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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (5369)	10/15/2001 9:47:40 PM
From: Hawkmoon	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

we aren't letting any of it go to North Korea or Iraq. No? I've heard rumours that N. Korea possesses at strain, and rumours that Iraq obtained some. But you're right that the US and Russia have kept strains in case it rears it's ugly head again and vaccines are required to be produced. But again, if you use biological warfare, it's preferable to use bacterial agents, rather than viral. And btw, lest we forget... there is economic biological warfare (aka.. hoof & mouth disease, West Nile Virus, wheat stem rust, rice blast.. etc) Hawk

To: Ilaine who wrote (5369)	10/16/2001 7:21:19 AM
From: RocketMan	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Those are the open stocks. There is, or was, widespread belief among analysts that North Korea and Iraq had hidden caches of smallpox, obtained from the old Soviet Union stocks. The head of the Soviet bio-weapons program (can't recall his name right now) left Russia for the U.S. and provided much of this information. And blood samples from North Korean soldiers showed recent immunization to smallpox. Same with Iraqui soldiers, but it was not clear whether those were recent or leftover from when everyone was vaccinated. That was in the early 90s as I recall, and the credibility of those reports was high enough that Clinton canceled the scheduled destruction of US stocks. Whether they still have smallpox (I understand it has to be cared for, in a special cooling unit, etc) we don't know. There was a NY Times article on that a few years ago, here is a report on that report expressindia.com