How fearful are we that terrorists will eventually use biological weapons in an attack on the United States?
We have three things happening today that make the likelihood that a biologic agent will be used [on] civilian populations all coming together. One, we have a number of different terrorist groups that have different ideologies; they have different reasons for wanting to do something, but they want to do it. Number two, the infectious agents are increasingly available. The Internet has helped facilitate the mail order nature of obtaining these kinds of agents. And number three, the kinds of devices that we need to disseminate these agents in buildings, subways, and whole cities are now readily available, and in large part, have been improved because of the kind of micronization we do today with computers and so forth. We actually have created the devices to make these aerosols very effective. With biologic weapons, [there is] the potential for them to actually have a kind of echo impact, where the illnesses may occur for weeks after the initial hit. And the potential for some agents, pa
