Book Suggestions for June 12th 2018I think what got me interested in the possibilities of bioweapons in the first place was reading the book Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World–Told from the Inside by the Man Who Ran It by Ken Alibek. That lead me to study to other facilities such as Lab 257 by Michael C. Carroll.
Then who could forget about outbreaks of dangerous viruses such as Ebola or Marburg? Richard Preston wrote a great book titled Panic in Level 4. Of course Richard Preston also wrote a lovely book touching on the 2001 Anthrax attacks called The Demon in the Freezer, an attack that is still unsolved. This is probably the most recent example of bioterror that Americans are particularly aware of. It is extremely hard to tell where diseases come from even if you know the exact strain. Mostly because the differences in weaponizing between countries is less than most are aware of. You can evolve the same traits from the same source genes if they happen to be only a few steps away and you reproduce the experiments, or better yet, if you get ahold of the enemies’ weapon you can then yourself have the same weapon.
The bioweapons world is a small clique and if I have any chance of getting in I will have to make some friends, socialize… etc. I want to destroy the world but I think the more I do research the more I think this might be a valid career opportunity that could keep me well to do if I find the right people. I’ll just need to make sure I have an insurance policy.
In Lab 257 the author explains how the official story of the purpose of the facility was to do research on infectious animal disease. They did indeed do a lot of that sort of research, but not just for prevention but for offense. Russian bioweapon programs focused on direct attacks at humans while American bioweapons programs had a large focus on agriculture. If you infect the food supply then everyone dies. Or the animals all die and then if anyone wants to live they have to buy food from you. I think this is much more of a capitalist idea than rather just killing you out right and stealing everything you have. The book Spillover explains how easy it would be for a virus to become strong and spread before detection among wildlife unchecked, much like how SARS or Zika spread for years before it was fully understood. Zika spread so fast that it was places no one thought to even check for it.
Idealy a virus would be hard to detect, it would have to have a long incubation time until it caused major issues, something hard to treat. The book The Great Influenza by John M. Barry explains about one of the deadliest outbreaks which happened in 1918 at the height of WWI. There are a lot of books on this subject, enough to fill a good sized part of your e-book’s storage. These are just some of the ones I happen to like.