What do you understand by bio weapon?

The history of biological weapon can be traced to medieval times when besieging armies tossed plague-infected corpses over city walls in an effort to spread disease. Modern biological agents are far more lethal than even the most toxic chemical weapons, though their effects take days to appear.

This makes them ideal terror weapons against civilians. A terrorist would need to find the right lethal strain of a bacterium such as, anthrax or plague and maintain its purity and virulence through processing, loading into weapons and dispersal.

Since organisms need to penetrate deep into the lungs, so they must be dispersed in a fine spray. An exploding warhead can be used for this purpose but this would also destroy much of the agent. The most deadly biological agent is small pox. This is virus rather than bacteria, these are only two official repositories of it located in America and Russia. But even others can hold as illicit or secret stocks.

The terrorists also afraid of using it because it honors’ no territorial limits that spreads freely in the air and in all direction. However, poisons manufactured by bacteria such as botulinum toxin may be more suitable to terrorism.

The Biological weapons convention was signed in April 1972 at London, Moscow and Washington but it came into force on 26 March 1975. This convention aims at prohibiting the development, production and stockpiling of biological weapons. It also seeks to eliminate them completely.

The signatory states are bound for not to produce, acquire or retain biological agents or toxins for use in an armed conflict. The states were also said to destroy or divert for peaceful purposes, all agents, toxins, weapons, equipments and means of delivery within nine months of the enforcement of the convention.