Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War » (Bargain)

Stephen Engelberg has reported on national security for over a decade and is now investigations editor for the Times.

William Broad, a science writer for the Times since 1983, has twice shared the Pulitzer Prize. His most recent book is The Universe Below. All three live in the New York City area.

In this groundbreaking work of investigative journalism, Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg, and William Broad of The New York Times uncover the truth about biological weapons and show why bio-warfare and bio-terrorism are fast becoming our worst national nightmare.

Among the startling revelations in Germs:

• How the CIA secretly built and tested a model of a Soviet-designed germ bomb, alarming some officials who felt the work pushed to the limits of what is permitted by the global treaty banning germ arms.
• How the Pentagon embarked on a secret effort to make a superbug.
• Details about the Soviet Union's massive hidden program to produce biological weapons, including new charges that germs were tested on humans.
• How Moscow's scientists made an untraceable germ that instructs the body to destroy itself.
• The Pentagon's chaotic efforts to improvise defenses against Iraq's biological weapons during the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
• How a religious cult in Oregon in the 1980s sickened hundreds of Americans in a bio-terrorism attack that the government played down to avoid panic and copycat strikes.
• Plans by the U.S. military in the 1960s to attack Cuba with germ weapons.