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Ebola As Biological Weapon?
Doomandbloom
With Ebola in the news, there are some that have pointed out the possibility that some nations may attempt to weaponize the virus. This is a concern that deserves discussion, so let’s talk about something that few consider a likely cause of a collapse scenario: biological warfare.
Biological warfare is the use of infectious agents such as bacteria, viruses, fungi or their by-products to wreak death and havoc among a specific population. The user’s goal is to achieve control over an area or a segment of the population by weakening the ability to resist. Biological weapons don’t necessarily have to directly kill: unleashing a horde of locusts to destroy crops or agents that kill an area’s livestock can be just as effective.
HISTORY OF BIOLOGICAL WARFARE
This type of weapon has been used since ancient times, and even appears in the bible as some of the plagues visited upon Pharaoh by a wrathful God. Medieval accounts of diseased corpses catapulted into besieged cities abound; this method was used as late at 1710, when the Russians attacked the Swedish city of Reval (present day Tallinn) in this manner.
The Western hemisphere was changed forever by the inadvertent introduction of smallpox into the Native American population, killing 90% in some areas and opening vast swaths of land for European colonization. In addition, purposeful biological warfare occurred against Native Americans when the British presented a large “gift” of infected blankets as a “peace” offering during Pontiac’s War in the mid-1700s.
As time progressed, new methods and infectious agents such as Anthrax were used in certain situations during World War I. As a result, use of biological weapons was banned by the Geneva Protocol in 1925, but research and production was still carried out by both sides during World War II. Research into the use of Anthrax by the United Kingdom left their laboratory area in Scotland contaminated for the next five decades. Eventually, the storage, production, and transport of such agents was banned in 1972 by the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC). Despite this, there are a number of violations that have been documented in the former Soviet Union and Iraq, and various others suspected. Presently, 170 countries have signed the BWC pact.
