Properly delivered from a plane, a few grams of botulinum toxin could kill hundreds of thousands, if not more, in a major city.

Silent Death by “Uncle Fester” has the full process instructions, including details on optimal delivery.

The LD-50 of botulinum injected into chimpanzees is 50 nanograms.

Combine it with effective microbots, and you have a situation where anyone can kill anyone without accountability.

This is one of the reasons I want a Friendly AI “god” (really more like a machine) to watch over me is that the dangers will simply multiply beyond human capability to manage.

Here’s a bit of an excerpt from my version of Silent Death:

Botulin is the second most powerful poison known, taking the runner up position to a poison made by an exotic strain of South Pacific coral bacteria. The fatal dose of pure botulin is in the neighborhood of 1 microgram, so there are 1 million fatal doses in a gram of pure botulin.

The bacteria that makes botulin, Clostridia botulinum, is found all over the world. A randomly chosen soil sample is likely to contain quite a few spores of this bacteria. Spores are like seeds for bacteria, and can withstand very harsh treatment. This properly will come in very handy in any attempt to grow botulism germs, because other germs can be wiped out by heating in hot water, leaving the spores to germinate and take over once they cool down. Much more on this later.

Another very important property of botulism germs is that they can’t survive exposure to air. The oxygen in it kills them, but does not kill their spores. Whatever toxin the germs made before their demise also survives. This needs to exclude air from the environment where the germs are growing is the most difficult engineering challenge to the aspiring cultivator of Clostridia botulinum.

Finally, all botulism germs are not created equal. There are subgroups within the species that make toxins that vary immensely in their potency. They are called types: A, B, C, D, E, F and 84. Type A is by far the most deadly, followed by type B and 84. THe other ones we won’t even bother to discuss. Also within a single type, there are individual differences in how much toxin a given strain will produce. Breeding and gene manipulation have a lot to do with this, and our government (and the Russkies as well) have put a lot of effort into picking out strains that make an inordinate amount of toxin. The champion as of about 30 years ago was the Hall strain, but I’m sure that they’ve come up with something better since then. The Hall strain of type A was able to make 300 human fatal doses of botulin per ml of broth it grew in.

Here we will explore the two major levels of use for botulin as an attack weapon: the individual or small group assassination, and the large scale assault with the poison in a manner similar to nerve gas.

Very informative! As a Russian, I love the “Russkies” anachronism.

99.9% of the population will dismiss the above as not a big deal, due to wishful thinking. It’s all just words on the page, until people start dying.