Among weapons of mass destruction, biological weapons are more destructive than chemical weapons, including nerve gas. In certian circumstances, biological weapons can be as devastating as nuclear attacks--a few kilograms of anthrax can kill as many people as a Hiroshima-size nuclear weapon.

Biological weapons can range in lethality from salmonella used to temporarily incapacitate to super bubonic plague engineered for mass casualities. Biological production and weapon-producing facilities can be small, inexpensive, and inconspicuous. Equipment to develop biological arms may have legitimate commercial and research purposes, as well as devious applications. Unlike nuclear weapons, biological weapons do not require unique ingredients that are ready objects of arms control.

Stephen Morse, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, has said that Mother Nature is the greatest terrorist. Since infectious diseases were widely dismissed as a world health threat some 30 years ago, nature has loosed some 30 new or reemerging infectious diseases on the world. An influenza pandemic was averted 2 years ago by the alert and energetic actions of epidemiologists in Hong Kong and around the world. Slower reactions might have permitted the pathogen's genes to shuffle amoung human and avian infections to make the flu strain readily transmissible from person to person.

* excerpts from an article by David W. Siegrist, Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, Arlington, VA, USA