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ADVANTAGES OF
USING BIOLOGICAL WEAPONSIt is a known fact that any crackpot government can easily start it’s own CBW program. Any nation with a reasonably advanced pharmaceutical and medical industry can do so since all you need is a team of scientists reasonably well versed in bacteria production and some rudimentary lab equipment.
There are four main advantages and three huge disadvantages to using biological weapons.
Probably the biggest advantage is the fact that biological weapons are extremely efficient. It is hypothesized that one gram of purified botulinum toxin could kill 10 million people. This is approximately 3 million times more deadly than Sarin, a popular nerve agent. Yet another advantage is that gram for deadly gram, biological weapons are the cheapest of the lot. To "affect 1 square kilometer, it would cost about $2000 using conventional weapons, $800 using nuclear weapons, $600 using chemical weapons and a grand sum of $1 using biological weapons. Do the math.
This disturbing fact has caused biological weapons to be considered the "Poor man’s atomic bomb". Perhaps you could more accurately describe it as the "Poor and extremely lazy man’s atomic bomb" since not only are biological weapons easy to produce, quantify and weaponize, they are also alarmingly easy to conceal. This is because a lot of the equipment used to produce viruses and other such pathogens are "dual-use", meaning that they can be both used for illegal or legitimate purposes. For example, centrifuges, culture flasks, petri dishes. Even the science laboratories of most schools have these items. In fact, to "grow" and "harvest" biological agents, all one needs is a standard lab, albeit with ultrasafe working conditions.
The last advantage concerns the "live" nature of these biological agents. Conventional weapons explode once, kill a few hundred people, maim thousands of others, disrupt traffic and stop. Biological agents, on the other hand, can spread from person to person. (Think of AIDS). With a few carriers of an airborne strain of the Ebola virus, hundreds, nay, thousands more can get infected. These thousands will infect hundred of thousands more and pretty soon, you have one heck of an epidemic on your hands. Not very good for tourism, epidemics.