Chemical and Biological Warfare

Book excerpt: The armaments of chemical and biological warfare (CBW) are now widely held not just by nation-states, but by terrorist and criminal enterprises. The weapons themselves are relatively inexpensive and very easy to hide, allowing organizations of just a few dozen people to deploy potentially devastating attacks. While in the twentieth century most arms-control efforts focused, rightly, on nuclear arsenals, in the twenty-first century CBW will almost certainly require just as much attention. This book defines the basics of CBW for the concerned citizen, including non-alarmist scientific descriptions of the weapons and their antidotes, methods of deployment and defensive response, and the likelihood in the current global political climate of additional proliferation.