It would seem that germ or toxin warfare would be at the very top of terrorist weapon lists intead of blowing people up. Why isn’t it used more? Is the ability to effectively weaponize and deliver toxins and germs like ricin and anthrax in open areas more difficult than most people think?
Short answer: yes.
Some of the challenges inherent in using chemical and biological agents include
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synthesizing the required large amounts without killing any of your own people (precision process control) or being discovered
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spreading heavier-than-air particulate matter in such a way that the density of your cloud remains lethal. If I breathe in one, ten, or even a hundred anthrax spores, I will probably survive. If the particles scatter effectively but then settle and land on the street, they will get all over my shoes, but will probably never infect me.
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spreading the particles without damaging them. Explosives can overheat your payload or subject it to excessive G-forces. Truck-mounted foggers don’t usually get a good enough distribution radius. Crop-dusting planes require a trained pilot, and an understanding that the residue in a crop-duster may be a poison that kills your biological weapon.
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safe handling. You need to keep your weaponized chemical or biological compound at the right temperature and pressure right up until it is distributed.
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creating the right particle size. I understand that the anthrax that got mailed to Congress was “too big”, and while it did make some people sick (and I think some people died) it would have been more lethal had the particles been more refined. This goes back to the first bullet, “precision process control.” Precision is not to be laughed at, and doubling your precision can often inflate the cost by an order of magnitude.
That said, it still scares the hell out of me – none of these are insurmountable problems. They require lots of funding, good scientists, time, and a little bit of luck to succeed. They also require stealth if you’re going to do them here in America. If I owned a crop-dusting plane and a Middle Eastern gentleman expressed an interest in flying it, I think I would get his contact information and “get back to him”[sup]1[/sup]. If I worked at Wal-Mart and somebody asked “how many of these humidifiers do you think I’d need to humidify three city blocks?” I’d probably do the same. 
As far as bang for the buck, it seems to me that a suicide bomber is more cost-effective than a costly and complex chemical weapons operation.
1 - by “get back to him” I mean “report him to the FBI and await further instructions.”
Bacteria are easy to grow, easy to store, and easy to transport. However, they aren’t easy to weaponize.
If you wanted to do it the easiest way you would need to get yourself a big-ol’ bioreactor, and a crop duster. Then you would grow up your culture in the bioreactor, dump it in the crop duster and dust NYC with it.
Now you would want to use a culture that can’t be traced. So getting it from ATCC probably wouldn’t be your best course of action. You could steal it from a lab, but you would need access and know what you were looking for.
If you’re a terrorist, your best bet would be a wild-type culture. In which case, you’re going to have to find it environmentally. It’s not hard, but you have to know what you’re doing.
However, the problem with wild type is that they’re generally very easily treated with antibiotics. So you’d have to screw around a bit with your culture to get it resistant. This is where you really need some knowledge, and a pretty decent lab.
So you go to college and get yourself a degree in Microbiology, change your garage into a fully functioning BSL-4 . So now you’re cooking. Literally. You’re cooking up agar and cultures, and you get yourself a really good resistant pathogen.
Unfortunately, no one tells Microbiology students how to weaponize bacterial cultures except for the crop-dusting method. The problem is that you, or someone you know, is going have do a lot of handling of the culture while it’s still alive and growing well. Too bad. Now your volunteer gets sick and drops dead from infection.
But you’re motivated, and you press-on. So now you get a job with the government at a weapons facility. You learn how to polish, and make bacteria good and infect-able. So now you go home, and get your culture, and grow it up. Now it’s too damn bad that the equipment, is controlled, expensive, and there’s no way you can get it without people asking questions.
It’s at this point where it becomes a pain in the ass and you decide to get some depressed kid to blow himself up instead.
So essentially, the answer is Yes.
Basically what Jurf said. But I’m a Microbiologist and I don’t get enough questions!
Your answer confuses me. You acknowledge that the problems of creating and distributing a bio-weapon are many and varied difficult problems. And that a suicide bomber is more cost effective and easier. A crop duster over a large city is going to be noticed before he has gone 10 blocks. And yet you are still scared of Bioweapons? I find this to be most illogical.
Any practical application of a bioweapon by a terrorist would be more effective if done with conventional weapons. Heck, a determined cell of 30 terrorists could easily cause a blackout in Minneapolis and assault the Mall of America on the day after Thanksgiving killing thousands with far less technical expertise than required to create a bio-weapon.
So are you also scared of getting shot by a stranger in your home? Let’s put a little risk analysis into our illogical fears!
A contageous bioweapon is very much to be feared. That is, a disease that can be passed from person to person.
If smallpox ever gets “out of the bottle”, well…