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

To: Karen Lawrence who wrote (80102)	3/7/2003 1:34:31 AM
From: KLP	Respond to of 281500

Yes Karen. If you will read on BioWeapons, perhaps you will feel the same as I do. Perhaps not. If we are nuked, we just die. With Bio or Chemical weapons, some of us will live. But the question is: How and what to do. I will follow this with a good resource for you or anyone who really wants to understand the problem. I'm certainly no expert. You asked if we had our vaccines. To my knowledge, there aren't enough vaccine doses as yet for the general public. Have you seen otherwise. The government wanted all military, police, firemen and all medical first responders to have the vaccine first. If you see something newer than that, please let us know. I can't speak for all my family as they are all grown adults with kids, but I will get one as soon as they are available. As for delivery of some of this stuff...again lots of books...we know that Saddam has been working on weaponizing WMD (through his 2 son-in-laws who came to the US, and stupidly went back, only to be executed by Saddam) Here is something about one of the books I was referring to: Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World--Told from Inside by the Man Who Ran It by Ken Alibek, Stephen Handelman (Contributor) Editorial Reviews amazon.com Amazon.com In this fast-paced memoir, Ken Alibek combines cutting-edge science with the narrative techniques of a thriller to describe some of the most awful weapons imaginable. The result will remind readers of The Hot Zone, Richard Preston's smart bestseller about the Ebola virus. That book focuses on the dangers of a freak accident; Biohazard shows how disease can become a deliberate tool of war. Alibek, once a top scientist in the Soviet Union's biological weapons program, describes putting anthrax on a warhead and targeting a city on the other side of the world. "A hundred kilograms of anthrax spores would, in optimal atmospheric conditions, kill up to three million people in any of the densely populated metropolitan areas of the United States," he writes. "A single SS-18 [missile] could wipe out the population of a city as large as New York." Chilling passages like these, plus discussions of proliferation and terrorism, make Biohazard a harrowing book, but it also has a human side. Alibek, who defected to the United States, describes the routine danger of his work: "A bioweapons lab leaves its mark on a person forever." An unending stream of vaccinations has destroyed his sense of smell, afflicted him with allergies, made it impossible to eat certain kinds of food, and "weakened my resistance to disease and probably shortened my life." But it didn't take away his ability to tell an astonishing story. --John J. Miller --This text refers to the Hardcover edition. The New York Times Book Review, Philip Taubman ...a richly descriptive report on the Soviet program and Alibek's role in it. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition. This is meant kindly in return, Karen. You've made three posts to my one in which I asked you simply what you know about how smallpox will be disseminated in mass quantities to be a threat to US citizens. No answer. Secondly I asked if you and your family have gotten the vaccinations - since you are so concerned -- . For argument's sake, let's say some source can contaminate a wide area with smallpox. And let's say that area is where you live. At that point it will be too late to get vaccinated. Which leads me to the other question I had, have you and your family gotten yours?