The ‘finding’ of some ‘mislaid’ anthrax by the Iraqi government in early March confirms that the spectre of biological warfare is still looming. But, if terrorists equipped with biological weapons seem to be the latest scourge of mankind, some even more cunning and deadlier enemies have been with us for millennia: bacteria that have craftily evolved to evade all attempts to outwit them, in a futile arms race that no side seems able to win. When Alexander Fleming discovered the antibacterial effect of penicillin in 1928, it seemed that science had finally hit upon the ultimate weapon. But we gave away our strategic advantage; by misusing antibiotics, we turned these seemingly God‐sent cures into the very tools for training the enemy for even greater deviousness. The war seemed to be lost in the late 1990s, when multi‐drug‐resistant Staphylococcus aureus breached the last line of antibiotic defences, vancomycin. But times are changing. One after the other, our bacterial foes are surrendering their secret arms to the microbial weapons inspectors: the sequencers and genomics experts who can lay bare their genomes in a matter of weeks, and inspect their armaments and biological weapons plants. The fruits of these grand microbial sequencing, genomics and proteomics efforts are having a varied effect on the war against bacterial infections. In some engagements, notably the development of new antibiotics, they are proving to be merely a useful addition. In vaccine research, however, they have already caused no less than a revolution. A brief glimpse at the TIGR (The Institute for Genomic Research, Rockville, MA, USA) website (www.tigr.org) reveals the extent of our intelligence about the bacterial world: in addition to the 91 published genome sequences, another 90, many of them belonging to human pathogenic bacteria, are underway (Table 1). A tax‐paying citizen would rightly ask, “So …