There are four basic types of military agents that can be used for chemical terrorism: choking agents (chlorine, phosgene), blister agents (mustard, Lewisite, phosgene oxime), blood agents (cyanide, hydrogen cyanide), and nerve agents (tabun, sarin, soman, VX).

Chemical warfare agents (CWAs) are defined as “any toxic chemical or its precursor that can cause death, injury, temporary incapacitation or sensory irritation through its chemical action.”

Nerve gas, tear gas and pepper spray are three modern examples of chemical weapons. Lethal unitary chemical agents and munitions are extremely volatile and they constitute a class of hazardous chemical weapons that have been stockpiled by many nations.

Types of Chemical Weapons

Urticants

Biological agents include bacteria, viruses, fungi, other microorganisms and their associated toxins. They have the ability to adversely affect human health in a variety of ways, ranging from relatively mild, allergic reactions to serious medical conditions—even death.

What Countries Have Them? Only 16 countries plus Taiwan have had or are currently suspected of having biological weapons programs: Canada, China, Cuba, France, Germany, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Japan, Libya, North Korea, Russia, South Africa, Syria, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Making biological weapons requires either fermentation technology (similar to what’s used to make beer) or production in cell culture. Viruses like SARS-CoV-2 are harder to grow than bacteria (like anthrax spores), but it can be done.

The United States had an offensive biological weapons program from 1943 until 1969. Today, the nation is a member of the Biological Weapons Convention and has renounced biological warfare.

One of the first recorded uses of biological warfare occurred in 1347, when Mongol forces are reported to have catapulted plague-infested bodies over the walls into the Black Sea port of Caffa (now Feodosiya, Ukraine), at that time a Genoese trade centre in the Crimean Peninsula.

It is believed that at least six countries could have an ongoing bioweapons program. These include: Iraq, Iran, Libya, China, Russia and North Korea. Although the world knows little about these programs, an American assessment says China has an advanced bioweapons program.

Offensive biological warfare is prohibited under customary international humanitarian law and several international treaties. In particular, the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) bans the development, production, acquisition, transfer, stockpiling and use of biological weapons.

More than 180 pathogens have been researched or employed as biological weapons, including anthrax, tularemia, brucellosis, plague, Legionnaire’s disease, Q fever, glanders, melioidosis, smallpox, viral hemorrhagic fevers, influenza, ricin, botulinum toxin, staphylococcal enterotoxin B, coccidiosis, rice blast, and …

Characteristics. Intrinsic features of biological agents which influence their potential for use as weapons include: infectivity; virulence; toxicity; pathogenicity; incubation period; transmissibility; lethality; and stability.

Russia

Anthrax is a serious infectious disease caused by gram-positive, rod-shaped bacteria known as Bacillus anthracis. Anthrax can be found naturally in soil and commonly affects domestic and wild animals around the world.

Anthrax is NOT contagious. You cannot catch anthrax from another person the way you might catch a cold or the flu. In rare cases, person-to-person transmission has been reported with cutaneous anthrax, where discharges from skin lesions might be infectious.

If your skin comes into contact with anthrax, you may get a small, raised sore that’s itchy. It usually looks like an insect bite. The sore quickly develops into a blister. It then becomes a skin ulcer with a black center.

It can also occur in humans when they are exposed to the bacterium, usually through handling animals or animal hides. There are three forms of anthrax infection: cutaneous (skin), inhalation (lungs) and gastrointestinal (stomach and intestine).

Anthrax causes skin, lung, and bowel disease and can be deadly. Anthrax is diagnosed using bacterial cultures from infected tissues. There are four types of anthrax: cutaneous, inhalation, gastrointestinal, and injection. Anthrax is treated by antibiotics.

Anthrax is a potential biological terrorism threat because the spores are resistant to destruction and can be easily spread by release in the air.

If you want some anthrax, you don’t necessarily have to purchase it from a lab. You can just dig it up someplace where anthrax is known to have infected livestock. “Growing this organism is no problem,” Norman Cheville, dean of Iowa State University’s School of Veterinary Medicine, explained on Oct.

Anthrax is one of the most likely agents to be used because: Anthrax spores are easily found in nature, can be produced in a lab, and can last for a long time in the environment. Anthrax makes a good weapon because it can be released quietly and without anyone knowing.

The only licensed anthrax vaccine, Anthrax Vaccine Adsorbed (AVA) or BioThraxTM is indicated for active immunization for the prevention of disease caused by Bacillus anthracis, in persons 18 – 65 years of age at high risk of exposure.