Today in Technology History

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April 10

According to a recent report in the magazine Newsweek, the anthrax used in last year's bioterrorist attacks was "ground to a microscopic fineness not achieved by U.S. biological-weapons experts."

Of course, the U.S. government does not make or use biological weapons, as per a 30-year-old treaty. That treaty -- formally known as the "Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on their Destruction" -- was opened for signatures on April 10, 1972.

Supporters of the treaty, according to its text, were "determined, for the sake of all mankind, to exclude completely the possibility of bacteriological (biological) agents and toxins being used as weapons." Any country that signed the treaty agreed never to "develop, produce, stockpile or otherwise acquire or retain" any biological weapons. What's more, they agreed to destroy any biological weapons they had stockpiled. The treaty went into effect in 1975.

The treaty had no "enforcement mechanism" -- that is, it depended on an honor system, and all the participating countries had to trust one another's word. Unfortunately, some countries are less trustworthy than others. The Soviet Union, for instance, flagrantly violated the treaty, building "the largest and most advanced biological warfare establishment in the world," according to Ken Alibek, a high-ranking Soviet scientist and administrator who defected to the U.S. in 1992. In his chilling 1999 book Biohazard, Alibek describes how the USSR, one of the 140 signatories to the treaty, "stockpiled hundreds of tons of anthrax and dozens of tons of plague and smallpox near Moscow and other Russian cities for use against the United States and its Western allies."

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