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Sorry, Cat, but "simple" anthrax dispersal methods like throwing the stuff around in a subway, explosive dispersal of packets, etc. have a kill likelyhood in the dozens or hundreds per packet. A full fledged aerial dispersion of anthrax of the quality used in the letters in 2001 could be expected to kill one to three million people with only hundreds of pounds of agent if the weather was "right" and the "crop dusting" accurately placed (within a few hundred yards.)

Both of those methods sound a whole lot simpler than putting up a GPS guided missle or drone.

That's if they use anthrax.

The Soviet Smallpox Accident
ew information about an apparent accident in the former Soviet biological weapons testing program three decades ago has raised some troubling questions about our own nation's ability to protect its citizens against a potential terrorist attack. The open-air test of a Soviet smallpox weapon in 1971 caused a small outbreak of the disease in a port on the Aral Sea, in what is now Kazakhstan, even among people who had been vaccinated.

Although Moscow has never acknowledged either the outbreak or the open-air test, researchers at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, with the help of Kazakh officials, have prepared a report on the incident. They conclude that two infants and a young woman, none of whom had been vaccinated, died from a rare hemorrhagic form of smallpox. Seven survivors who had been vaccinated contracted mild to serious cases of the disease. The outbreak was contained by quarantining hundreds of people and vaccinating almost 50,000 residents within two weeks, a demonstration that public health responses can be effective.

The report infers from circumstantial evidence that the outbreak was triggered by airborne viruses from a germ warfare test on an island in the Aral Sea. The viruses infected a crew member on a research vessel that is said to have come within nine miles of the island, and she in turn spread the virus to others in the city of Aralsk. Although some experts think the Aralsk outbreak may have had natural causes, a former general in the Soviet germ warfare program told a Moscow newspaper it had been caused by field-testing of germs.

If that is true, it raises the worrisome possibility that a smallpox attack might be carried out with plumes of germs that could infect large numbers of people simultaneously. The incident also raises the possibility that the Soviet virus was unusually potent and thus able to overcome at least partially the protective effects of vaccination. This makes it imperative that the Bush administration press Russia for full details on what smallpox strain was tested and how it was disseminated. Such knowledge is vital to determine whether new vaccines or drugs might be needed to protect against that strain's falling into the hands of terrorists.

One consequence of the end of the U.S. offensive bioweap-ons program in 1969, as a result of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, was the loss of technical understanding of these weapons. Many scientists believe that such weapons don't work: they are uncontrollable, liable to infect their users, or impractical. A handful of influential scientists also held pas-sionately to the view that the Soviet Union was not violating the Conven-tion-despite intelligence reports that Biopreparat was set up in 1973, the year after the USSR signed the agreement.

Ken Alibek, deputy chief of research and production for Biopreparat before his defection, responded to this view about bioweapons: ``You test them to find out. You learn how to make them work,'' he told Richard Preston. ``I had a meeting yesterday at a defense agency. They knew absolutely nothing about biological weapons. They want to develop protection against them, but all their expertise is in nuclear weapons. I can say I don't believe in nuclear weapons work. Nuclear weapons destroy everything. Biological weapons are more .. beneficial... They don't destroy buildings, they only destroy vital activity.... People'' (New Yorker 3/9/98). The ultimate capitalist weapon?

From the first defector from Biopreparat, Vladimir Pasech-nik, Western intelligence learned that the U.S. was a ``deep target''-far enough away so that the Soviet Union wouldn't be contaminated. Inspectors found the same problem there as in Iraq: denials, evasions, large rooms stripped of equipment. ``These people just sat there and lied to us, and lied, and lied.''

William Patrick, one of a handful of living American scientists with a hands-on understanding of bioweapons, had doubts about whether bioweapons work-until the summer of 1968. At that time, a long series of open-air tests was conducted downwind from Johnston Atoll, as elaborate as the first tests of the hydrogen bomb, involving enough ships to constitute the world's fifth largest navy. The method: a line-source laydown. A Marine Phantom jet flew low, releasing dust from a single pod under its wing.

U.N. inspectors found a videotape of an Iraqi Phantom jet doing a line-source laydown over the desert.

Though the agent used was susceptible to antibiotics, Dr. Patrick pointed out that to treat 30,000 infections in, say, Frederick, MD, would require more than 2 tons of antibiotics, delivered overnight. ``There isn't that much antibiotic stored anywhere in the United States'' (Preston, ibid.).

Then there's the problem of bioengineered smallpox or other agents, also discussed in Preston's article (available at http:// cryptome.org/bioweap.htm).