But other scientists urged holding onto smallpox stocks. They pointed out that the eradication campaign might not, in fact, have been a complete success. In the 1990s, Soviet defectors revealed that their government had set up labs to produce a weaponized form of smallpox, one that could be loaded in missiles and launched at enemy targets. After the fall of the Soviet Union, those biological warfare labs were abandoned. No one knows what ultimately happened to the smallpox viruses used for that research. We are left with the terrifying possibility that ex-Soviet virologists sold smallpox
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