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Scourge by Jonathan Tucker, Atlantic Monthly Press, $26, ISBN
0871138301

I DIDN’T know my own country, Canada, might owe its existence to biological
warfare. During the American War of Independence, the British commander
defending Quebec sent civilians infected with smallpox out among Benedict
Arnold’s besieging troops. The resulting outbreak broke the siege.

That’s history. Is there really anything new to be said about smallpox?
Plenty, to judge by the number of exclamation marks I have scribbled in the
margins of my copy. It’s tough going to cover everything from the invention of
vaccination to the politics of the World Health Organization in one book, but I
had trouble putting Jonathan Tucker’s Scourgedown.

But isn’t smallpox itself history, since its much-vaunted eradication in the
1970s? Possibly the most fascinating part of the book is its highly personalised
account of that hair-raising and sometimes very unorthodox campaign. D. A.
Henderson, who led the assault, once told me they had “to break every rule in
the book” to eradicate smallpox. Now I know that was an understatement.

The scariest part of this book, though, is its account of why many people
believe that smallpox is not, in fact, dead. Tucker neatly recounts the past
decade’s horrifying revelations about biological weapons research, again with a
few surprises—even for a specialist.

Should we destroy the last official samples of the virus, now in freezers in
the US and Russia? Could some mad terrorist release smallpox again? Read Scourge
and decide.