A bit lengthy this.
Inspired by Europe's postings on biowarfare, Iran and the coming WWIII. (Aren't we up to at least IV by now?)
Bioweapon possibilities from the 20the Century.
http://cns.miis.edu/pubs/opapers/op9/op9.pdf
Is a nice little file on the 1971 Aralsk, Kazakhstan smallpox outbreak and Soviet Biowar Program.
Yekaterinberg suffered a similar Anthrax? outbreak in 1979. It is interesting to note that no one under the age of 24 was ever diagnosed as having contracted the agent. Anthrax is not so choosy in its choice of victims raising the possibility that it was in fact some new related agent that targeting older, middle-aged individuals preferentially.
In 1990 and 1991, Russian scientists found a way to splice Venezuelan equine encephalitis (a brain virus) into the genome, or DNA, of smallpox. The result was a "recombinant chimera virus" called Veepox. It looks like smallpox under the microscope but isn't. Nor did the standard vaccines work against it.
Similarly Variant U Ebola which Biopreparat had in storage in Vector in weaponized form (planned for deployment on Soviet ICBMs but was overtaken by the collapse of the USSR) was another of their prime weapon developments.
At its peak Biopreparat employed 25,000 people and many left for jobs abroad and took samples with them (no doubt to enhance their value to their prospective employers) including it is believed samples of Variant U Ebola.
And in the 21st Century the possibilities just keep getting worse.
The recent discovery of IL-4-gene-added-smallpox as a possible supersmallpox variant based on experiments in mice using IL-4-gene-added-mousepox. The mousepox variant was intended to be a new and effective sterilizing agent for mice but instead attacked their immune systems and killed them even those mice vaccinated against standard mousepox. A human specific variant using smallpox is expected to be just as lethal to humans. Standard smallpox cases have a 30% lethality dropping to 0% for vaccinated individuals, hemorrhagic smallpox has a 98% lethality dropping to 50% for vaccinated individuals. Such a supersmallpox variant, it is believed would by analogy to the mousepox variant be 100% lethal in humans regardless of whether they were vaccinated or not.
Similarly the ability to map the genomes of various agents such as plague and polio already have been done and then to synthesize them from the gene map from scratch is a technology that already exists.
The weaponization of gene therapy techniques if they can ever get that to work is another nightmare scenario.
It has been demonstrated that putting together a bioweapons program with properly trained people is easy and cheap compared to nukes. The properly trained people being the important thing as errors and misfortunes in the USSR's bioweapons programs repeatedly demonstrated.
All of the above would argue against the Iranians in their current fiscal straits spending so much money as they certainly are on missiles and nuclear weapons both. If they had such mass casualty WMDs, then they should announce their existence as a way to deter their enemies from carrying out hostile/aggresive actions.
In Saddam's case he was under UN sanctions to give up all WMDs but for political reasons domestic and foreign wanted to intimidate others into thinking he still had them. So aside from a few hidden leftovers what we wound up with in Iraq was a regime that claimed to have no WMDs ("wink, wink, nudge, nudge") right now but had had them in the past (and could you please lift those sanctions now?) This led to a just-in-time concept of WMD development/manufacture where the regime had squirreled away all the necessary hardware and raw material such as the several hundred tons of yellowcake recently shipped from Iraq to Canada (purchased somewhere in Africa perhaps?), plus a bunch of dual-capable factories. The idea being that the day sanctions ended it was back to business as usual, and a reconstitued Iraqi WMD capability in days to weeks at most. Certainly the amount of chemical weaponry that turned up just in Amman, Jordan and was discovered less than a day before it would have been used to gas about 80,000 of the capital's populace would argue he had such weapons. Certainly his conduct was such that he convinced everyone including all the world's major intelligence agencies that he did have at least a minimal WMD capability that would only grow worse over time. In the end, he failed to deter anyone and instead by his aggresive actions provoked the United States into attacking him.
Today with US oil imports approaching 70% of all US consumption any threat to the flow of oil in the Middle East is a threat to numerous vital US interests - economic, political and military. Given the current hyperpower status of the US, provoking the US is foolish without some means to deter or defend against US responses.
Today it is Iran and its leadership that is behaving in a belicose and reckless fashion. Threatening genocide against the Israelis and WMD attacks against the US and its allies.
If the Iranian government doesn't want to go the way of the Ba'ath party in Iraq (best case) or get a serious overdose of Instant Sunshine (worse case), then continuing to threaten to use such capabilities as soon as they are developed and deployed is not the way to prosper. It is in fact precisely because of their belligerent rhetoric that is seems unlikely that Iran has any serious global WMD capability that they can use at this time to include biowarfare agents. Some argue that because biowarfare capabilities are so easy to develop that Iran almost certainly has them and if attacked would use them. If that is indeed the case, then a nice backchannel communique to that effect would certainly calm everyone down, since it would go a long way to proving that (barmy rhetoric about 12th Imams aside) they are rational actors as they have had a WMD capability yet Israel and the US have not been attacked by them.
If they continue developing the missile and WMD technologies, then while they may get lucky and stymie any action politically until after they do indeed have global WMD capabilities and/or regional nuclear missile capabilites. Sadly, so long as they go out of their way to convince everyone that they are not rational actors, possession of such WMD capabilities will not act as a deterrent towards their enemies but as a provocation.
When someone keeps saying that soon as he gets a gun that he is going to shoot you dead, do you ignore him or call the cops? Sadly in international affairs it is a state of nature out there and the only cops as it were are the US and its allies.* You can wait and maybe millions will die or you can act now and stop a potential genocide before it starts, but if you act now you'll never have the certainty of knowing you were right, but at least those millions will not die.
In the case of Iran and its many terrorist proxies the lack of deterrence if you are proved wrong and millions do die is that there is no deterrence possible.
http://belmontclub.blogspot.com/2003/09/three-conjectures-pew-poll-finds-40-of.html
As Wretchard points out, this ends badly all around but most particularly for the 'usual suspects'. If you don't know who's guilty then surely "God will know his own." (Also referred to as Option Zero.)
*As for those who would like to call someone else. Recent events in Georgia would argue against calling Russia and the Chinese complicity in the ongoing genocide in Darfur agues against calling them.
