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Then I take it you hold the position that releasing smallpox against your attacker and causing an pandemic that eliminates 200,000,000 Americans is perfectly Constitutional.

I guess you and I will have to agree to disagree.

Then I take it you hold the position that releasing smallpox against your attacker and causing an pandemic that eliminates 200,000,000 Americans is perfectly Constitutional.

I don't appreciate you trying to frame my thoughts. Was the nuking of Hiroshima perfectly COnstitutional? What if the A bomb had been developed by private research and the only means of deployment was privately owned?

The use of small pax as a US GOVERNMENT POLICY was probably Constitutional since I cannot see any Constitutional prohibition.

Now was it moral or ethical? Looking back in retrospect it is easy to say that no, it wasn't.

Does the Constitution prevent Ross Perot or Bill Gates from owning private vessels of war? No.

Does the Constitution prescribe what weapons thoe privately owned vessels of war may or may not use? No. commissioned by the US government? No.

Lazamataz said: "Then I take it you hold the position that releasing smallpox against your attacker and causing an pandemic that eliminates 200,000,000 Americans is perfectly Constitutional."

The germ theory of disease was not well understood several hundred years ago. The word "malaria" means "bad air" and derives from the thinking that it was caused by odors or gas in the environment. This would complicate matters for our Founders since they would not be able to conceive of the control mechanism for inflicting injury at all, let alone selectively.

I have read of sieges during which the carcasses of dead horses would be catapulted across barriers to encourage disease among the besieged. I don't know for sure if this practice was used in post-Colonial America.

Cities during both the Revolutionary War and the Civil War would come under siege and would be bombarded with heated shot with the sole intention of starting fires to drive the occupants out. This seems pretty indiscriminate to me and yet it would have the desired effect of defeating an enemy.