Word: germs
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...assassin--while a young man he took part in a 1959 attempt on the Iraqi Prime Minister--he once ordered a hit on George Bush. He has tried to build atom bombs and, U.N. inspectors believe, he is working to amass a stock of nerve gas and germ weapons. Finally--and this is crucial--he himself is the problem. Iraq experts agree that any successor, no matter how thuggish, would be less powerful, less malevolent, less dangerous. Isn't it moral--as with Hitler in 1938--to take this one life before he takes thousands more, or hundreds, or even...
...population is forever on the move. The U.S. is a sea into which evildoers can dive and remain submerged. Terrorists, like anyone else, have little difficulty obtaining guns or the simple makings for oil-barrel truck bombs. Now the new terror could be an even more lethal destroyer--microbes. Germ weapons are small, cheap, easy to hide, simple to dispense and horribly effective. They may be the threat of the near future...
...weapons experts have compiled a record of real achievement over the years. They have essentially dismantled Iraq's nuclear- weapons industry and accounted for the great majority of its Scud missiles. They have uncovered vast stocks of chemical agents and have been trying hard to find Saddam's germ-warfare arsenal. But they still have a lot of work to do in all those categories of weapons...
BIOLOGICAL These are the inspectors' biggest worry right now. Before the Gulf War the Iraqis had a secret germ-weapon program that brewed up and tested huge quantities of several lethal agents, including 8,500 liters of anthrax, 19,000 liters of botulinus and 2,500 liters of aflatoxin. (That's theoretically enough to kill everyone on earth.) They had "weaponized" them by loading them into bombs and missile warheads. Iraq claims it unilaterally destroyed all those weapons after the war, but has never offered proof. U.N. inspectors have been checking more than 80 suspected areas for clandestine storage...
...notion that disease originates in cells rather than tissues or organs, introduced in the mid-19th century by the German pathologist Rudolf Virchow, brought on just such a radical change in perspective. So too did the germ theory, based on British surgeon Joseph Lister's application of Louis Pasteur's work to prevent wound infections. Each was the result of thousands of meticulous observations made over many years. Virchow's studies were done in a university setting; Lister's in a laboratory that he and his wife set up in the kitchen of their home, where they worked tirelessly until...