The Plague and Biological Warfare

On the drive to drop Number 3 off at school the other day, we were talking about the recent (potential) lab leak of the plague and the possibility of a new pandemic starting in Russia, and it just so happened that one of my favorite podcasts released an episode about that very topic! The podcast is quite good, and I recommend listening to the whole thing, but a single line really caught my attention. (I don’t want to give away the plot, but they do not see a new pandemic on the horizon.)

Here is the show description:

A young researcher in Siberia has died under mysterious circumstances, raising questions about a potential lab leak. Russia won’t say how it happened. Marshall Billingslea, former Special Presidential Envoy for Arms Control, says Moscow has scrubbed news reports, had officials walk back talk of an outbreak, and kept the World Health Organization in the dark. He joins School of War to fill in what the Kremlin won’t, taking us inside Russia’s expanding bioweapons program and the institute at the heart of the mystery, which defectors say ran a covert effort to weaponize the disease and make it resistant to antibiotics. He also explains how Moscow thinks about using these weapons, how China is building a program of its own, and why the most frightening of them pose a risk even nuclear weapons don’t.

At about the 6-minute mark, this statement really caught my ear (emphasis mine):

“At its peak, the Soviet Union, Russia inherited the program from, the Soviet Union had about 60,000 people working in the BW, in the warfare program, across 40 different locations, more than 40 actually, scattered all over the Soviet Union. They were both researching, developing and then weaponizing. We’re talking here about tons and tons, literally tons of different kinds of weapons.
It ranges from infectious diseases, such as the plague, hemorrhagic fevers, like the Marburg virus and the Ebola virus, smallpox. They have developed and weaponized toxins and other poisonous substances, venoms, you name it. If it can be lethal to a human being, they’ve even developed biological weapons that are focused on destroying crops, agricultural weapons.”

Honestly, this was supposed to be yesterday’s article, but I just couldn’t motivate myself to do it. I had about 12 tabs on agroterrorism open on my computer, but just couldn’t do it; then I saw this tweet:

My latest, with Ella Busch for @irregwarfare’s Journal of Strategic Competition, explores past cases of agroterrorism, the vulnerabilities of American agriculture, and the potential weaponization of the agricultural sector by terrorists of several stripes. https://t.co/oYCDRcxmN0 https://t.co/0NEiTuQbxY

— Jacob Ware (@Jacob_A_Ware) October 13, 2026

Read the whole thing. There is a reason this article is found on The Irregular Warfare site and not the Department of Agriculture. Remember, when your adversary embraces unrestricted warfare, nothing is off limits. From the Abstract:

A series of indictments against Chinese nationals over the summer of 2025 drew national attention to the specter of agroterrorism, a subset of bioterrorism targeting animal and plant life with massive implications for national security. Despite the designation of the Food and Agriculture (FA) sector as one of the sixteen critical infrastructure sectors determined by the National Infrastructure Protection Plan (NIPP), the United States remains woefully unprepared for a targeted act of agroterrorism. This paper explores past case studies of agroterrorism, the vulnerabilities of the American agriculture system, and the potential weaponization of the agricultural sector by terrorists of several stripes.

So what did they do?

I don’t want to quote too much, but they provide an excellent synopsis in their introduction:

“Having posed a relatively dormant threat throughout the so-called “War on Terror” years, agroterrorism broke into American consciousness in the summer of 2025. In June, three Chinese nationals were concurrently charged with the smuggling of biological materials into the United States for alleged research at the University of Michigan. In the first indictment, a Chinese couple, Yunqing Jian and Zunyong Liu, both citizens of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), were caught smuggling a fungus known as Fusarium graminearum (F. graminearum). This pathogen, a “potential agroterrorism weapon,”3 is known to affect a variety of widely-consumed crops with the potential for gastrointestinal issues, liver damage, and reproductive issues if consumed by humans or animals. One week later, authorities arrested Chengxuan Han, a Chinese doctoral student from Wuhan, who had sent four shipments of concealed biological material to a laboratory at the University of Michigan, this time relating to roundworms.4 In November, three more Chinese-national University of Michigan students were charged by the Department of Justice (DOJ) over a second roundworm-related conspiracy, bringing the total number of researchers charged for similar crimes in 2025 to six.5 By February 2026, another arrest had occurred, this time in Las Vegas, where over 1,000 samples of “potential biological and hazardous” materials were collected from a local household and sent off for testing at federal laboratories. The property in question was thought to be owned by Jiabei Zhu, a Chinese national who was also indicted in 2023 for operating a similar illegal biolab in Reedley, California.6 In the latter investigation, the lab was found to have been funded by Chinese banks and contained thousands of pathogenic samples, including those labeled as HIV, malaria, tuberculosis, COVID-19, and even Ebola.7”

See also:

House Select Committee on the CCP, “Investigation into the Reedley Biolab: Findings” (November 15, 2023): https://chinaselectcommittee.house.gov/media/investigations/investigation-reedley-biolab-findings
U.S. Department of Justice, Eastern District of California, guilty-verdict release (May 6, 2026): https://www.justice.gov/usao-edca/pr/guilty-verdict-california-biolab-operator

And here:

Newsweek, “CDC Responds to Claims About Chinese Biolab in California” (November 17, 2023): https://www.newsweek.com/cdc-responds-claims-about-chinese-biolab-california-1844760
Sacramento Bee, “Congress faults lax laws and CDC in Reedley lab response” (November 15, 2023): https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/article281922768.html
Los Angeles Times, “Reedley biolab operator convicted in scheme to sell millions of faulty COVID tests” (May 7, 2026): https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-05-07/reedley-biolab-operator-convicted-in-scheme-to-sell-millions-of-faulty-covid-tests
ABC30, “Reedley biolab case remains unresolved as Zhu sentencing is delayed” (August 25, 2026): https://abc30.com/post/reedley-biolab-case-remains-unresolved-zhu-sentencing-is-delayed/19730245/
Rep. Jim Costa’s office, citing Mid Valley Times (May 6, 2026): http://costa.house.gov/media/in-the-news/reedley-biolab-operator-found-guilty-12-counts-fraud

Why is this important?

Again, I don’t want to quote too much, but I will leave you with this banger of a statement:

“America’s food supply is among the most vulnerable and least protected of all potential targets of terrorists.”17

To emphasize the importance and impact of this form of bioterror, we can look at two examples. Before we dive in, I need to note that there is no evidence these two cases were deliberately introduced, but their impact highlights the importance and potential consequences of bioterrorism. I am using Grok to provide a more concise summary.

Citrus greening in Florida’s Orange groves

Florida’s orange groves have been devastated by citrus greening (Huanglongbing or HLB), an incurable bacterial disease first detected in the state in 2005 and spread by the Asian citrus psyllid; it has infected essentially every commercial tree, clogging their vascular systems, causing yellowing leaves, bitter and misshapen fruit, premature drop, and eventual tree decline and death.⁠Newser Orange production has collapsed by more than 90–95 percent from peaks of roughly 240 million boxes in the early 2000s to around 12 million boxes in recent seasons—the lowest in over a century—while citrus acreage has shrunk dramatically as growers abandon or convert groves to housing, crops, or other uses, costing the industry billions and thousands of jobs.⁠Epi.ufl Temporary measures such as trunk-injected antibiotics and intensive pest control can slow decline in some trees, and researchers continue pursuing tolerant or resistant varieties, but no cure exists and many operations have already exited citrus entirely.⁠Uncoveringflorida

The American Chestnut Tree

Once a dominant canopy tree comprising up to a quarter of the hardwood forests across much of the eastern United States—prized for its rot-resistant timber, abundant nutritious nuts that fed people, livestock, and wildlife, and rapid growth—the American chestnut (Castanea dentata) was nearly wiped out by chestnut blight, a fungal disease (Cryphonectria parasitica) accidentally introduced from Asia on imported Japanese and Chinese chestnut nursery stock around the late 19th or early 20th century and first formally identified in 1904 at the Bronx Zoo.⁠Global-agriculture The pathogen girdled trunks, killing mature trees within a few years, and within roughly four decades it destroyed an estimated three to four billion trees, reducing the species from a keystone forest component to a functionally extinct understory shrub that persists mainly through root sprouts which rarely reach reproductive size before succumbing again.⁠Wikipedia Although the blight cannot kill the root systems and the tree is not fully extinct, no commercial chestnut lumber has been produced from American trees for decades, and restoration efforts through hybridization with resistant Asian species and genetic engineering continue.

And lastly, I used Grok to summarize the danger of Bird flu as a weapon of bioterror.

Highly pathogenic avian influenza such as H5N1 poses a theoretical bioterrorism concern primarily because of its historically high case-fatality rate in the limited human infections reported (often around 50 percent) and the fact that laboratory research has demonstrated that the virus can be adapted for efficient airborne transmission among mammals, raising dual-use fears that such knowledge or engineered strains could be misused.⁠Scientificamerican In practice, however, experts and assessments have generally judged it a poor choice for deliberate biological attack: the virus is genetically unstable, difficult to stabilize and control once released, and any version capable of sustained human-to-human spread would likely infect the attackers’ own populations and become uncontrollable, while far more suitable agents exist for targeted use.⁠Nti Influenza has never been deployed as a bioweapon, and current public-health evaluations (including from the CDC) focus overwhelmingly on the greater natural pandemic risk should the virus acquire efficient person-to-person transmissibility through mutation or reassortment rather than on intentional weaponization.

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