LINK

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FACTOID

Chemical and biological warfare are not an invention of the 20th
century.

Solon (638-559 BC) used a strong purgative, the herb hellebore, in
the siege of Krissa. During the 6th century BC, the Assyrians
poisoned enemy wells with rye ergot. In the Peloponnesian War (431-
404 BC), the Spartans flung sulfur and pitch at the Athenians and
their allies. In the Middle Ages, besiegers used the bloated and
dripping bodies of plague victims as readymade "dirty bombs".

In 1346, during its siege of Kaffa (present day Feodosia in Crimea),
the Tartar army suffered an outbreak of the Plague. They hurled the
corpses of their infected dead over the city walls and into the
city's water wells. The resulting epidemic led to the city's
surrender. It is widely believed that people afflicted with the
horrendous disease fled the place and started the Black Death
pandemic which consumed at least one third of Europe's population
within a few years. Russian troops adopted the same tactic against
Sweden in 1710.

Smallpox was another favorite. Francisco Pizarro (1476-1541) gave
South American natives clothing items deliberately contaminated with
the variola virus. During the French and Indian wars in North
America (1689-1763), blankets used by smallpox victims were given to
American Indians. General Jeffery Amherst (1717-1797) gifted Indians
loyal to the French with smallpox-contaminated bedspreads during the
French and Indian War of 1754 to 1767. An epidemic broke among the
Native American defenders of Fort Carillon and they lost it to the
English.


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