A Wallace Hayes, Ann M Marini, Peter Pressman
This review examines the historical development of biological warfare from premodern contamination practices to twentieth-century state programs, post-9/11 bioterrorism, and the renewed prominence of biological risk in the COVID-19 era. Drawing on historical, policy, and public-health scholarship, it shows how disease came to be understood not only as a natural threat but also as a strategic instrument shaped by scientific knowledge, military organization, and administrative secrecy. The review traces the transition from empirical uses of contamination in siege warfare and colonial settings to laboratory-based weaponization in the 20th century, including German sabotage during the First World War, Imperial Japan's Unit 731, British anthrax trials on Gruinard Island, and the expansion of United States and Soviet biological warfare programs during the Cold War. It also evaluates the limits of international restraint through the 1925 Geneva Protocol and the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, emphasizing the persistent problem of verification illustrated by the 1979 Sverdlovsk anthrax outbreak. The analysis then follows the shift from state arsenals to public fear through Aum Shinrikyo and the 2001 anthrax letters before situating epidemic and pandemic disease within the broader politics of biological vulnerability. COVID-19 and gain-of-function research are treated as cases of intensified scrutiny of biosafety, uncertainty, and public mistrust, rather than evidence for any single-origin hypothesis. The review concludes that biological warfare is best understood not solely as the deliberate use of pathogens but as a broader political and institutional phenomenon emerging where scientific capacity, strategic fear, concealment, and social vulnerability converge.