Stardate 20011126.0833 (On Screen): Senator Leahy announced that the suspicious letter addressed to him contained enough anthrax to kill 100,000 people. This is not a useful announcement to make. It's also a crock.
It may be true, if you were to line up 100,000 people, and then carefully adminster precisely a fatal does to each of the without wastage. I think that unlikely to happen, and in the real world, nearly all of any toxic substance used as a weapon is wasted. The worst case plausible scenario for his letter was that it kill a few dozen people, perhaps even a few hundred. Note that in fact as far as anyone knows that particular letter didn't actually infect anyone at all.
Is Leahy blowing his own horn here? "Hey! I'm important! You know that because someone tried to kill me." Is receiving an anthrax-letter the new DC status symbol or something? (discuss)
