The most complete account readers have ever had of the history and current status of American biological warfare research, The Killing Winds is both expose and cautionary tale.

        As an ultimate image of terror, a test tube of colorless liquid may one day take a place next to the mushroom cloud. According to U.S. Army calculations, just one plane spraying the right mixture of deadly germs in the winds over New York City could conceivably kill half the area's eight million inhabitants.

        In 1987, with the U.S. government continuing to insist that the Soviet Union has broken the treaty banning such horrific weapons, momentum is building for an insidious new arms race.

        This is the dire message of this meticulously researched book by science reporter Jeanne McDermott. Blending historical research with personal reporting, McDermott tells the story of America's flirtation with what has sometimes been called "the poor man's atomic bomb." She outlines the secret post-World War II pact with Japan that enabled the United States to take advantage of Japanese biological warfare experiments on human subjects. She sorts out conflicting claims in the "Yellow Rain" controversy. She reports on incidents that have imperiled both researchers as well as innocent - and ignorant - civilians. And she details how the U.S. Army continues to study tularemia, Q-fever germs, and cobra venom - at an annual cost that quintupled between 1981 and 1987 - insisting all the while that American research is "strictly defensive" in nature. The Killing Winds also shows how the advent of gene splicing may create an even more insidious technology of silent, odorless, invisible, and cheap mass destruction.

        More than just a compelling reading experience, this book will force public debate on an issue that threatens life on this planet. In the words of Admiral Gene R. LaRocque, director of the Center for Defense Information: "Jeanne McDermott expose biological warfare as sophisticated savagery. The subject is terrifying, but we must pay attention."

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        Jeanne McDermott is a frequent contributor to Smithsonian, and has written for The Wall Street Journal, Popular Science, Geo, and other publications. During the 1984-85 academic year she was a Vannevar Bush Fellow in the Public Understanding of Technology and Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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