Bioterrorism and Biological Warfare: Disease as a Weapon of War

This book explores the history and threat of bioterrorism, focusing on the use of disease and germs as weapons of mass destruction. It highlights the effectiveness of biological weapons in instilling terror, panic, death, famine, and economic ruin, and the ease with which they can be manufactured and obtained by terrorists. The book also examines the connection between the industrial-scale proliferation of biological weaponry and the opportunities it gives to terrorists to manufacture their weapons of choice.

Format: Hardback
Length: 288 pages
Publication date: 30 July 2023
Publisher: Pen & Sword Books Ltd

This important, disturbing, and timely book focuses on the use of disease and germs as weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and the threat bioterrorism poses in an increasingly unpredictable and volatile future for the world. For context, it traces developments from the earliest primitive but effective days of infectious rams, poison-tipped arrows, and plague-infected corpses used as toxic, disease-spreading projectiles, to the twenty-first-century industrial scale weaponization of biomedicine. Paul Chrystal shows how biological weapons and acts of bioterrorism are especially effective at instilling terror, panic, death, famine, and economic ruin on a large scale, shredding public confidence in governments and civilization itself. For the disaffected, lethal biological agents are comparatively easy to manufacture and obtain, and they have the benefit of being almost invisible and easy and quick to administer in lethal quantities through a variety of discreet delivery systems. Just what the terrorist wants. We explore the sinister connection between the industrial-scale proliferation of biological weaponry by state actors and the greater opportunities these growing bio-arsenals give to the increasingly scientific-minded and determined terrorist to manufacture his or her weapon of choice, taking advantage also of the state of the art sophisticated delivery systems. The epilogue analyses the concerted but groundless 2022-2023 disinformation campaign conducted by Russia, with support from China, relating to the claim that public health facilities in Ukraine are secret U.S.-funded biolabs, purportedly developing biological weapons.

Weight: 584g
Dimension: 163 x 241 x 33 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781399090803