Description

Pp. 291. “Tucker, an expert in biological weapons, has a sense of both the detail and the broad sweep of history that helps him make the story of smallpox as disease and as weapon fascinating and frightening. He reveals that the deadly infection was used as a weapon in American colonial and revolutionary times as well as in the Civil War, and he devotes much of the book to the WHO smallpox eradication program, which freed the world of it in 1978. D. A. Henderson, a major participant in that program, demonstrated the toughness and persistence needed to face down powerful politicians and bring religious leaders to heel. Nationalism and economics have often played negative roles in the fight against smallpox; for instance, the shah of Iran kept an epidemic secret so that celebration of the two-thousand-five-hundredth anniversary of the Persian Empire wouldn’t be overshadowed. Tucker describes in detail the long struggle over maintaining research stocks of the virus–an effort that rather leaves smallpox as a terrorist weapon looming threateningly over this well-written, thoroughly documented book.”