It is a decade since the exposure of Project Coast, apartheid South Africa's covert chemical and biological warfare program. In that time, attention has been focused on several aspects of the program, particularly the production of narcotics and poisons for use against anti-apartheid activists and the proliferation of both chemical and biological weapons. The eugenic dimension of Project Coast ...

There is a spectrum of several threat agents, ranging from nerve agents and mustard agents to natural substances, such as biotoxins and new, synthetic, bioactive molecules produced by the chemical industry, to the classical biological warfare agents. The new, emerging threat agents are biotoxins produced by animals, plants, fungi, and bacteria. Many types of organisms produce substances that ar...

Dr. Mark Wheelis is Senior Lecturer in Microbiology at the University of California (UC), Davis, where he has been teaching in the field since 1970 and is also Director of the Program in Nature and Culture. He has authored numerous pieces on the history of biological warfare and the control of biological weapons, including two chapters on biological warfare in Biological and Toxin Weapons: Rese...

Current trends in American agriculture have changed the vulnerability to use of biological weapons against plant and animal resources. The major effect has been a requirement to look again at the model of the U.S. BW program of widespread dissemination of agent and look to attack models requiring much lower levels of resources. The U.S. biological warfare program models must take the effects of...

TITLE: Information Engineering: The Foundation of Information Warfare. If information is governed by physical laws, information engineering may be possible. If information engineering is possible, it forms the basis for developing information weapons. Thus information engineering is the foundation of information warfare.. This paper establishes the theoretical linkage between the potentially ne...

Chemical warfare agents are the most brutal weapons among the weapons of mass destruction. Sulfur mustard (SM) is a potent toxic alkylating agent known as “the King of the Battle Gases”. SM has been the most widely used chemical weapon during the wars. It was widely used in World War I. Thereafter, it was extensively employed by the Iraqi troops against the Iranian military personnel and even c...

Toxins are hazardous biochemical compounds derived from bacteria, fungi, or plants. Some have mechanisms of action and physical properties that make them amenable for use as potential warfare agents. Currently, some toxins are classified as potential biological weapons, although they have several differences from classic living bio-terror pathogens and some similarities to manmade chemical warf...

©2003 EUROPEAN MOLECULAR BIOLOGY ORGANIZATION EMBO reports VOL 4 | special issue | 2003 S53 The First World War left millions dead on the battlefields of Europe, and the survivors returned home with the experience of the first industrial-style war fresh in their minds. It was particularly because of the horrors created by the use of chemical weapons and the mutilation that these gases caused th...