Jeanne Guillemin discusses her book, "Biological Weapons: From the Invention of State-Sponsored Programs to Contemporary Bioterrorism." She speaks about the anthrax epidemic that took place in the Soviet Union in 1979. In 1992, Guillemin was part of the team that discovered that the largest inhalational anthrax outbreak in history was caused by an emission from a military facility. She mentions that the French, Japanese, Soviet Union, and the U.S. all had major biological weapons programs in the 20th century. She speaks of the Geneva Protocol of 1925 to ban the use of these weapons after the outrage of their use in World War I and that the U.S. took fifty years to officially ratify the protocol. Guillemin also talks about the Japanese using plague infected fleas on the population of Manchuria in World War II. She goes on to share that in researching her book, she discovered that most military leaders do not want these weapons as part of their arsenal.
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