In my opinion, yes. Once I talked to a government official about starting to develop vaccines and other immune system modifiers for aerosol application-because it is much easier to vaccinate troops using inhalers. And he said: “Ken, of course, we thought about this, but the problem is we don’t want anybody to think that we are developing aerosol vaccines as a model for biological weapons.” The US government is unbelievably overcautious. We don’t have to pay attention, for example, if Russia says the US is doing something. Russia has no right to accuse anybody. I know from personal experience that the US would never be interested in developing biological weapons for one very important reason: there are not enough people with enough knowledge to do that. The only person in the US with a sophisticated knowledge in this area of biological weapons is Bill Patrick (who helped run the US’s biological weapons programme from 1948 to 1969).

So what can the government do?

We need to take a very aggressive approach and start developing real protection against biological weapons. We need a special government board overseeing this work, which covers everything from detection, identification, protective garments and disinfection, to the organisational tactics of medical services, diagnostics issues, treatment, re-treatment, and urgent prophylaxis.

Given that the Soviet Union cheated on the biological weapons treaty for decades, everyone agrees we need enforcement. How are we to do it?

In my opinion-and I know some people are going to be disappointed in my response-this treaty is worthless. It isn’t worth the price of the paper it’s written on. Why? Because I believe enforcement is impossible. Research and production are easy to hide and difficult to prove. Timetables for inspections are very limited, and it is impossible to search countries like Russia and China with such limited timeframes. Iraq is a small country, but we were unable to find everything until Saddam’s son-in-law defected. But even in this case we have not “discovered” everything.

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