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could not afford nuclear weapons.
    The meaning of the Pacific trials was not lost on the supreme leader of the Soviet Union, Leonid Brezhnev, or on his advisers. Brezhnev was reportedly furious at his scientific people for having fallen behind the Americans. The Soviets believed that Nixon was lying, that he never really canceled the American bioweapons program. They thought he had hidden it away. So Brezhnev did exactly what Nixon was trying to head off. He ordered a secret crash acceleration of the Soviet bioweapons program in response to a perceived threat from the United States.
    In 1972, the United States signed the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on Their Destruction, commonly known as the Biological Weapons Convention. Soviet diplomats helped to write much of the language of the treaty, and the Soviet Union became one of three so-called depository states for the treaty; the other two were the United States and Great Britain. By making themselves depository states, the three nations offered themselves as an example to be followed. It was believed that the resources of the intelligence community and the vigilance and concern of the scientific community would serve to sound the alert to any violations of the treaty.
    But that belief turned out to be only a belief in the years following the treaty. For there was no way to verify whether or not violations were taking place, and the truth is that much progress was made in the development and engineering of bioweapons in various places around the world. This was not noticed for a long time. It was an invisible history.

Part Three
    D IAGNOSIS
    Monkey Room
    THE CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL, ATLANTA, GEORGIA WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, APRIL 22, 199-
                      
    THE WEATHER IN ATLANTA had turned glorious, blue, sunny, and hot. The late April air was filled with a drifting scent of loblolly pines. Northeast of the city center, Clifton Road winds through hilly wooded neighborhoods and goes past the headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control, a warren of buildings made of brick and concrete. Some of the C.D.C. buildings are new, but many are old and deteriorating and stained with age, offering visible evidence of years of neglect by Congress and the White House.
    Building 6 is a stained brick monolith, almost without windows, that sits in the middle of the C.D.C. complex. It was once an animal-holding facility that stored populations of mice, rabbits, and monkeys used for medical research. The C.D.C. grew and became so short of space that eventually the animals were moved elsewhere, and the animal rooms were converted to offices. They are the least desirable offices at the C.D.C., and therefore they are occupied by the youngest people. Many of these people are in the C.D.C.’s Epidemic Intelligence Service—the E.I.S., everyone calls it. About seventy officers enroll in the E.I.S. every year. During a two-year fellowship, they investigate outbreaks of diseases all over the United States and, indeed, the world. The Epidemic Intelligence Service is a training program for people who want to go into public health as a career.
    On the third floor of Building 6, inside a windowless former monkey room, Alice Austen, M.D., a twenty-nine-year-old E.I.S. officer, was on phone duty. She was taking calls, listening to people talk about their diseases.
    “I got something bad,” a man was saying to her. He was calling from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. “And I know where I got it, too. From a pizza.”
    “What makes you think that?” she said.
    “It was a ham and onion. My girlfriend got the disease, too.”
    “What do you think you have?” she asked.
    “I don’t want to, like, get too specific. Let’s just say I got a V.D.”
    “Have you seen a doctor?” she asked.
    “I’m installing Sheetrock for this guy, and he don’t give us no medical,” the man said.