About the small pox, I'm having some difficulty understanding how anyone who wants victory over someone else, us or them, would think that using a contagious disease will help them get it. It's likely to cause as many problems for them as it is for us.

I'm sure, if someone did decide to use it, they would have their key people vaccinated, but it's unlikely that they would be able to have very many of the rank and file and local populace vaccinated. Certainly not in a place like Afghanistan. Or Somalia.

And every war effort depends on many people besides the officers. People who wage war depend upon many every day citizens for support. Even the kind of bio terrorism that is spreading anthrax requires massive support from ordinary citizens. Without the thousands of postal workers who keep the mail moving, there would be no way to deliver the weapon.

Using small pox could kill a lot of people in the US, but it would also kill large numbers of people throughout the rest of the world. By destroying the support systems that the perpetrators would need to depend on to do any more damage, or to achieve supremacy, killing a sizable percentage of the world's population would, in the end, render them pretty ineffective in the long run. I don't see how anyone, even someone who appears to be thick, would think that small pox would be an effective weapon to use to achieve victory.

Also, the vaccine that we have on hand here in the US can be used as after-exposure protection. Even after exposure, recieving the vaccine can protect people from the disease. We have a pretty sizable supply of the vaccine available in the event of a small pox outbreak, and we're in the process of making more. Some people in the US would likely die, but probably not as many as the agressors might anticipate. If the contagious bio-terrorism were to be waged by people in a third world country, it's possible, maybe even likely, that they would sustain more casualties than us.

Keep in mind, also, that the terrorist networks are spread throughout counties all over the world, including the US. If we're thinking in terms of cancer, we had probably better change our analogy from that of a tumor that can be removed surgically, to a cancer that has metastasized to many parts of the body. With such a cancer, there is no surgical way to remove it. It has to be gotten rid of through other means.

One of the ways that is currently being experimented with is to cut off the blood supply that feeds the cancerous cells, but leaves the healthy cells intact. I think we can find ways to accomplish this with regard to the terrorist organizations as well.