How hard is it to create a biological weapon?

There is all kind of persecution for countries like Iran and North Korea that try to develop nuclear weapons… you know what I mean. But how hard would it be for these countries to develop an effective biological weapon? I mean all you would need would be an inconspicuous laboratory, bunch of scientists and some chemicals or biological specimens. Then play with them a little bit, induce correct mutations, and then send some inconspicuous package to some friendly-minded individual in say the USA, where it will be released inconspicuously on a major airport. Spread by air, long incubation period to have time to spread without alarming authorities, quick to kill after first appearance of symptoms, rapidly mutating without lowering effectiveness to make production and distribution of possible antidote harder. On top of that, authorities would not know who the attacker is, and even whether it is an attack in the first place. Place of release may differ from airport if international spread is not desired. Say a football stadium.

How hard is it to create and use such a weapon?

Growing the contagion is the relatively easy part. For example, a teenager with a decent understanding of high school biology could grown anthrax and force it into a spore state with basic equipment.

The delivery mechanism of a hypothetical biological weapon will determine some of the details of processing and packaging. That same teen would need some serious equipment and expertise to dry and mill anthrax into a powder that could be dispersed easily and be of the optimal particle size to maximize infections.

During WWII the Japanese’s notorious** Unit 731** was a major military program to create such weapons. Although they experimented on & killed hundreds of thousands of people (in some of the most horrific ways imaginable, so much so that the Nazis were shocked!) they never even came close to developing any practical delivery system. Their only success was the olde timey method of dropping plague infected fleas from aircraft. Point being that successfully dispersing biological agents isn’t an easy thing to do (thank god…)

There’s also the problem that an effective weapon must be controllable. It’s not enough just to kill the other guys; you also want to not kill your own guys. That’s tough to do with biological weapons.

There’ also the problem that even an effective biological weapon is going to be slow. Plenty of time for the enemy to throw everything they have at you if they have a faster form of WMD, like nukes.

Something similar turned out to be a major problem with the idea of a neutron bomb; the original idea was to use it against tank formations, but it turned out the result would have been large numbers of soldiers who are already as good as dead, know it, but can still fight for some time.

Creating the nasty in the lab is easy. I easily posess the knowledge, technical ability and equipment to do it; either to isolate something existing or to engineer something new (as would any halfway decent molecular biologist/microbiologist/virologist).

Mass production and a good reliable delivery system are much harder. Anything that harms the enemy will harm your side just as easily if the wind changes.

Are you seriously going to ask that question in this day and age in America? Seems you have just voluteered yourself to be put on the terrorist watch list.

Too bad I am not from America. And even if I were, what’s wrong about being vigilant and informed about potential threats from teh “Axis of evil”? That’s patriotism, not terrorism.

As was mentioned, developing disease germs is the easy part-dispersing them is the problem. The fact is, it is not easy to deliver germs-they tend to get blown away, or destroyed by other bacteria. The anthrax spores are a case in point- you need to prepare tremendous quantities to be sure of causing an epidemic.
It would make more sense to launch cyber attacks against the banking system.

Seems like this thread is mostly talking about airborne contagions. Perhaps a waterborne or foodborne one would be simpler to distribute? Sneak some into a major reservoir, or a major meat processing plant, and you could infect civilian populations pretty easily. We already see it happen from time to time by accident.

As for targeting enemy soldiers and not your own… if the warring factions are different ethnicities, I wonder if genetically engineered viruses that target one race instead of the other would work?

I remember seeing a PBS documentary about this when we were experimenting back in the 60s. One method the Us government invested in was creating a car that gave off spores and pathogenic microbes in the exhaust of the car. It was low key and you could drive all around densely populated areas that were also travel hubs w/o anyone knowing it was you, spraying deadly bacteria/viruses/whatever where you went on all the people walking on the sidewalk. If the US gov wants to put me on the terrorist watch list for reporting their own tactics so be it. But there you go.

I remember another story about the soviet program, one guy was working with a very bad pathogen and broke the vial. He had to go into quarantine and his friend watched him slowly die of an incurable infectious disease. They designed it to not be treatable with any drugs, and it wasn’t.

Couldn’t spare the ammo, huh?

It was all for science.

I don’t think that is possible. Different races don’t differ all that much DNA-wise, so you wouldn’t have anything to make the virus know who is who. On the other hand, distributing a vaccine to your own people that would prevent them from getting infected is a different thing.

As for the delivery system, one has to wonder why is it difficult to come up with something, when things like black death or even ordinary flu are so notoriously contagious.

Different “races” do tend do have greater or lesser prevalence of various genes though (a classic example being blacks and recessives for sickle cell) So if you were sufficiently ruthless you might be able to create a disease that, say, killed the target race 80% of the time and the favored race only 20%. For some Hitlerian type that might be good enough.

Of course even then the thing is likely to just mutate in some unforeseeable fashion anyway.

No one has pointed out it’s not in a species’ interest to kill its host. If it killed people quickly, it wouldn’t spread.

But hey, how about this idea: I keep myself on a low dose of all the common antibiotics, breeding antibiotic resistant bacteria in me. Then one day, BAM! I run amok in a hospital. Would that work? Or is that already what we’re doing with our livestock?

But sickle-cell disease is congenital, right? Biological agent would have to specifically work with certain gene that is prevalent in target race and not work with some different gene (or allele) that is prevalent in friendly race. I am not sure current technology is capable of creating such a sophisticated virus/bacteria, that could distinguish between subtle genetic difference.

It would have long incubation period, so a lot of people can get infected in that time, but then when the symptoms occur, it will kill quickly.