One of the most terrifying of human diseases, smallpox covered the skin with hideous, painful boils, killed a third of its victims, and left the survivors disfigured for life. Over the centuries, the disease afflicted rich and poor, royalty and commoners, and repeatedly altered the course of human history. In Scourge, Jonathan B. Tucker tells the dramatic true story of smallpox and draws some important lessons for the future. No safe way of preventing smallpox existed until 1796, when an English country doctor named Edward Jenner developed a vaccine against it. Over the next 170 years, vaccination banished smallpox from industrialized countries, but it remained a major cause of suffering and death in the developing world. In 1967, the World Health Organization launched a global campaign to eradicate smallpox. After a heroic effort, the last natural outbreak was snuffed out a decade later. During the 1980s, Soviet leaders cynically exploited the world's new vulnerability to smallpox by mass-producing the virus as a strategic weapon. In wartime, the deadly agent would have been loaded into missile warheads targeted on American cities. After a Soviet defector exposed this top-secret program in 1992, the recognition of smallpox as a potential military and terrorist threat triggered a series of urgent debates over how to respond. Scourge tells the riveting history of smallpox, the heroic efforts to eradicate it worldwide, and the looming dangers it poses to the world today.