BIOLOGICAL WARFARE

also called Germ Warfare, the military use of disease-producing agents, such as bacteria and viruses, on humans, animals, or plants and the means for combating such agents. Though direct use of biological warfare against enemy personnel is very old, it has acquired a stigma in modern times, and no country has admitted employing it. In 1972 a treaty was signed by more than 70 countries prohibiting the production, stockpiling, or development of biological weapons and requiring destruction of existing stockpiles. Nevertheless, reports, rarely substantiated, persist, alleging such development or, occasionally, disastrous accidents growing out of such experimentation. One of the grounds for opposition is the possibility of an agent getting out of control, as is said to have happened in the most celebrated recorded case of biological warfare. In the siege of Caffa (now Feodosiya, Ukraine) in the Crimea in 1347, the Mongols hurled bodies of plague victims over the walls of the Genoese defenders. Genoese ships carried the bacillus to Europe, loosing the massive epidemic known as the Black Death. Many later attempts were made to spread infection among enemy armies or populations, but rarely with much success. In World War I the Germans infected Romanian cavalry horses, as well as livestock in the United States destined for shipment to the Allies, with glanders, a lesion-producing bacterial disease. Charges of germ warfare were made by the Chinese against United Nations forces in the Korean War of 195053, but no substantiation was offered. So far as is known, no nation has used germs successfully against the personnel of another in the 20th century.