So if I had to guess where the recipe for the 2001 anthrax was discovered
I'd say it was in the Soviet program
or its post-Soviet successor. Using
of course
the virulent Ames strain.
No doubt you have learned
from TGS
(the younger)
*everybody*
just *everybody*
possesses the virulent Ames strain.
Actually, by "recipe" I meant the physical preparation process, and the chemical additives that aerosolized the anthrax particles. This is just a guess, but I doubt that the genetic differences between the various military strains pertain to the surface chemistry of the anthrax spore, which is where the famous
van der Waals forces are at work. Choice of strain is all about deciding what warhead to put in your missile, so to speak. I think the hard part would be optimizing the recipe and the procedure. The question is, just how optimal was the 2001 recipe, how much of an advance on the 1969 recipe was it, and how hard would it have been to discover?
From a counterproliferation perspective, I imagine it's much safer to talk about the strain than to talk about the recipe. Far better to have al Qaeda trudging around Texas with a shovel, digging up cowpats in search of Ames, than to have them digging through industrial catalogs in search of suppliers of [REDACTED]. So we hear all this stuff about using genetic lineages to reconstruct the spread of Ames between labs, but the spread of weaponization know-how is equally key, albeit a little harder to trace.