It was March 20th 2003, the whole world was glued on their television sets, and the world was witnessing what many hailed as WORLD WAR 3. Which was the was on Iraq or Operation Iraqi Freedom in which all the big allied forces of United states along with UK , with smaller contingents from Australia and Poland were invading Iraq and to over throw Saddam Hussein.

It was March 20th 2003, the whole world was glued on their television sets, and the world was witnessing what many hailed as WORLD WAR 3. Which was the was on Iraq or Operation Iraqi Freedom in which all the big allied forces of United states along with UK , with smaller contingents from Australia and Poland were invading Iraq and to over throw Saddam Hussein.

The First World War got the attention for some of the most innovative inventions in military armed developments like the grenades and tanks, and machine guns

The Second World War was famous for Japan’s kamikaze suicide bombers and of course the atomic bomb, which cause wide spread devastation.

Then came the gulf war and all of a sudden every one was talking about SCUD and cruise missiles.

Going back to the war on Iraq. What the then president George w bush said on national television the most eminent threat the world faces from Iraq were the weapons of mass destruction. And besides the nuclear weapons the most dangerous was BIOTERRORISM...

Everyone wanted to know what was bioterrorism? All the wars have long being ended now and what the world faces is the terror attracts from the terrorist groups who are from every corner of the world. Whether it was 9/11 attracts on US or 26/11 attracts on India. The world now has woken up to a new way of destruction which this terrorist group can use and it’s called

BIOTERRORISM.

So what exactly is it?? Should we be really scared? Is it even worse than the nuclear bomb? Well let’s find out.

What is bioterrorism?

When agents such as viruses bacteria or other germs are released with the sole intention to cause illness and even death in people and other living organisms like animals and plants

Should we be scared?

Now this answer can be a little towards on both sides, as yes it’s true that there are military experts who believe that bioterrorism is an efficient and deadly weapon and is it get in the hands of terrorists, they can use small amounts of viruses or bacteria and kill many people, but then according to the medical field of microbiologist don’t share the same views as they argue that for a bioweapon to be able to cause true devastation it should have lots of penetrating power,economically, militarily and most important psychologically, and a bioweapon does not have all these .sometimes these bioweapons are just hyped up by our sensation hungry media and they always refer to them as a POTENTIAL threat !!!

So should we not worry about it? Not quite so as Biological weapons are much deadlier than regular weapons. For example one of the most virulent, botulin – the toxin produced by the bacterium clostridium botulinum which causes botulism. The lethal dose of this toxin is tiny.Biological weapons also have an advantage of being living micro-organisms and thus making them the only weapons that can proliferate without further assistance once released in a suitable
enjoinment, and to top it we can accelerate its proliferation by genetic manipulation. These weapons are easy to produce; all that is needed in many cases is a small laboratory.

And one does not need sophisticated devices to to launch a bio terror attack, they work through inhalation or ingestion and can easily be spread by crop-spraying equipment in the open or by aerosol in a confined space. Also, depending on their nature, they can be introduced into the drinking water supply or the food chain. Biological weapons are invisible; they are the ultimate weapons of stealth. They can be carried undetected across frontiers if need be, either in small initial cultures from which the huge quantity could be grown to cause devastating effects .To put things in perspective . If 100 kg of anthrax bacillus dropped on a city the size of New Delhi it would cover an area of 300square kilometers and could kill between 1 to 3 million people

But as with nuclear weapons, the danger of accident is still greater than the danger of deliberate military use. The countries know that if they were to use biological weapons, they would expose themselves to retaliation of the same kind, if not worse. On the other hand, the threat of biological weapons for terrorist purposes in an urban environment is much more frightening. Alongside this highly alarming tendency among religious sects and extremist ethnic groups,there is a recrudescence of terrorism by states or armed groups as an act of retaliation. But the most frightening threat comes from a combination of these two factors,

So what do we do now?

Well, Rather than advocating how to prevent these strikes it would be better to look into ways and means of preventing such atrocities? So who really are the potential users of these weapons? They come in 2 categories one are the desperados nurtured in the very heart of industrialized societies, children of the social crisis forced into religious, political fanaticism, on the other are the third-world states opposing the West So do we have a solution? Yes w do and it is to restore genuine social security instead of spending more and more on weapons – we have to concentrate on welfare not warfare! And,second, we have to conduct international relations on a democratic basis and not on this present unipolar arrogance.