The Odds of Smallpox Virus or Nuclear War in the Syrian Conflict

Sometimes there can be hidden dangers of pushing too far on people with nowhere to go. President Assad of Syria and his relations have nowhere to go except to the Hague perhaps if the war can push the regime out of office. Is the U.S. Government prepared for a possible outbreak of weaponized plague or smallpox viruses in case some former Soviet citizen sold a pound or two to Iran or Syria in the 90's and it is used as a last resort to create a world of chaos better suited to a fleeing despot?

Reading through a book on the history of the end of the Soviet-U.S. Cold war and specifically on the problem of weapons of mass destruction I developed an awareness that smallpox that was made quantitatively and improved to resist anti-biotics (16 flavors) and also to attack the immune system in a second wave to kill off survivors had a reasonable chance of being hidden by former military officers and mobsters during and after the end of the cold war. With so much in existence and with low security hiding a gallon or two of smallpox virus in Siberia or selling one to Iran wouldn't have been too hard.

Because Iran sent agents to buy radioactive materials and hired former Soviet Biological weapons designers to lecture on manufacture of bio-war agents it is reasonable to speculate that some few pounds of plutonium or bio-war agent may have walked over to  Syria at some point.

The 2009 book 'The Dead Hand' has interesting details on the vast quantities of unsecured plutonium and highly enriched Uranium available in the former Soviet Union during the 1990's. With its value being so high-Iran would have paid a billion for enough plutonium to build a bomb, it isn't likely that a lot of that stuff didn't end up underground with remote g.p.s. coordinates to the buried treasure existing in someone's memory as the sole clue to its existence. Evidently many Soviet weapons and radioactive research facilities didn't even know exactly how much of the stuff they had.

The Soviet Union had a hidden bio-war design program from 1927 to the 1994, and apparently there are still three major and several minor biological war research and/or production facilities in existence in Russia that are not open to inspection. Well, Russia is a dangerous place with all the hidden stuff perhaps held by mobsters and communists etc. Perhaps Putin wants to be able to be competitive on a live agent battlefield.