Biological Terrorism: Our City Streets as the New Battlefield Essay

Biological Terrorism Our City Streets as the New landing fieldThe polish 60-70 divisions of the twentieth century might be called the raw era of biological warfare. During this period, nation states substantial biological weapons to be apply on a far-away European battlefield. Even after substantiation of the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972, the closely impressive BW program in the history of mankind continued for 20 years, effectively cloaked in secrecy. Yet between 1970 and 1990, little thought was given to the possibility of a biological warfare or biological terrorist attack on US cities. Funding for biological defense mechanism in the US was minimal and most of the federal government was oblivious about the threat. In fiscal year 2000, the US government has committed to a greater extent than $1.5 billion to military biodefence and another $1 billion to domestic preparedness for biological attack. What happened? In 1991, the US decisively engaged the Iraqi force, demonstrating vast conventional adept superiority while the world watched on CNN. Shortly thereafter, with economic implosion in the Former Soviet Union, our concern turned to the fate of tens of thousands of Russian scientists and engineers who had developed an impressive programwhich may never be surpassed in exceed or offensive capability. We feared that lesser nations might turn to now baseless Russian bioweaponeers for help in building their great equalizer. All this occurred with a backdrop of increasing evidence that the dual-use nature of bioweapons programs might desex treaties unverifiable. present at home, the equally dual-use biotechnological revolution screamed forward while novels imprinted the horror of biological terrorism on our minds and experts proclaimed that there are no... ...se who would use these breakthroughs for evil---taking away their emancipation through effective intelligence programs and law enforcement---we will be more likely to stay steps ah ead as we use the technologies for good, and support an additional deterrent to the threat. Bioterrorism presents a daunting problem to our bare(a) society, especially at the unique intersection of politics and biotechnology that occurred during the last decade of the 20th century. We may have been lulled by our prosperity and strategic isolation from major conflict into a sense of invulnerability. However, we are defenseless todayand there is no reason to believe that will transpose in the near future. We must carefully evaluate the real threat, make the hard cost-benefit decisions and continue to build a fully integrated defense against the distortion of biology by those who would do us harm.