Prepare for terrorism
The Soviets apparently did not mass produce or stockpile anti-agriculture agents; instead, they maintained the ability to expand production rapidly if desired. prepare for terrorism Prepare for terrorism. Other states may have considered biological agents as weapons against agriculture. South Africa has been accused of using anthrax bacteria as an anti-animal agent in Zimbabwe in the mid- to late 1970s during the Rhodesian civil war, but the outbreak could also have been a natural occurrence. The Iraqi bioweapons program of the early 1990s included agents like cover smut (an anti-wheat fungal agent) and camel pox. prepare for terrorism American war on terrorism. Neither appears to have been mass produced or weaponized. Iraq, however, did weaponize anthrax bacteria, botulinum toxin, and aflatoxins, although details remain sketchy. Most national efforts outside the United States and the Soviet Union were not technically sophisticated. prepare for terrorism Water terrorism. The German sabotage program of World War I relied on infecting individual horses. The Japanese studied climatic and geographical factors that might affect their use of biological pathogens, but they appear to have made minimal efforts to find effective dissemination techniques. The technical detailsA look at various countries' programs suggests that the development and weaponization of effective anti-agriculture agents is not straightforward-it requires dedicated infrastructure, personnel, and resources. A successful agricultural attack would require: acquiring and propagating the proper pathogen; processing it for delivery; constructing an appropriate delivery device; and developing a range of techniques to deal with varying meteorological conditions. No detailed discussion of these factors has been published in the open-source literature, but a determined terrorist could find a great deal of factual information on animal or plant pathogens. Using it to produce a successful disease outbreak, however, would not be straightforward. It would require some degree of scientific sophistication. Although the United States and other nations place export and/or trade restrictions on dangerous foreign animal and plant pathogens, it is still possible to obtain them from various international laboratories or repositories. 3 Alternatively, pathogens can be isolated from infected animals or diseased crops. Small quantities of pathogens could easily be carried across a customs checkpoint or an unregulated border area, or sent through international mail. Only a few of these pathogens are zoonotic (communicable from animals to humans), so there would be little risk of infection to the carrier. In a globalized society, increased travel by humans and increased transport of agricultural and other goods have already unintentionally spread some pathogens. Obtaining a strain of a virus or a fungus does not necessarily mean, however, that it can be used directly as a biological weapon. For example, different strains of the rinderpest virus are immunologically similar, but they vary widely in pathogenicity, lethality, ease of transmission, and host affinity. 4 Such variations, which occur in all animal and plant pathogens, complicate the selection of a weapons-usable strain. In most cases, a terrorist would need the right strain to cause a significant disease outbreak. Some foreign animal pathogens, like the foot-and-mouth disease virus, are highly infectious and would not need to be cultured-a vial of material might be enough to cause an epidemic. But that is not always the case. Depending on the pathogen, different infective doses would be needed.
Prepare for terrorism
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