Biodiversifical Blasphemy & Chemical Catastrophe

Welcome back!

In the previous weeks, I delved into Nuclear Warfare and uncovered its parlous environmental impacts on both local and global scales. However, nuclear arms are only a fraction of the Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), a category encompassing weapons ‘with the capacity to inflict death and destruction on such a massive scale and so indiscriminately that its very presence in the hands of hostile power can be considered a grievous threat’. This week, I will be exploring the other two arms constituting WMDs – Biological and Chemical Warfare (CBW). Here is some background on it:

Interactive Infographic: Right-click on underlined phrases for references/more information

Intended Impacts

One of the most common impetuses of CBW is to wound or inflict death onto the human enemy. Chemical warfare has reared its ugliest head in the Holocaust, where the use of Zyklon B and carbon monoxide claimed an estimated 2.7 million lives in the Euthanasia Programme. Jews and the disabled were unsuspectingly escorted to gas chambers guised as showers, where they were then trapped and suffocated. Other lethal chemical arms include Sarin, which killed 43 in Douma, Syria in 2018, and the VX Nerve Agent, which was used in the 2017 assassination of Kim Jong Nam.

Gas Chamber labelled Brausebad (shower in German)

Biological weapons prove to be equally, if not more insidious. For instance, 1 gram of vaporised Botulinum Toxin, a bacterial neurotoxin, is capable of executing 1.25 million people. Moreover, unlike chemical agents, the impacts of bioweapons can be widespread due to the transmissibility of diseases. In light of how COVID-19 has been shaking the world, fears of biowarfare remain fresh in our minds, apparent in the rife speculations on the virus’ origins.

Another conspicuous motive of CBW is to ravage agriculture, as part of the Scorched Earth Policy – we seem to have come a full circle from Ancient Warfare… however, the ramifications of modern methods are undoubtedly more deleterious, by a supreme margin.

The most notorious incidence of chemical destruction would be the decade-long use of Agent Orange in the Vietnam War. To ‘deprive Vietnamese forces of crops to eat and forest canopy in which to hide’, the US sprayed over 20 million gallons of herbicides to obliterate 2.6 million acres of croplands, marshlands and rainforests. However, the chemical defoliant did way more than ensuing widespread famine – its dire and heart-wrenching health and ecological aftereffects persist saliently till today.

Biological agents are also fully capable of waging agricultural warfare. Rice Blast (magnaporth grisea), though not yet deployed, has been weaponised and trialled by the US in Okinawa. It is postulated that the fungus can ‘ruin the amount of rice that could feed 60 million people’.

Unintended Impacts

Apart from the contemplated impacts of CBW, its inadvertent impacts on wildlife can also be highly devastating, as summarised below.

In essence, while CBW may be termed the ‘poor man’s atom bomb’ due to its inability to hold a candle to nukes in terms of direct global impacts, its environmental impacts must not be discounted. To be honest, this post was hard to write due to the extent of cruelty evinced in the Holocaust and Vietnam War which I was unaware of. With that said, join me next week as delve in the human-driven impacts of war on the environment!

* infographic created my me using Canva, image source: Pixabay (except header)