Weapons of mass destruction are highly dangerous and are used against societies and organizations to bring them down. They are mostly used by terrorists. Weapons of mass destruction come in four major different ways. They are biological, chemical, and nuclear and radiological weapons. Most of all there is the newly emerging cyber terrorism.
These issues are important and pressing in our society today. Especially since what happened on 9/11, we as a society live in a high alert of terror attack and must be informed about the weapons these terrorists could employ. After doing this research I am more unsettled than I previously was, as Americans we are not well prepared for such attacks. Our government is working to fix this situation by developing detection devices for these weapons of mass destruction. Right now there are glitches in our technology. The responses to a weapon of mass destruction attack are still either untested or in the planning stages.
Biological Weapons.
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First we must understand where such agents can be made. According to Tucker "nearly any plant that produces vaccines, antibiotics, feed supplements, or fermented beverages could potentially be diverted to the illicit production of biological weapons agents"(Tucker 6). This makes one question how many of these industries exist?.
Now that we know where these agents can be created, we must how these agents would get into and infect a human being. Biological agents must either be ingested or inhaled to cause infection (Tucker 7). One way to use this method would be to taint the drinking water with a microorganism. However there are definite problems with this method. "Unless a massive quantity of biological weapons agent were dumped, the dilution effect would be so great no healthy person drinking the water would receive an infective dose"(Tucker 7). An enemy could contaminate the food supply as well, however this would be as difficult as tainting the water supply.
