BATTLEFIELD OF THE FUTURE

BATTLEFIELD OF THE FUTURE
BW weapons, conduct an effective preemptive counteroffensive
strike against enemy BW facilities, or protect the civilian
population against a terrorist BW attack .
Robert Kadlec, M.D ., (Lt Col, USAF) shows that the ongoing
revolution in biotechnology has also made possible medical
products readily transferable to biological warfare applications .
Some vaccines are available, but do not have wide distribution .
He contends that the proliferation of BW weapons provides
less-developed countries capabilities that could be as lethal and
devastating as nuclear weapons . BW weapons are inexpensive,
easy to produce, can be disguised as natural events (for example
as agricultural sprayers), are hard to detect or preempt, and are
hard to defend against once employed .
Dr Kadlec analyzes the current BW threat and cites Office of
Technology Assessment (OTA) findings which emphasize
how certain unstable states have governments seeking
WMD, including BW . The OTA analysis suggests that BW
is the cheapest and most easily produced of all the
weapons of mass destruction . Indeed some third world
regimes see BW as a "potential equalizer" to offset
Western conventional or nuclear forces .
In his essay on biological warfare as a possible means of
attacking an adversary's agricultural base, Dr Kadlec shows how
"the existence of natural occurring or endemic agricultural pests
or diseases and outbreaks permits an adversary to use BW with
plausible denial ." Dr Kadlec shows instances of how BW could
be used in attacks on livestock and plants including anthrax,
glanders, rinderpest, and wheat rust .
He notes instances of naturally occurring infestations of
agriculture . For example, the whitefly infestations of California
crops in 1981 and 1991 caused $500 million worth of damage .
The Russian wheat aphid cost the United States $600 million .
Similarly, in other cases the Mediterranean fruit fly caused
$900 million in damage and lost revenues to American crops .
To guard against such pests, over $7 billion is spent every year
on pesticides .
Dr Kadlec then provides a series of illustrative and
hypothetical scenarios of how biological warfare could be
waged against certain food suppliers : spraying a corn seed
blight over the Midwestern United States from commercial
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