Actually, do we need to keep samples anymore?

mRNA vaccines go from sequenced DNA to vaccine without any need to store or culture the original virus in the lab.

We could destroy our existing stockpile of smallpox and be ready to produce vaccines based on it faster than we could thirty years ago.

We couldn't validate new vaccines without access to the live virus, but then, if we aren't willing to expose hopefully-volunteers to a disease with a 30% mortality rate, we weren't really validating it anyway.

But yeah, I think we could probably unilaterally "disarm" and destroy our smallpox samples, and from a national security standpoint, I don't think we'd be significantly worse off; if the weaponized strain is significantly different from the old strain, enough to bypass vaccination, we'd need samples of the new thing in any case.

I'm not even sure we'd be substantially limiting new research on it, given that smallpox doesn't infect animals, I'm not sure if there's even any animal testing we could do with a live virus.

So yeah. Destroy the samples already.