Despite their signature on the Biological Weapons Convention of 1975, it has been reported that China has the most advanced modern germ warfare arsenal in the world at Xian, Shaanxi province.

As proof, information obtained using the Freedom of Information Act shows that in 1997 Clinton administration officials approved supercomputer exports to a known Chinese germ warfare lab without an end use inspection. The computer was delivered to Jiatong University, Xian. The university is a known center for bioweapons research.

Furthermore, in April 2005, Deputy Director of China's Academy of Military Medical Sciences, Cao Wuchun said "China is developing technology to resist possible bioterror attacks." The science lab used to develop resistance to bioattack can be the same science lab to develop bioweapons.

In 2001, the U.S. State Department issued a report naming Sudan, North Korea, Iraq, and Iran as countries known to be developing dangerous biological weapons, but strangely, the Bush administration refused to put China on the list, saying "there may be some 'friendly countries' with biological weapons programs who would not be named."

Given the reality of a Chinese bioweapon program, it is conceivable that a cell of young communist microbiologists, working within a weapons think tank, have proposed the following scenario to government officials:

Bird flu, or H5N1, is a readily available deadly pathogen. It is rapidly mutating into human-to-human transmission capability. Because bird flu is at the epidemic stage in southeast Asia, it would be completely transparent to the world if our labs were to release a concentrated form of this virus on our enemies, such as Taiwan. We could even retaliate against Japan for the 1940 bombing of China with plague-infected fleas.

By itself, the scenario above sounds far-fetched, until you recall a very similar scenario that featured SARS instead of bird flu. It's been more than two years since the Chinese government lied about their knowledge of SARS and then finally confessed that SARS somehow "escaped" from a Chinese military lab, but we still don't have a vaccine for SARS. Why? Because it was genetically engineered by Chinese scientists, making it very difficult to produce a vaccine.

The U.S. has been playing rather fast and loose with the BWC,too.

In 2001, New York Times journalists, Judith Miller and Stephen Engelberg, uncovered the Defense Intelligence Agency's effort at the Battelle Memorial Institute, Columbus, Ohio, to genetically engineer a strain of vaccine-resistant anthrax, just to name one secret project. There are many others ongoing, so it is logical to assume that the U.S. is experimenting with H5N1 as a bioweapon, also.

In the first year of his administration, President Bush sent John Bolton to ambush the BWC, and put in its place a biological weapons treaty that would place the U.S. above question by any country.

With two superpowers considering H5N1 as a secret bioweapon, and no vaccine in sight, the earth's population may suddenly find itself intentionally being thinned down. After all, the planet's 6,446,131,400 billion people are pushing the limits of sustainability. The risk of getting caught in this thinning is very high. If H5N1 is unleashed as a weapon, or it reaches pandemic proportions on its own, it will be far more devasting than a nuclear attack.