Human beings are the only creatures on earth with an acute awareness of their own mortality, and as such, we morbidly pursue an obsession with chronicling and documenting those events and things that could lead to our premature deaths. Germ warfare, the subject of numerous magazine articles and books in recent months, is the death du jour. Most major nations have at least openly promised to stay away from biological weapons, but the temptation to stockpile these remarkably efficient devices has not been lost on the world's mass-murderers-in-waiting. Since the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Empire, the threat of rogue nations has increased tenfold, and while reliable adversaries such as Iraq have long been biological-weapons enthusiasts, even the smallest and most technologically basic of countries can now theoretically create weapons powerful enough to place entire populations at risk. Military scientist Ken Alibek worked high up in the Soviet Union's biological-weapons program, Biopreparat, before fleeing to the U.S. with enough chilling tales to keep even the most mildly paranoid Chicken Little up at night. Alibek carried with him the knowledge that Russia had been secretly testing biological weapons from the '70s through the '90s, well after treaties had been signed prohibiting just that, and in Biohazard he tells of his firsthand experiences building his country's armory of hazardous germs. The experiments he describes are almost surreal in their foolhardy aim for maximum casualties, and the mishaps he relays go beyond simple carelessness and into a realm shockingly close to self-destruction. Yet the most frightening aspect of Biohazard may not be what is written but what must—after debriefing and reclassifying—remain unwritten. If Russia had been so willing to unleash such terrible and terrifying diseases, then there are certainly other countries eager to do the same. Alibek's book only lends further credence to the concern that it could happen sooner than we might expect.