Word: lethal
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...naked eye. Even the infectious dose, which is between 8,000 and 10,000 spores, is smaller than a speck of dust. It?s totally odorless and tasteless as well. There are other ways to get anthrax, via the skin, for example, but the inhaled version is the most lethal...
Federal agents have already turned up some worrisome evidence. One discovery that causes shivers: among the belongings of suspected terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui, sources tell TIME, was a manual showing how to operate crop-dusting equipment that could be used to spray lethal biological, chemical or radiological toxins into the air. On Sept. 16 the government temporarily grounded all crop dusters and warned farmers and pilots to put even their most modest planes under guard...
...among terrorists. That's because the raw materials are relatively easy to get, and the finished products don't have to be kept alive. But chemical weapons aren't well suited for inflicting widespread damage. Unlike germs, chemical agents can't reproduce, observes Tucker. "You have to generate a lethal concentration in the air, which means you need very large quantities." To kill a sizable number of people with sarin, for example, which can be absorbed through the skin as a liquid or inhaled as a vapor, you would need something like a crop-dusting plane--which is why investigators...
...Biological Weapons Germ warfare has been around since at least the Middle Ages, when armies besieging a city would catapult corpses infected with the black plague over the walls. Today the bugs authorities most fear are anthrax (a bacterium) and smallpox (a virus). Both are highly lethal: the former kills nearly 90% of its victims, the latter some 30%. Anthrax is not communicable; smallpox, on the other hand, can be transmitted with horrifying ease from one person to another. "The feelings of uncertainty, of who is infected, of who will get infected, are the main advantages of biowarfare," says Stephen...
...Disease Control in Atlanta and at Vector in Koltsovo, Russia. But experts believe that Russia, Iraq and North Korea have all experimented with the virus and that significant secret stashes remain. Even more worrisome are reports that Russia used genetic engineering to try to make anthrax and smallpox more lethal and resistant to antibiotics and vaccines. (The U.S. put a similar program on hold...