An arrow covered with bacteria that flies through air and pierces the body of the enemy….
An arrow covered with bacteria that flies through air and pierces the body of the enemy….Doesn’t it send a chill up your spine?It surely will when I tell you that this is how some wars in our history were fought.From bacteria to viruses, all pathogenic organisms have been tried and tested during different periods by our ancestors. The fear of a massive bioweapon capable enough to wipe out the human population has been looming around since the World War 1, but this fear has just come to the forefront again; making headlines after the Russia- Ukraine standoff broke out in February 2022. What are biological weapons or bioweapons and how deadly can they be?
The United Nations defines bioweapons as “devices or methods that disseminate disease-causing organisms or toxins to harm or kill humans, animals or plants”.Well, that definition is enough to make your arrector pili muscles go functional!The strange fact is that some of these warmongers had no idea as to how these weapons work, they just knew that they worked!
According to historians, the Hittite empire that ruled over modern-day Turkey was the first to use biowarfare against their enemies. “Some researchers allege that around 1320 B.C. the Hittites released infected rams and donkeys along a trade route used by their enemies, who brought the strays back to their villages. Along with the animals came tularemia, a bacterial disease that, though treatable now, caused significant disability and death in ancient times”, says a newsletter published in The Sciences. The so –called ‘Hittite plague’ ravaged through half of Europe taking hundreds of lives.
Another story comes from The Roman empire which was always famous for its marshes.But what their enemies didn’t know is that these marshes were home to Rome’s secret army- Malaria-inducing mosquitoes; their body equipped with the life-threatening Plasmodium parasite.During the Second World War, Germany made use of this bioweapon as it flooded these marshlands, thus providing an appropriate environment for its mosquito army to breed. The Mongols, however, employed some extreme tactics which ultimately backfired.They used to throw corpses infected with Black Death or the bulbonic plague into enemy territory.It caused swelling of lymph nodes, causing ectreme pain, dizziness, chills etc. in those affected.But unfortunately for the Mongols, this weapon is believed to have backfired as it soon wiped out about 70% of their population.
When Covid- SARS-2 struck humankind with full force on a cold December night in 2019, many nations and their thinktanks stressed on the possibility of it being a bioweapon that might have accidently leaked from a Chinese secret laboratory. The allegations still continue on this plot, but history proves that this possibility too cannot be fully disregarded.Using ‘life to kill life’ is indeed a very scary scenario and is something that must be prevented at any cost in the future. The most notorius fact about bioweapons is that they are ‘silent killers’.Nobody will know until they strike, and a disaster of that magnitude is sufficient to make us question humanity in its entirety. Like Martin Luther King Jr. rightly said,”we have before us the glorius opportunity to inject a new dimension of love into the veins of civilisation”,let us just hope that that love triumph,let love never be compromised….
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