International biohazard symbol (public domain). I mean, otherwise it would be an image of a bunch of test tubes or something…

(14) BIOLOGICAL WARFARE

War by disease or pestilence. Germ warfare – using biological toxins or infectious agents such as bacteria, viruses, insects, and fungi.

War is so often accompanied by disease or pestilence in its wake that they join each other along with famine and death as the proverbial Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – proverbial, that is, because the original Biblical Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were conquest, war, famine, and death (but conquest seemed too much like doubling up with war so pestilence was substituted or proposed for the original image).

Biological warfare takes that to the next level – as war waged by pestilence or disease.

Yes, biological warfare is that “offensive use of living organisms” as weapons that I pre-empted in my previous entry for chemical warfare (and distinguishing chemical warfare’s use of the toxic properties of non-living chemical substances, albeit including those produced by living organisms such as botulinum toxin, risin, and saxitoxin).

Or in other words, disease as a weapon – the use of bacteria (sometimes distinguished as bacteriological warfare), viruses, insects (sometimes distinguished as entomological warfare), and fungi (disappointingly not distinguished as mycowarfare) “with the intent to kill, harm, or incapacitate humans, animals, or plants as an act of war”.

And yes, it evokes our visceral horror in reaction to it arguably exceeding that to chemical warfare – and depending just how pandemic it is, arguably rivalling the existential horror of nuclear war. Hence the taboo against it helping to uphold the prohibition of it by international law – that has seen the modern use of biological warfare to be more hypothetical or rarer than chemical warfare, and even nuclear warfare for deployment and testing.

Of course, it helps for the taboo against and prohibition of it that biological warfare has a similar logic of mutually assured destruction as nuclear war, hence the similar existential horror (and visceral horror more than chemical warfare). However, that might change with genetic engineering, which potentially might allow for more targeted biological warfare.

There is some rudimentary use of biological warfare in history, going all the way back to the Bronze Age – the Hittites driving plague victims into enemy territory, the Assyrians poisoning wells with ergot, the use of excrement or cadavers to cause or spread infection.

Perhaps the most famous historical examples are the Mongols catapulting the bodies of those who died from Black Plague into the Crimean city of Kaffa they were besieging, or the use of blankets to spread smallpox to native Americans – although in both cases, it is debated the extent to which this actually spread the disease as opposed to other vectors.

However, it was only with modern science, not least germ theory, that biological warfare became a matter more of design than chance – while at the same time, our greater visceral and existential horror in reaction to it.

RATING: A-TIER (TOP TIER)