Biological & Chemical Terrorism – Will They Attack Us With a Nerve Gas That can Kill Thousands of People in Minutes?

> DISASTER > Biological & Chemical Terrorism – Will They Attack Us With a Nerve Gas That can Kill Thousands of People in Minutes?

Chemical terrorism is now a reality and no longer an abstract threat, said Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov speaking at conference on disarmament in Geneva, Tuesday. According to Russia’s top diplomat, terrorist organisations such as the so-called Islamic State (IS; formerly ISIS/ISIL) now possess the capabilities to produce “proper chemical war agents.” He also said that the threat of similar weapons being used by militants is on the rise in countries such as Afganistan.

The fact that terrorist organizations appear so dispersed and disjointed is not a weakness but a strength and makes the counterterrorist’s job that much more difficult. Many terrorism experts have stated on television that biological agents are too difficult for the average terrorist to dispense. University medical specialists in infectious disease who were interviewed on television news had no expertise in weaponized biological agents and merely described naturally occurring disease.

During the Cold War we lived under the specter of sudden nuclear annihilation; now we live under the specter of imagined annihilation by germs we cannot see or smell, and chemicals that our enemy can make in the neighbor’s bathtub.

At least 17 countries, some of whom sponsor terrorists, currently have biological and/or chemical weapons programs. They include Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, Bulgaria, India, North Korea, South Korea, Vietnam, Russia, China, Taiwan, and Israel.

There are hundreds of bacteria, viruses, and toxins that could be used to attack people, but the military has chosen to develop only a handful because of they meet criteria involving ease of production, stability, and ability to infect. They include anthrax, smallpox, plague, cholera, Venezuelan equine encephalitis, Q fever, brucellosis, tularemia, staphylococcal enterotoxins, ricin toxin, and botulinum toxin. There are also many harmful and deadly chemicals being developed.

Some American officials have long realized that the nerve agent attacks in Japan’s subway could just as easily have occurred in any subway system in America, and some analysts have been trying to warn us that a terrorist biological attack on America was just as possible. Few people listened to them until now.

America is in a new type of war with terrorists, with part of the battlefront on our own shore. They can certainly inflict casualties upon us by surreptitiously inserting diseases in American society, and by surreptitiously releasing chemical agents that can harm, even kill us. But they cannot do it with effectiveness, especially in light of a now alert America.

For the initial stages of this new type of warfare, there will be a learning curve. But this is not the Middle Ages when plagues of various sorts visited generation after generation and went unchecked. We now have the science to quickly ascertain any threat and to develop preventive measures.

The learning curve will involve some casualties but mostly anxiety because we won’t know when or where or how the terrorists will strike.

Chemical weapons

Chemical agents, including some nerve agents, are much easier to make than biological weapons, thus earning them the reputation as “the poor man’s atom bomb.” Iraq manufactured several nerve agents, which it used with deadly effect against Iranians in their 1980s war, and again against its own people, the Kurds, in 1988.

Chemical agents are particularly frightening because many of them can be made with chemicals that are readily available to terrorists. They can be made in a home laboratory, and many of them can be disseminated fairly easily.

The agents come in several varieties: choking agents like the chlorine and phosgene used in World

War I; vesicants (blister agents), like mustard and lewisite; nerve agents, which are closely related to the insecticides and pesticides we use around the house and garden; and blood agents like cyanide, which is used in many manufacturing processes and is always being transported on our nation’s highways.

The most deadly chemical agents are the nerve agents, which include VX, GF, soman, sarin, and tabun. They may also be the most likely choices as terrorist weapons. They are chemically similar to pesticides, and like pesticides they can be disseminated through spraying devices such as those on crop dusters.

Many of us are familiar with the Japanese cult, Aum Shinrikyo, which in 1995 released sarin gas, a nerve agent, in the Tokyo subway system, killing 12 people and injuring 5,500. The cult was also implicated in a sarin gas attack that occurred in 1994 in Matsumoto, Japan, killing 7 and injuring 200. The cult had produced an impure form of sarin that was not nearly as lethal as military grade. The same cult was unsuccessful at developing a successful biological agent, even though it had six laboratories and a budget of $300 million.

Some nerve agents, such as VX, are at least 10 times more powerful than sarin, and it is known that some countries that are sympathetic to terrorists possess it. In the case of VX, a single drop on the skin can kill a person.

Nerve agents are acetylcholinesterase inhibitors and interfere with the nervous system’s ability to control muscles, causing muscles to spasm. They are absorbed through the respiratory tract or skin, and symptoms include chest tightness, pinpoint pupils, shortness of breath, drooling, sweating, vomiting, stomach cramps, involuntary defecation and urination, and extreme muscle twitching and seizures. It is very nasty stuff.

In the Persian Gulf War, Hussein’s possession of nerve agent, and his suspected possession of biological weapons, caused the U.S. to arm troops with chemical defense kits and immunize them against anthrax and botulinum toxin. The U.S. said he never used the agent, but some veterans groups claim that Gulf War Illness (GWI) exhibits symptoms that are consistent with nerve agent poisoning.

Possible methods of delivery by terrorists would be to modify aircraft with tanks designed to spray the agent. Iraq was working to develop such a method in 1990, according to CIA reports. An aerosol system mounted on a remotely controlled Unmaned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) is another method.

The Aum Shinrikyo cult that attacked the Tokyo subway possessed a Russian helicopter and two radio-controlled drone aircraft that could have been modified to spray chemical agent over a city. The cult used exploding canisters to distribute their nerve agent in the subway system.

Tanks mounted under a car and crop dusters are obvious ways to deliver nerve agents. A crop dusting manual was found among the belongings of Zacarias Moussaoui, a material witness detained by the FBI as having links with the terrorists who destroyed the World Trade Center towers. Moussaoui had also sought to take flying lessons.

Most nerve agents tend to dissipate fairly quickly, but VX agent was designed to be sticky and so stays on a surface for a long time, making an area unusable. It is mainly absorbed through the skin, while other nerve agents are mainly absorbed through inhalation.

When I was attending CBR Warfare School in the Army 35 years ago, atropine injected into the thigh was the life saving antidote against nerve agent. That is still the antidote today, but rapid decontamination is also critical for survival. In many countries, military personnel carry an auto-injector containing atropine and pralidoxime chloride. Pretreatment to withstand an attack is also available to the military in the form of pills that lessen the effect of the nerve agent.

Recovery from nerve agent takes about two weeks, but long-term effects that include mental disorders are possible. As I said, this is very nasty stuff.

CONCLUSIONS

A gravely written Ministry of Healthcare (MoH) “red alert/warning” bulletin circulating in the Kremlin today states that the mysterious “deadly to human” virus that is now causing the largest pandemic in China in 100 years may shortly be labeled by Federation scientists as a “weaponized threat” due to its appearing to be humanly engineered—and that the world’s richest man, Bill Gates, appeared to announce that 30 million human beings would soon die from an “unspecified/not known” pandemic.

World Health Organization (WHO) had warned about last month by stating: “The global spread of flu and the number of viral strains currently circulating and causing infections have reached unprecedented levels, raising the risk of a potential human outbreak.”

Many models have been developed for emergency response. However, all leave many uncertainties, and no model can be truly predictive in the context of smallpox outbreak planning. But it is clear from reviewing different scenarios that early detection, isolation of infected individuals, surveillance of contacts, and a focused, selective vaccination program are the essential items of an effective control program.

The efficacy of such a program, however, depends on the level of education, both in the public as well as in the medical community. Education of health care professionals should permit early detection of infected individuals and allow for prompt initiation of adequate first steps to contain the approaching epidemic. Advanced planning for isolation of infected individuals, both in their homes as well as in hospitals, will be critical to prevent the outbreak from further expansion. Finally, the success in conquering the threat of a reemerging epidemic will rest on the availability of adequate supplies of vaccine and other medications necessary for treatment. To ensure an effective and relatively inexpensive safeguard for such a tragedy, it is necessary to provide an adequate stockpile of vaccine. However, proper education of the medical community as well as the public remains an essential cornerstone of such preventive efforts.

To how many people in the United States have been killed by these believed to be “weaponized”.
This bulletin says, is impossible to know for two reasons:

1.) The US stopped reporting major causes of death in 2018, and

2.) Those younger than 50 years of age who die of the flu are listed under their Influenza and Pneumonia statistics (55,227 deaths), while those over 50 years of age dying of the flu are put into a bizarre category named Chronic Lower Respiratory Diseases (147,101 deaths)—that is a catch-all term for Emphysema, Bronchitis etc., and whose victims catching the flu receive a virtual death sentence from—and that the rest of world categorizes as “lung death” that kills more people than any other disease worldwide.

An act of biological or chemical terrorism might range from dissemination of aerosolized anthrax spores to food product contamination, and predicting when and how such an attack might occur is not possible. However, the possibility of biological or chemical terrorism should not be ignored, especially in light of events during the past 10 years (e.g., the sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway and the discovery of military bioweapons programs in Iraq and the former Soviet Union ). Preparing the nation to address this threat is a formidable challenge, but the consequences of being unprepared could be devastating.

The public health infrastructure must be prepared to prevent illness and injury that would result from biological and chemical terrorism, especially a covert terrorist attack. As with emerging infectious diseases, early detection and control of biological or chemical attacks depends on a strong and flexible public health system at the local, state, and federal levels. In addition, primary health-care providers throughout the United States must be vigilant because they will probably be the first to observe and report unusual illnesses or injuries.

This report is a summary of the recommendations made by CDC’s Strategic Planning Workgroup in Preparedness and Response to Biological and Chemical Terrorism: A Strategic Plan (CDC, unpublished report, 2000), which outlines steps for strengthening public health and health-care capacity to protect the United States against these dangers. This strategic plan marks the first time that CDC has joined with law enforcement, intelligence, and defense agencies in addition to traditional CDC partners to address a national security threat.

Preparedness and Prevention

Detection, diagnosis, and mitigation of illness and injury caused by biological and chemical terrorism is a complex process that involves numerous partners and activities. Meeting this challenge will require special emergency preparedness in all cities and states. CDC will provide public health guidelines, support, and technical assistance to local and state public health agencies as they develop coordinated preparedness plans and response protocols. CDC also will provide self-assessment tools for terrorism preparedness, including performance standards, attack simulations, and other exercises. In addition, CDC will encourage and support applied research to develop innovative tools and strategies to prevent or mitigate illness and injury caused by biological and chemical terrorism.

Should people stockpile antibiotics?

Maintain a public health preparedness and response cooperative agreement that provides support to state health agencies who are working with local agencies in developing coordinated bioterrorism plans and protocols.
Establish a national public health distance-learning system that provides biological and chemical terrorism preparedness training to health-care workers and to state and local public health workers.
Disseminate public health guidelines and performance standards on biological and chemical terrorism preparedness planning for use by state and local health agencies.

Some people are stockpiling antibiotics — a practice health officials are concerned will lead to dangerous side effects and drug-resistant germs. Still others are toting around gas masks purchased from Army surplus stores.

Recent threats and use of biological and chemical agents against civilians have exposed U.S. vulnerability and highlighted the need to enhance our capacity to detect and control terrorist acts. The U.S. must be protected from an extensive range of critical biological and chemical agents, including some that have been developed and stockpiled for military use.
Even without threat of war, investment in national defense ensures preparedness and acts as a deterrent against hostile acts. Similarly, investment in the public health system provides the best civil defense against bioterrorism. Tools developed in response to terrorist threats serve a dual purpose. They help detect rare or unusual disease outbreaks and respond to health emergencies, including naturally occurring outbreaks or industrial injuries that might resemble terrorist events in their unpredictability and ability to cause mass casualties.

Terrorism-preparedness activities described in CDC’s plan, including the development of a public health communication infrastructure, a multilevel network of diagnostic laboratories, and an integrated disease surveillance system, will improve our ability to investigate rapidly and control public health threats that emerge in the twenty first century.

Take a look at this collection The Lost Book Of Remedies, taken word for word out of a circa 1845 manual.

What is The Lost Book of Remedies? The Lost Book of Remedies PDF contains a series of medicinal and herbal recipes to make home made remedies from medicinal plants and herbs. Chromic diseases and maladies can be overcome by taking the remedies outlined in this book. The writer claims that his grandfather was taught herbalism and healing whilst in active service during world war two and that he has treated many soldiers with his home made cures.

First, understand how a biological or chemical agent could be delivered. By air, by water, by food… even by clothing and other materials in our environment. They can also be spread by animals (fleas, mosquitoes, rodents, livestock).Early detection of and response to biological or chemical terrorism are crucial. Without special preparation at the local and state levels, a large-scale attack with variola virus, aerosolized anthrax spores, a nerve gas, or a foodborne biological or chemical agent could overwhelm the local and perhaps national public health infrastructure. Large numbers of patients, including both infected persons and the “worried well,” would seek medical attention, with a corresponding need for medical supplies, diagnostic tests, and hospital beds. Emergency responders, health-care workers, and public health officials could be at special risk, and everyday life would be disrupted as a result of widespread fear of contagion.

In the event of mysterious deaths suddenly taking place, it would be smart to consider that a bio-chemical attack or series of attacks was possibly being unleashed on the nation, and to immediately cease and desist all contact with major population centers… as well as other people in contact with these major population centers.

That’s in the first couple days of the attack. As days progress, and potential bio-chemical agents are carried to small towns by a fleeing population, many unknowingly “infected” (in the case of a virus), or simply “carriers” in the case of a chemical, less contact with people would be a very smart move.

– How to identify prophesies coded in the visions of four men whom God revealed information about the latter days to.
– How to survive each day with little necessities of life like little food, no technology as there will be no electricity, and sometimes poor housing.
– How to preserve medication and food at home without chemical preservatives or a refrigerator.
– How to identify biological weapons and chemicals thrown your way, understanding how they affect your body and what to do about it and also how to avoid it and stay safe.
– How to make protective clothing to shield you against chemical weaponry using simple household items. This covers you when an attack is imminent and you do not have the necessary gear or did not have time to buy required gear.
– How to craft a plan to survive even when times become challenging. Here, Cain explains simple military science to help you survive at home. You will need to use simple equipment and substances available at home.
– How to distinguish clean water and food from ones that have been contaminated after an attack. This keeps the family safe and free of diseases that may be caused by contaminated food or water.