Chemical and Biological Warfare; A comprehensive Survey for the Concerned Citizen

New York: Copernicus Books [and Imprint of Springer-Verlag], 2002. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. xxii, 306, [8] pages. Footnote. Illustrations. Notes. Select Bibliography. Index. DJ has slight wear and soiling. Biological and chemical weapons expert Eric Croddy Biological and chemical weapons expert Eric Croddy is a senior research associate at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. From a Publishers Weekly review: Mustard gas, sarin, hemorrhagic fever viruses, vomiting agents, biological toxins the weapons described in Chemical and Biological Warfare will make the reader's head spin, but author Eric Croddy, a Monterey Institute of International Studies research associate, is careful to avoid unnecessary alarmism in this primer on unconventional weapons. He describes the various existing chemical and biological weapons, how they work, and which countries own them, evaluating the threat that each kind of weapon poses and the likelihood of its use. For the most part, he argues, this weaponry is still prohibitively expensive. Whether he's right or not, this is a thorough, understandable crash course. The armaments of chemical and biological warfare (CBW), as Eric Croddy shows in this introduction for the concerned layman, are now widely held not just by nation-states, but by terrorist and criminal enterprises. The weapons themselves are relatively inexpensive and very easy to hide, and organizations of just a few dozen people are capable of deploying potentially devastating attacks with them. While in the twentieth century most of our arms-control effort focused, rightly, on nuclear arsenals, in the twenty-first century CBW will almost certainly require just as much attention. This book defines the basics of CBW for the concerned citizen, including non-alarmist scientific descriptions of the weapons and their antidotes, methods of deployment and defensive response, and the likelihood in the current global political climate of additional proliferation.