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Part of the risk stems from the fall of the Soviet Union. As my friend Nathan Myhrvold notes in his paper "Strategic Terrorism," an international treaty banned bioweapons in 1972, but the Soviet Union continued its program into the 1990s--"thereby producing thousands of tons of weaponized anthrax, smallpox, and far more exotic biological weapons based on genetically engineered viruses. No one can be certain how far either the germs or the knowledge has spread since the collapse of the Soviet Union." The chances that terrorists will get their hands on these existing weapons are compounded by the fact that the science behind engineering pathogens is no longer the sole province of highly trained scientists working in secretive government programs. Thanks to the advances in molecular biology of the past few decades, undergraduate students at hundreds of colleges and universities around the world can learn everything they need to know to engineer a biological weapon. And some scientific journals have published information that a terrorist could use to concoct a new pathogen, decisions that have led to vigorous debate about how to share research knowledge without adding to the risk. We haven't yet seen a mass attack using an engineered bioweapon, but it is certainly not out of the question. In fact, during the Cold War, Soviet and American labs produced bioengineered anthrax that was resistant to antibiotics and evaded every vaccine. A nation-state or even a small terrorist group that developed smallpox that resisted treatment and vaccines would be capable of killing over a billion people. A new pathogen could be designed that is highly communicable and lethal, but doesn't cause symptoms right away. Such a pathogen would spread quietly around the world, perhaps for years, before arousing suspicion. HIV, which evolved naturally, works this way; although people can infect others very quickly after acquiring it, their health doesn't fail for almost a decade,