The Threat by the Use of Biological Weapons by Terrorist - Coursework Example

President Bush deplored the terrorist attack by saying that men who would dare such an act are not above using biological or chemical weapons, the threat posed by bio-weapons as an instrument of terrorism became an ugly reality. This paper weighs the pros and cons of whether al Qaeda or any other international terrorist group indeed has the motivation and capability to develop and use bio-weapons to carry out their missions of terror against the civilized world. If biological weapons represent the new threat to world peace and security that it is feared to be, we need to examine the desire and capability of authorities to deal with this yet to be experienced a challenge to existing health and defense systems.

Together with chemical and nuclear weapons, modern biological weapons are commonly classified as weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and have been used as such on many occasions in the past. Biochemical weapons may appeal to terrorists for three major reasons: 1) they are easier and cheaper to acquire than nuclear devices and cause more casualties; 2) their effects on target population are hard to detect and counter; and 3) the threat of their use causes fear, which element the terrorists love most (Danitz, 1998, p. 3). The use of bio-weapons actually goes back to the siege warfare in the Medieval Ages, among which was the recorded attempt to spread disease through dead horses at northern France in 1340.

In 1346, cadavers of plague victims were dumped on the defenders at Caffa in Crimea, while human and animal manure was used at Karlstein in Bohemia in 1422. The most successful was said to be the bio-attack at Caffa, where a large number of the defenders came down with the Bubonic plague (Wheelis, 2002, p. 12). On the American frontier, some of the disease outbreaks between the 18th and early 20th centuries might have been deliberately instigated (Fenn, 2000).