Biological and Chemical Warfare

In the city of Athens in 404 BC, Sparta used dead bodies to poison the wells of the Athenians. Killing most of their population and leading to their vistory of the war.

Hannibal had earthen jars filled with venomous snakes, covered and taken on board his ships. When the enemy ships came within range, the earthen jars with the snakes were hurled at the enemy vessels where they broke discharging their terrifying occupants among the enemy sailors

Tartars catapulted bodies of plague victims over the walls of Kaffa in an attempt to initiate an epidemic upon the residents.5 The bubonic plague is primarily a disease of rats and other rodents. Only when they become very numerous in close contact with humans does the plague arise in man.

Ring around the rosy
(The feverous face encircled with pustules)
A pocket full of posies
(Flowers placed on the foul smelling victim)
Ashes, ashes
(Septic shock that precedes death, wearing of mourning ashes, or burning of the corpses of the plague victims?)
All fall down
(The victim dies)

Russian Army besieging the Swedes holding Reval in Estonia tried the catapulting of corpses of those who died of the plague. Again the success of the tactic was due in no small way to the panic and hysteria that the plague induced in people.

The agent was smallpox. The method of delivery was blankets not bombs. Sir Jeffrey Amherst who was the commander of British forces in North America created a plan thats aim was to reduce the Native Americans.

English physician, Edward Jenner who discovered the smallpox vaccine in 1796. What is also remarkable is the fact that science did not discover the germ theory and how diseases are transmitted until the late 1870's.

World War I became known as "the chemists' war," for the deadly gases it introduced to combat. At the Second Battle of Ypres, the German army released thousands of cylinders of yellow-green chlorine gas across the battlefield—the first major use of a chemical weapon in modern warfare. (Small amounts of tear gas had been used earlier by the French and Germans as an irritant.)

The gas, a choking agent that causes fluid to build up in victims' lungs, killed hundreds of French soldiers—at least; accounts vary—but didn't give the Germans an immediate advantage. It's been suggested that they themselves were so shocked by chlorine's effects that they failed to make an advance.

During World War I, chlorine and phosgene gases were released from canisters on the battlefield and dispersed by the wind.

Plague infected rats were fed upon by laboratory bred fleas. The Japanese then collected the now infected fleas, containerized them and released them over Chinese cities from low flying aircraft.