to overcome - military as civil.
Logically, biological weapons had a significant value for the Soviet Union: they were easy to manufacture (if the scientists had the know-how to breed them), easily spread by airplanes and were less controllable, but just as destructive as conventional weapons - so one cheap alternative to the surface bombing of the British and Americans.
Nevertheless, the Soviet Union allegedly used biological weapons only once - at Stalingrad. As early as 1926, Soviet scientists were researching bred pathogens in the White Sea. Since 1941, the Soviet Union has been researching the tularemia pathogen (rabbit plague).
In 1942 German soldiers fell ill with tularemia; The Soviet government claimed that it was a naturally occurring disease and, after all, many Russians died as a result of the epidemic. But the Russians became infected weeks later, and more than two-thirds of all sufferers died of lung tularemia, which is transmitted through the air.
Thus, there are indications that the Soviet leadership tried Tularämie as a bioweapon against the Nazi soldiers. If so, it is also clear why the Red Army renounced its use. The German troops were in the middle of Russia, only Stalingrad was to bring about a change, and a weapon that had been proven to decimate its own population as well as its enemies would have been a collective suicide.
Great Britain
British medicine was well advanced around 1939, and British doctors had been researching viruses and bacteria for decades. Churchill personally commissioned the development of biological weapons for defense as well as for attacking Germany.
The MI 5 reported falsely that Germany wanted to attack England with botulin and anthrax weapons. The British government therefore provided citizens with 1 million vaccinations against botulinum toxin.
The most promising of the British government of anthrax. As a test area she chose Gruinard Island, a tiny island off the Scottish coast without inhabitants, so perfect for laboratory conditions in the wild. 60 sheep served as experimental animals. It was not a day after the anthrax spores spread, and no animal was alive.
British scientists produced anthrax spores in the war in large quantities; they should be processed into animal feed and dumped over German grazing areas. The production went through the United States, because Britain was considered endangered, if Germany had attacked it, the spores might have spread in England.
The United States planned 1944 one million anthrax bombs. You should meet Stuttgart, Wilhelmshaven, Hamburg, Frankfurt and Aachen. Fortunately for the German civilian population capitulated Nazi Germany before the spores were used. It is estimated that more than half of the affected natives died from the disease.
Despite the international agreements, there is a risk that new biological weapons will be developed and used in the future. (Image: Black Mamba / fotolia.com) Bioweapons of our time
After 1945, the US and the Soviet Union fought a secret biorem racing race. The Soviet program was mainly known because in 1979 a leak in a secret laboratory in Sverdlovsk and 66 people died of anthrax. The Soviet government covered up the accident and said it was food poisoning from contaminated meat. Only in 1992, under Boris Yeltsin, did the whole truth come to light.
The Americans researched infected mosquitoes in 1950 to release them in hostile terrain. The US Army developed special nozzles and projectiles to use pathogens. In the 1960s, the US officially stopped its bioweapons programs, but today US military researchers are researching gene mutations, which is nothing but biological war planning.
Saddam Hussein cultivated anthrax and botulinum cultures but never used them. This was probably less due to ethical motives, but because Iraq had not developed any suitable delivery systems to use these pathogens.
In the developed capital states, the danger today is in new biological weapons that intervene in genetics. The classical pathogens such as anthrax or plague are inadequate from a modern military point of view, as they are difficult to focus on a target, depend on the environment, for example, the wind direction and seem too slow.
The advances in synthetic biology already make it theoretically possible to produce ethnically selective biological weapons and thus come closer to the dream of racist regimes.
Already in 2007, the J. Craig Venter Institute warned that it could be easy to artificially produce almost every pathogenic virus in 2017. Bacterial genomes can now be produced synthetically.
Nevertheless, we do not have to worry about a flood of biological warfare agents. "Alone to get to a pathogen strain is impossible, and to modify the almost impossible unless you have a high-tech laboratory and capable people," said the Shell employee Michael Behrens.
Are we facing terrorist attacks with synthetic anthrax? This is not theoretically ruled out, but there are hardly any labs around the world that are capable of modifying and developing biological weapons. (Dr. Utz Anhalt)
Swell:
http://www.gifte.de/B-%20und%20C-Waffen/biologische_waffen.htm
http://www.kas.de/wf/doc/kas_21391-544-1-30.pdf&110104111342
The History of biological warfare on:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1326439/
http://sicherheitspolitik.bpb.de/massenvernichtungswaffen/hintergrundtexte-m6/Biologische-Waffen-und-biologischer-Krieg-eine-kurze-Geschichte
http://www.spektrum.de/lexikon/biologie/biologische-waffen/8704
http://www.spektrum.de/magazin/biologische-waffen/823655