*Even the anthrax attacks in 2001 in the United States, alarming as they were, did not cause mass casualties.

Indeed the German army in World War II avoided areas with typhus outbreaks, prompting one community to vaccinate its citizens in order to register false positives on the Weil-Felix diagnostic test. This saved the residents from deportation to concentration camps. E. S. Lazowski and S. Matulewicz, “Serendipitous Discovery of Artificial Weil-Felix Reaction Used in Private Immunological War,” ASM News 43 (1977): 300 – 302.

*It is a mistake to assume that the victim of a biological attack will automatically seek assistance or that he would be correctly diagnosed in any event. Some victims would wait until it was too late for effective treatment; some doctors might not recognize unfamiliar symptoms. In the case of infectious diseases such delay could be costly.

It is alleged that Leon Trotsky proposed at one time a modern telephone system for the new Soviet state, and that Stalin vetoed this idea with the remark that he could imagine no greater instrument of counterrevolution.