``Both sides also stockpiled plenty of anthrax,`` adds Block.
In 1969, President Richard Nixon issued an executive order unilaterally and unconditionally ending America`s bioweapons program, and all U.S. stockpiles were destroyed by 1972.
That same year, 160 nations signed a treaty banning all use of biological and chemical weapons. And 143 countries eventually ratified the treaty, including the United States, Russia, Iraq, Iran, Libya and North Korea. Fifty-two nations have not signed on, including Israel, Egypt and Somalia.
Failed treaty
Despite its noble intentions, says Block, the 1972 treaty lacks any significant provisions for enforcement or verification. As a result, a number of signatories to the treaty have maintained active bioweapons programs.
``I`m fairly confident that the U.S. has stopped producing biological weapons,`` he says, ``but the Soviet Union carried out ultra-secret bioweapons work right up until it collapsed in 1990.``
In 1979, 100 people and countless livestock died following the accidental release of anthrax spores from a bioweapons plant in the Russian city of Sverdlovsk - one of 40 such facilities that operated in the former Soviet Union.
Russia`s dismal economic situation raises the question of how out-of-work bioweapons scientists are managing to find gainful employment now, observes Block.
``Some experts contend that a low but significant level of bioresearch still exists today,`` he adds.
Block`s ultimate nightmare is that terrorists could somehow get access to the smallpox viruses being kept on ice at the Russian State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology - a fear bolstered by the testimony of a former official in the Russian biowarfare program, who claimed that smallpox-based weapons were being manufactured there as recently as 1992.
Iraq also has violated the 1972 bioweapons treaty by ma
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Contact: Mark Shwartz
mshwartz@stanford.edu
650-723-9296
Stanford University
11-Jan-2001