Original subtitles

We'll learn that there is really many, many ways in which

atomic science can be used for the benefit of mankind.

These are the weapons at the edge of acceptability.

When you're actually in a fight for survival,

rules generally tend to go out the window.

The fear of the weapon may actually be more impactful

than the weapon itself.

In warfare's deadly arsenal, chemical, biological,

and other poisonous agents are the most controversial.

Though each plays a lethal role, they can be loosely

categorized by what they're composed of

and how they're deployed.

For as long as there have been weapons, people have tried

to govern their use and distribution.

Their implications of use must be so devastating,

their reach so far ranging, their implications of usage

so widespread that a group of the good and the great

determined that they must be outlawed.

If you look at the evolution of conflict and warfare,

there's always been this struggle and this question

of what's right, what's not right,

what's just, what's not just,

what's fair, what's not fair.

in war and conflict.

That kind of sounds good on paper, but when you're

actually in a fight for survival, rules generally

tend to go out the window.

Chemical warfare and biological warfare

are overlapping concepts.

Poisons are a pretty broad category because almost

everything in nature is a poison.

Think of this as three circles that do actually all come

together in the middle.

Poisoning as a method of attack

tends to be focused and targeted,

as opposed to chemical warfare, which is,

by definition, indiscriminate,

and actually kind of goes which way the wind flows.

Biological weapons is basically the weaponization of natural

agents to cause infection, like with viruses or bacteria.

Disease spreading agents take advantage of the fact

that diseases can go from one individual to the other

and spread more widely, and therefore attack

or infect a number of people.

The classical biological weapons are basically

pathogens, things that cause disease in humans.

So we're talking about things like bacteria, viruses.

Chemical weapons, in a way, are as old as science itself.

They date back at least 3,000 years.

The Persians used to burn crystals of sulfur to poison

Roman legions, but more elaborate chemical

weapons were mainly developed during the Industrial Age.

The OPCW lists five different types

of chemical weapon systems.

Blood agents,

blister agents,

choking agents,

nettle agents,

and finally, nerve agents.

Blood agents, those that are absorbed by blood,

depriving vital organs of getting oxygen.

Blister agents or chemical compounds that cause severe

irritation in the skin or eyes,

resulting in blisters, swelling, inflammation,

and leading to the destruction of tissues.

Choking agents, so chemicals that cause severe irritation

or swelling of the respiratory tract, attacking the lung

tissue, causing pulmonary edema, and basically just

impeding an individual's ability to breathe.

Fourth, nettle agents, all chemicals that corrode

the skin and other tissues upon touch.

They cause intense itching

rashes and things like that,

And fifth and finally, nerve agents,

organic gases that affect the nervous system,

preventing it from functioning properly,

Effective and time-tested, poisons entered the modern age

with the introduction of mass produced chemical weapons

during the War to End All Wars.

Within months of the outbreak of the First World War,

the two belligerent parties were stuck in a stalemate,

in long trench lines facing each other in a seemingly

cold and unbreakable impasse.

It was this stalemate that scientists

came up with a solution to,

the use of chemical agents

dispersed by wind or artillery

to render the adversary incapacitated or dead.

Tear gas was first seen

at the Battle of Ypres in 1915.

This was a particularly bloody battle.

But nobody really sat there and thought through what are

the immediate second, third order effects

of this battlefield, not only on the troops and the soldiers,

but on the psyche, on society, and on innocent bystanders.

It's this lack of ability to control the secondary impact

of these weapon systems that has led to the really

consensus efforts to ban them on the battlefield.

For example, today, particularly in France,

farmers occasionally find varied mustard gas canisters.

When these canisters are dug up, the gas inside them

is still potent.

It goes to show that these weapons

remain dangerous decades after their use.

Chemical weapons were relatively easy

to develop and deploy.

Anyone with a dead pig and a science lab could start

to develop chemical and biological agents

that would have a devastating impact,

or so the science promised.

Story of the Big Four Geneva Conference.

Seen here arriving to play their part

in the Geneva Conference.

We'll learn that there is really many, many ways in which

atomic science can be used for the benefit of mankind

instead of destruction. Thank you very much.

The Geneva Protocol was the first initiative to govern

the use of chemical and biological weapons

in armed conflicts,

signed on the 17th of June, 1925.

The Geneva Protocol is not a very effective document.

It's-- it's pretty thin. It's a couple of pages.

It's got very loose definitions.

It talks about asphyxiating gases, and there's a lot

of ways that poisons work besides asphyxiating.

So it's a technical document

drawn up by nontechnical people,

so it's not very effective.

Chemical weapons didn't really live up to expectations

in the First World War.

They really didn't lead to any major victories on either side.

Somewhere upwards of 90,000 soldiers

died from chemical warfare exposure

in the First World War, and it's really difficult

to point to any particular battle

where chemical weapons were truly decisive.

The other issue about chemical and biological weapons

is they're quite difficult to control.

Once released, if the wind changes, the cloud of nerve

and biological agents could blow back over your own troops.

It requires your own troops working in that environment

to wear very restrictive

and difficult-to-operate-in mop suits.

These chemical and decontamination suits

require a huge amount of effort and reduce the fighting

effectiveness of your own soldiers.

There are other ways to achieve your military objectives.

And one of the problems with these type of weapons was

you had to store them and keep them and transport them.

Nobody wanted these types of weapons around.

Chemical and biological weapons are just not an effective way

to kill people.

There are better, cheaper, easier,

and more controllable ways to do it.

That's simply why Western powers and Western militaries

just don't like it.

Despite their limitations and international efforts

to restrict their use, chemical and biological weapons

never really went away.

In the 1920s and 1930s, you see use of chemical weapons

in colonial wars.

First big example is what was called the "Rift War."

Spain was using aerial bombardment

to deliver chemical weapons

against Berber rebels in what's now Northern Morocco.

Mussolini invaded Ethiopia, which at the time

was called Abyssinia.

In the 1930s, Japan invades China.

And there was a fair amount of use of chemical weapons

by Japan against China.

And all these cases,

these are disproportionate uses

because one side is actually poor and not technically

developed versus an industrially developed,

you know, attacker.

The Japanese established the infamous Unit 731 that

developed and tested biological capabilities against their own

subjects in Chinese Manchuria.

Those weapons would later be used in the battlefield,

including contaminating the Horustein river

with typhoid fever and bombing the city of Ningbo

with fleas carrying bubonic plague.

When you look at those examples, they're basically

examples of racist ideology, because these chemical weapons

are used and framed at the time in a way that sort of paints

the enemy as subhuman.

At the end of the Second World War in Europe,

the Western Allies and the Soviets basically stumbled

upon this nerve agent research program that had been operated

in secrecy by the Nazis.

And it was a fundamental technological shift in chemical

weapons because these were far more effective weapons.

During the Cold War, planning for the use

of chemical weapons became popular

in some of our war plans.

It offered the ability to deploy chemicals

where there was a key pass through mountains

that could deny the enemy access through it.

Or, if they were gonna travel through it, they would have

to go to great pains to prepare themselves to move

through a chemically contaminated area.

Pressure against the use of chemicals weapons

by western democracies, continued to rise

during the latter half of the century.

The fear of being disadvantaged in chemical warfare was real

because the real-world impacts could be so devastating.

Biochemical weapons also have a fear factor, so to speak.

At times, the fear of the weapon may actually

be more impactful than the weapon itself.

The US used a lot of chemicals in the Vietnam War,

used a lot of tear gas.

They used a lot of defoliants, like Agent Orange.

You ended up with many square miles

of South Vietnam being totally defoliated.

The debate rages to this day whether or not,

you know, basically agricultural chemicals

that were available off the shelf to

American farmers, whether you really can call them

chemical weapons or not.

And then there were a series of incidents.

There was this thing called the "Skull Valley incident."

The US was testing a chemical agent called VX,

a nerve agent,

and got the weather data all wrong,

and the VX went the wrong way.

Poisoned and killed thousands of sheep.

And there was a big cover up, but then the cover up

was rumbled, and it became a big embarrassment

for the US Army.

This incident was at a place

called Dugway Proving Ground in Utah.

You had similar incidents going on in the Soviet Union.

There was this thing called the "White Sea incident,"

where basically the Volga River got poisoned, and it was called

the White Sea as a nickname because of all the dead fish

floating belly up in it.

The Soviet stuff had a reputation of being

really dangerous.

These tragic incidents and growing public condemnation

triggered a surprising turn of events in the United States.

I have decided that the United States of America will renounce

the use of any form of deadly biological weapons

that either kill or incapacitate.

Richard Nixon renounced the use of biological weapons

for the United States.

Nixon renounced the use of biological weapons.

The entire United States offensive program

on biological warfare came to a close,

Devoting efforts toward

saving life rather than destroying life.

At this point in the story, you get a really unusual hero,

Richard Nixon, of all people.

When he comes into office in 1969, he actually energizes

this, this whole chemical, biological arms control thing,

and gets the US out of biological weapons.

And basically, the chemical weapons stuff

was pretty much frozen in time.

And so it came to be that the majority of chemical

and biological weapons shifted from military development

into the security and intelligence services,

the spy agencies,

for subterfuge, for assassination,

for subversion.

Iraq has been accused of massacring up to 4,000

Kurdish men, women, and children with chemical weapons.

They would have been unaware

that the lethal gases would penetrate.

That military concern about the possible existence

of a new Soviet chemical weapon.

There were countless heartbreaking sites which told

stories of how parents had desperately tried to shelter

their young from the invisible vapors.

One example of this goes back to the assassination

of Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov in 1978.

On the 7th of September, 1978, Markov was heading

to work at the Bulgarian section of the BBC.

While waiting for the bus, Markov felt an acute pain

on his right thigh.

As he looked behind, he saw a man who apologized

with a thick foreign accent while picking up an umbrella

from the floor.

And then he crossed the road and entered a taxi

that drove away.

While going to the restroom at the BBC office,

Markov noticed a red pimple

had formed in the place that he got stabbed

by the umbrella.

He would actually recall this incident later

to his colleague, Theo Lirkov.

Later in the evening, Georgi Markov developed

a high fever.

Concerned, he would go to St James' Hospital,

where he ended up being hospitalized.

His pulse was too rapid,

considering the low blood pressure.

The wound on his thigh was severely inflamed.

A lab test revealed a soaring white blood cell count.

The following morning, he started to vomit

and had difficulty speaking.

On the third day in the hospital,

Markov was sweating and dizzy,

quite likely hallucinating,

probably due to a toxic shock-like syndrome resulting

in a vascular collapse.

His white blood cell count nearly tripled.

Later, his organs began to fail.

He stopped passing urine and started to vomit blood.

His internal organs were actually collapsing inside him.

It sounds like the plot of a political thriller

from the Cold War era.

Bulgarian dissident assassinated in London.

The murder of a Bulgarian dissident, Georgi Markov.

Was the victim of the so-called "poisoned umbrella murder."

Georgi Markov, a leading Bulgarian dissident

who worked for the BBC's World Service, died days after being

jabbed in the leg by an umbrella.

It was the first major assassination in the Cold War.

Detectives from Scotland Yard have flown to Bulgaria

several times to question witnesses.

The Bulgarians say they'll bend their rules

and continue the investigation. But who might have done it?

According to the autopsy reports, Georgi Markov had

developed an edema in his lungs, a fatty change

of the liver, a hemorrhagic necrosis

of the small intestines, and suffered hemorrhages

of the pancreas, lymph node, and testicles.

And coroners would finally find the cause of this.

They only really figured it out at the autopsy

because they found a very small pellet in his thigh.

And upon examination, that small pellet contained

traces of a chemical called ricin, which is a naturally

occurring toxin that is found in castor beans.

Georgi Markov was assassinated using

the Bulgarian umbrella, as it is known, has a hidden

mechanism where a pallet containing ricin is hidden.

This is being then injected into the victim.

The Bulgarian umbrella was also allegedly used in the failed

assassination attempt against the Bulgarian dissident

journalist Vladimir Kostov in the same year

on the Paris metro.

Kostov...

uh, survived,

and he survived because the blood had clotted around

the small pellet, and I think that kept a lot of the ricin

in the pellet. So he only got sick.

He didn't actually die from it.

No one who saw Markov or Kostov being hit by an umbrella

realized what had exactly happened.

Back then, there were no surveillance cameras.

It was much harder to pinpoint the moment

the dose was delivered.

This gives a pretty good window of opportunity

for the killer to flee.

Both assassination attempts are believed to have been conducted

by the Bulgarian secret service with assistance from the KGB.

Yet, till this day, no one could identify who did it.

Ricin is not hard to make.

A good high school kid with high school chemistry lab-type

equipment can make it from castor beans.

And this puts it really on the easy end of poisons,

but also because a very, very small amount of it

is very deadly.

It wasn't a shot from a sniper. It wasn't designed to terrify.

It wasn't designed to sow fear in the public's imagination.

But then that would change after the end of the Cold War,

when assassination was used by the Russian state to sow fear

and to guarantee the certainty of reprisal.

A former Russian agent dies in London after lethal

radiation poisoning.

Died last night and this morning the police moved in...

The health protection agency confirmed today

that traces of radioactivity were found.

Tissue damage characteristic of radiation.

The question is, "Where does it come from?"

There are very few labs in the world that can do it.

We actually have evidence that Russia has been creating

and stockpiling Novichok.

It was somebody's attempt to send a spectacular message

to others. Radioactivity fuels fear.

When the Cold War ended,

the use of these weapons did not.

Only their purpose changed.

The goal wasn't just to kill one dissident, but to send

a warning to all dissidents through fear and intimidation.

In 1993, Vladimir Kaplun,

the director of a packing company

was killed by radioactive material,

probably cobalt 60 or cesium 137,

which was placed in his chair.

A month after his hospitalization,

the cause of his death, radiation poisoning,

was found at the post mortem.

In 2004, Roman Tsepov, a politically influential

Russian who provided security to Vladimir Putin,

amongst others, fell sick on the 11th of September 2004,

after a trip to Moscow.

He died 13 days later.

A post mortem investigation found poisoning

by an unspecified radioactive material.

A year before, Yuri Shchekochikhin,

a Russian political journalist known for writing on organized

crime and government corruption, he was due to fly

to the US to meet with FBI investigators, but he suddenly

fell ill and died.

His medical records were never released.

And then in 2006, Alexander Litvinenko,

a former Russian agent who fled his native country to live

in London six years previously, was suddenly hospitalized

and died soon after.

While on his deathbed, he claimed his death was

the result of an assassination ordered by Russian government

officials, the same punishment he had publicly accused Putin

of metering out on others.

Litvinenko showed all signs of radioactive poisoning.

But the thing the thing is, there are three different

types of radiation--

alpha particles, beta radiation, and gamma radiation.

And Geiger counters are much better at detecting

beta and gamma radiation, while alpha radiation

rarely shows up.

It seems that Litvinenko was poisoned with a substance

emitting alpha radiation.

It's believed that he'd ingested polonium 210

from a cup of tea.

Samples of the agents taken from Litvinenko were sent

to the UK Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston

in Berkshire.

The scientists detected a substance whose alpha

particles matched an isotope known as polonium 210.

Polonium 210 only comes

from this one commercial facility,

and it's a very short-lived substance.

The pathway to this goes straight to Putin and the FSB.

So it's... it's a clear fingerprint.

It's not trying to be secretive.

It's point is to scare anybody else that might defect

from Putin's inner circle.

By this point, Putin and the FSB made it clear

that dissidents were fair game.

This would become clear to Sergei Skripal

some 12 years later.

The report of a male and a female, gravely unwell.

...found unconscious in a bench, being treated

for suspected exposure to an unknown substance.

Novichoks are particularly identifiable.

A new and deadly poison.

Their condition does remain critical.

Detectives are focusing on who was responsible.

Highly likely that the Russian state was involved.

If you become a traitor, you won't end good,

as Putin said.

Sergei Skripal is a former Russian military intelligence

officer who was arrested by the Russian FSB for acting

as a double agent for the UK's intelligence agencies.

After a spy swap, he settled in the UK in 2010.

But on the 4th of March 2018, he and his daughter Yulia

were poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent.

It showed that the Soviet Union could reach its foes

anywhere at anytime.

The fact you could do this in a very public place,

and your assailants could get away without being caught,

is a very powerful and useful attribute.

A nation state may not even have to have

a working biological agent.

The fear of that, in itself, is a weapon of terror.

But what happens when those biological or chemical weapons

fall in the hands of a bad actor,

whether it's a rogue state,

a rogue individual, or a rogue organization?

The idea that using cheap and readily available materials

to produce a biological or chemical weapon has a unique

appeal for ground level terrorist organizations.

The indirect evidence is simply the fact that Iraq, of course,

was manufacturing bacteriological weapons.

Arguing that it's time now to take on not just

Osama bin Laden's network and Afghanistan,

but also Saddam Hussein and Iraq, suspected of being

the source and supplier for chemical weapons.

I don't think that we can really afford not to be

concerned about the prospects that chemical or even

biological weapons might not find their way into terrorist

attacks in the future.

The terrorist's job is to strike terror.

Even a small amount of biological or chemical agents

in their hands will get the job done.

Body count is almost beside the point.

One of the things that attracts terror groups is that you could

smuggle a fairly small amount of a biological agent

and create great devastation.

And even if the numbers of people killed

aren't that great,

the fact that it was used as a terror weapon

could cause mass panic.

The utility of biological weapons is partly because

what they deliver is not death, but fear, terror.

These are the main aspects, the main objectives

of any ground level terrorist organization.

The Japanese government has called it

the indiscriminate murder of innocent people.

At the height of the morning rush hour,

more than 3,000 subway passengers were affected.

This was Shoko Asahara's terrible handiwork,

unsuspecting commuters poisoned by deadly sarin nerve gas.

Nausea, bleeding, headaches,

and a dimming of vision.

Probably the most notorious chemical terrorist attack

worldwide was in 1995,

when members of the Aum Shinrikyo sect

in Japan used a sarin nerve agent to kill 12

and injure more than a thousand on a Tokyo subway.

But even before that, in Matsumoto, the Aum cult used

a converted refrigerator truck to dispense sarin

and killed some people.

And it's not an incident a lot of people talk about

because it wasn't really figured out at the time.

But if you look at their overall

effort and infrastructure, they had the chemical warfare

research effort of a small country.

Al Qaeda have attempted to acquire chemical weapons.

This was a car bomb.

The Americans have promised a dossier of evidence

against Iraq.

Al Qaeda, they were aggressively seeking

to acquire biological or chemical weapons.

In Afghanistan, Al Qaeda had multiple small centers

where they were trying to perfect

chemical and biological weapons.

One of the tasks when we first went into Afghanistan was

to try to find these centers and go to them so we could

ascertain how developed Al Qaeda's programs

for chemical and biological weapons was.

Al Qaeda initiated chlorine attacks in Iraq in 2007.

At the beginning, these attacks were quite inefficient,

but from 2006 onwards, there were a series of attacks,

several of which caused injuries and even fatalities.

Most of those were done by blowing up vehicles

with tanks of chlorine.

In the end, the fatalities were mainly caused by the explosions

rather than the toxic fumes themselves.

But still, these types of attacks also caused fear

and panic in the country.

The thing is, you don't necessarily need

a big organization or terrorist group for biochemical attacks.

Sometimes, a lone wolf, a single terrorist,

is all that is needed.

We are confident that Dr. Ivins

was the only person responsible for these attacks.

Samples that we took from Senator Daschle's office,

it is indeed anthrax.

We cultured it, and what we found out about it, it's sensitive...

I understand he was aiming for the people in Congress,

but he affected a whole lot of other people.

Prepared to indict him on capital murder charges

and the deaths of five people poisoned by the anthrax.

Here's the messed up thing. I knew Bruce Ivins.

I didn't know him really well. I met him several times.

I might be of a minority opinion here.

I don't think he actually wanted to see anybody dead.

'Cause, at the end of the day, anthrax is a treatable thing.

I think he wanted the attention.

He wanted to be the guy to come in and save the day

'cause he was working on new treatments for anthrax

and new anthrax vaccines.

He had this sort of twisted psychology going on,

and clearly a deep inner life that the rest of us

didn't understand at the time.

Serious counterterrorism professionals

talk about "lone wolves."

He was a lone wolf, but also there's a concept

of the "insider threat,"

because he was the great anthrax expert.

The good news is we don't actually see a lot of chemical

and biological terrorism.

And there's a lot of good reasons for that, actually.

One of those is that the technology,

for the most part, you know, plateaued a long time ago.

The main reason why chemical weapons plateaued is because

there was a realization of their terrible effects

that seemed disproportionate,

and also made a lot of people ask for their ban,

and they were eventually banned.

Advances in medicine and science have also helped

to counteract the effects of chemical weapons,

thereby rendering them less effective.

But also, the cost benefit ratio doesn't quite work.

They are too costly

for the military benefit they produce.

Have a look at the Aum cult.

They had a lot of technical expertise, they had a lot

of scientists and engineers who joined.

And they spent an awful lot of money.

They built this chemical weapons research program

that was roughly equivalent in size

to what Tito-era Yugoslavia had.

But combined, you add up all the people that they killed

with the chemical weapons, it's something under 30.

So they're spending more than a million dollars per fatality.

That's not really a sustainable burn rate for even

a well-funded non-state actor.

It's perverse to think about the economics

of killing people, but it is a factor.

To some, biological weapons might be a better bargain than

chemical weapons, though there are other costs to consider.

Biological weapons can be quite effective, and they are

considerably cheaper to produce than chemical weapons.

Some studies suggest that it can be 600 times cheaper

to produce a biological agent rather than a chemical weapon.

But biological agents are quite fragile and are often easily

destroyed by heat, which means that finding a good way

to distribute it is relatively difficult.

And it's hard to make a rational argument

economically that chemical and biological weapons

are somehow...

a better use of money than, you know, bombs and guns.

You can buy a lot of AK47s for what it's going to take you

to make a teaspoon of sarin.

In most cases, traditional ballistic weapons

deliver the biggest bang for the buck, while chemical

or biological agents are better as psychological weapons.

At least for now.

And only if everybody plays by the rules.

If you're a commander, considering the offensive use

of chemical weapons,

there's a lot of things to consider.

One is the fact that they're non directional, meaning

that they're just as effective against your own troops

as they are against the enemy.

Let's say we plan to use them

to clear a forward position in advance.

The first thing I'm gonna have to do is put

all of my forces in protective gear.

That's gonna restrict our movement.

Then we're gonna have to move through

the contaminated area.

Once we clear that, we have to go through decontamination.

We have to stop our advance for long periods of time.

On the modern battlefield, speed and maneuverability

are keys to success.

The use of chemical weapons detracts from that,

and it's not an attractive choice

in today's modern warfare.

The treaties, the Hague Convention, the Lieber Code,

the Geneva Conventions, and its protocols haven't

stopped examples of war crimes in recent histories.

There are rules and there are norms, but whether a nation

state decides to follow those rules and norms is up to them.

For example, you're not allowed to speed on the highway,

but people are going 20, 30, 40 miles beyond the speed limit

all day long. It's just a matter

of getting caught and what are the consequences,

but if it's a fight for survival,

it's either me or you,

do those rules and norms and ethics go out the window,

and it really does just come down to a fight for survival?

There are some countries that still consider the use

of chemical weapons.

These are generally countries that do don't have a high

regard for the survivability and welfare

of their own militaries.

So they don't care if they waste them all

in their use of a chemical weapon.

Last Saturday, up to 75 people,

including young children, were killed.

The international community has failed desperately over this.

These children have been killed yesterday in Istanbul.

The Syrian regime, under the leadership

of President Bashar al-Assad, are responsible

for this attack.

What is the world doing about it?

The world's most heinous weapons must never again be

used against the world's most vulnerable people.

A perfect example of this is the Syria conflict.

President Assad is basically in a fight for his life

in a massive civil war where their forces

are trying to oust him.

He believed that he was just and needed to use chemicals

in the battlefield.

Regardless of treaties or worldwide opinion,

biochemical weapons are here to stay, and may even be

at the heart of a biochemical arms race powered by AI.

We saw an AI that within six hours created 40,000 new

chemical molecules, each of which were more toxic

than those we had known so far.

That means that you no longer need a PhD

in chemistry to create a chemical weapon,

but more or less anyone can do it with the help of AI.

There are still laboratories around the world that store

the plague virus, for example.

So we know that research is still being done.

Of course, primarily to find antidotes, and to find ways

to counter these attacks with such systems.

But it also means that further development is possible.

Pathogens are messy and difficult to control.

Now imagine if one could be tailor-made to target

an ethnic group or even an individual.

Provided you had an accurate copy of the person's DNA

fingerprint, you could release a weapon from thousands

of miles away, not just over the horizon.

You could not worry about spreading infection,

but you'd know that only one person would be impacted.

You no longer have the complications

and difficulties of targeting surveillance and understanding

the battle space.

This could be the gold standard of assassination.

The unintended consequences, however, of this kind of action

would be incredible.

Think about not just the applications of such

a force, but the irresponsible actors using unaligned science

that get the sequence slightly out of place.

It's about the spread of a virus throughout a population

that potentially has the ability to mutate.

The misunderstanding of developers of these

capabilities adds huge danger across populations.

When you're talking about biological attacks

against critical infrastructure,

particularly food resources, water, um...

or other parts of society,

what does that impact do on the civilian population?

And what are the second, third order effects of that?

And what are the long term effects of that as well?

There's really no controlling on who that attacks

or who that impairs or who it harms or kills.

The impact of a biological weapon on the food supply

could be catastrophic.

Imagine developing a biological agent that would destroy

an essential crop like rice or wheat.

Rice from India accounts for 40% of the global supply,

or the wheat crops in Northern America

supply a quarter of the world's exports.

If these crops were to be targeted by a biological

weapon, the impact could be devastating.

So we really are at the precipice

of a very slippery slope.

Once a biological weapon has been invented and created

and put out there, what's to stop a rogue element within

that nation, a rogue actor, or a terrorist organization

getting their hands on that weapon?

And what is it that'll unleash

in terms of kind of the horrors of the impact

on the civilian population that's not in the fight?

The other thing that bothers me is actually we live

in a very technological society.

We use a lot of chemicals in commerce and industry.

Can you do chemical warfare by proxy by bombing

somebody's chemical plant or sabotaging it?

And actually, you can.

So...

It's not traditional chemical warfare, but it's...

very much a possibility, particularly when we start

seeing, you know, this Russia-Ukraine conflict.

Both sides have got large chemical factories,

and you know, use a lot of chemicals in agriculture.

So, if you set fire to a large factory complex,

it's making, actually quite nasty chemicals

for legitimate use...

that's a problem.

What we know about what the global superpowers

are thinking about the next great global war

is that it won't be a use of nuclear weapons,

electromagnetic pulses...

It won't be the use of chemical and biological weapons

as their chosen ways of fighting the next war.

But they do have strategies.

They do have an understanding of potentially what they will

use as their next weapons in the conflicts to come.

And what will the consequences of this future be?

Whatever weapons they choose must have

certainty, accuracy, lethality, and deliverability.