They all seem to use bombs.
I know it happened once in Japan but Someone told me that biological weapons wouldnt really work on the subway/underground because the initial explosion would destroy all the bacteria as well as the humans. But if I lead a terrorist group Id consider it worth a go. So why dont they do it more often?
Whats the deal here?
Ease of procurement.
Explosives are used everywhere in modern times. (Hypothetically) you just break into an explosives trailer at a construction site and you’ve got all you need. Timing device is a bit tricky, but that’s where the suicide bombers come in. OTOH, there just aren’t that many biological weapons out there. Sure the militaries have them, but they don’t want anyone (like their enemies) to get them, so they’re pretty well protected. Plus, I think you need quite a bit of the actual biological material to have any effect. That requires lab conditions to grow cultures and such, which may be a bit difficult for the average poorly funded and hidden underground terrorist to handle.
Please note that all information in this post was obtained from Tom Clancy books.
Who needs an explosive device? What if they just throw a glass container w/ the virus/bacteria/whatever in it against a wall and run?
If I might say a few words…
I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and as it happens I had a nice conversation with my Dad about it last weekend. One big problem with keeping biological weapons out of the hands of terrorists is that it’s too easy to obtain and use the equipment (apparently beer suppliers sell appropriate fermenters. Nuclear weapons, OTOH, require lots of big, specialized equipment.) The only problem is getting your hands on the anthrax or what-have-you.
OTOH, if a disgruntled grad student (or for that matter, any sufficiently determined lunatic) wanted to take potshots at the human race, he could churn out potentially horrific viruses quite easily. One potential scenario is that someone could use a DNA synthesiser to create a batch of poliovirus from scratch; since most Americans have never been exposed to polio at all, the results could be much, much worse than the polio epidemics of the first half of the 20th century.
Also, there are any number of ways a virus could be enhanced with very simple gene splicing. For example, one could take a protein toxin (diptheria toxin, cholera toxin, botulism toxin, etc.) and splice the gene into a cold virus. If it turned out not to be sufficiently deadly, one could always try another combination until one ended up with a plague that would cut a bloody swath through America or through the world. The techniques aren’t hard at all- like I said, I suspect that a sufficiently determined layman could practice with the genetic engineering cookbooks until he got it right. It might take a couple of years of practice, but he could probably succeed. And like I said, there’s always a good supply of disgruntled grad students.
-Ben
also if one wanted bubonic plague.
plague is endemic to rats above a certain height so all you need to do is go to the sierra nevada, catch yourself a rat, synthesize the blood and youve got yourself plague in a test tube.
That’s right, let’s give the weirdos all the information and ideas that we can come up with to get them started. Or is this the real thing?
First you catch a really BIG rat.
Make sure it’s 48” or more at the shoulder, or it won’t contain plague spores…
There’s not much here that undergrads didn’t talk about back in the 70’s. No one ever did clone that fungal Tryptophan monooxygenase into a wild type coli.
Trust me, the weirdos have already thought of it, and ignoring the problem won’t make it go away.
Of course, before any terrorist creates a plague, we’ll probably have a repeat of the great Influenza Epidemic anyway…
-Ben
another possible reason why…
Terrorists are trying to make a political/religious/whatever statement. A bomb is instant gratification for chaos & damage and will certainly make the news headlines.
A bio weapon can do this do, but I’m not sure if the immediate impact would be as clear of a message.
A few things…
As some have pointed out bio weapons are relatively easy. It doesn’t take a lot of funding and not a whole lot of technical knowhow (unless you get into gene splicing).
There are a couple of things that keep bio weapons from being used by terrorist organizations:
Whatever you may think of a particular organization and their cause they usually believe they are fighting for a just cause. As a result they desire international attention and (hopefully) support. Anyone who unleashes a bio weapon is NOT going to get any support from anyone. Indeed, such a thing would be treated on a par with detonating a nuke and the organization responsible would be hunted down and squished ASAP. There wouldn’t be a government anywhere that would be able to shield them (since the US and its allies, if no one else, would walk through anyone standing in the way of getting the bad guys).
Bio weapons can have a nasty way of getting out of control and turning on you. Growing the nastiness may be easy but handling it can be hard. It is quite possible that the people growing the stuff end up infecting their own population first. Even if they did manage to keep themselves safe you have to remember we live in a global economy now. The terrorist may infect New York but before anyone knows what has happened the infected people get on planes and travel thus infecting others, etc., etc., till its back on your doorstep. This also means you have a good chance of infecting your ‘friends’ as well as your enemies which means it is doubtful that they would remain your friends much longer.
Nope…bio weapons are really the province of the psycho. They have little to know military value and really are only likely to be used by wack-jobs like some cultists who want to bring about the end of the world.
At least two suicide bombers in Israel had hepatitis. There are those that think that they were sent to spread their disease as well.
It’s been surmised this has already happened in this country.
No, bio weapons can be very hard. Living agents are usually quite picky about the conditions they grow under. For instance you could spray every potato field in Eireland with late blight fungus and if the humidity and temperature weren’t perfect, you still wouldn’t cause another great potato famine. The whole “Lets slip bot toxin into a rhino virus” scheme ignores the very real size limits on what can be introduced into a virus while maintaining infectivity. The list goes on. Sure you can dump dead cows in wells and catapult plague victims over the city walls, but it takes considerable effort to do an effective job with bioweapons. That does not mean that their use is limited to, as you say, “wack jobs”. It just means that whatever organization decides to use them will have to invest some effort in making them do what they want them to do.
Actually, when I went oversees with the US Army, I was vaccinated for the plague, so some of us will be safe from that one.
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And yet, diseases do indeed spread. Could you fill us in with more details? When smallpox was so prevalent in the US, did it only come out at times when the weather was right?
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Hmmmm… a very good point, which I should have thought of. (FWIW, the scenario I used was, SFAIK, one of the ones raised at the Asilomar conference when they decided whether genetic engineering was too dangerous to be permitted.) I’ll have to think about that one a bit.
There is, however, the possibility of creating antibiotic resistant bacteria, which should be quite easy. I could imagine an anti-sex religious zealot reintroducing syphilis as an incurable disease.
-Ben
Boy howdy! If the FBI’s not tracking down every poster’s net address in this thread by now carnivore’s asleep at the switch.
Actually Squink got it right.
The Japanese were the first to try this in WW2, sending balloons filled with all sorts of nastiness out to California, and they found that it just does not work that well.
It has turned out that (luckily) bio-weapons have an increadibly difficult time just “getting their foot in the door”, however, if the conditions were right, and a weapon did get a foot hold, look out.
If you want to know more about how various diseases spread get yourself a copy of Rats Lice and History Since it dates from 1934, the book is VERY thin on molecular biology, but gives a great overview of historical epidemics and epidemiology. It’s also a fascinating read.
I’ve never seen a good review on the molecular biology aspects of designing pathogens, but there is a lot of relevant stuff scattered through the primary literature e.g. Science, Nature, Gene etc.
Here’s a nice story on creating a more lethal version of the mouse pox virus by inserting a gene for interleukin-4.
Another reason might be that, in one of the treaties between the US and the old Soviet Union, biological weapons were classifed as “weapons of mass destruction” - as mentioned above, the same as nukes. So, these guys are on warning. Forget about going in to get them - we could simply H-bomb the bastards - and justifiably so. I doubt if even someone as nuts as Khaddafy or your pal Sadam would want to take that chance.
FWIW, bubonic plague would make a very poor biological weapon in modern idustrialized countries. For it to spread amongst humans, you need rats, fleas, and humans all living in close proximity. Remove one of the links, and the disease no longer spreads. (Putting pneumonic plague to the side for the moment.)
For example: New York City has plenty of people. It also has plenty of rats, and presumably plenty of fleas living on those rats. However, in most of the city the rats and humans aren’t in close proximity, and most of the humans don’t have fleas. Hence if plague broke out in NYC, it probably wouldn’t spread far.
Squink mentioned Rats, Lice and History, which gives you the full rundown.