When I saw that Annie Jacobsen’s Biological War was coming out, I decided to revisit Ken Alibek’s Biohazard, which I read soon after 9/11 and the mysterious anthrax attacks — 25 years ago. He opens with his bona fides:
Between 1988 and 1992, I was first deputy chief of Biopreparat, the Soviet state pharmaceutical agency whose primary function was to develop and produce weapons made from the most dangerous viruses, toxins, and bacteria known to man. Biopreparat was the hub of a clandestine empire of research, testing, and manufacturing facilities spread out over more than forty sites in Russia and Kazakhstan. Nearly every important government institution played a role in the Soviet biological weapons program: the Ministry of Defense, the Ministries of Agriculture and Health, the Soviet Academy of Sciences, the Communist Party Central Committee, and, of course, the KGB.
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Over a twenty-year period that began, ironically, with Moscow’s endorsement of the Biological Weapons Convention in 1972, the Soviet Union built the largest and most advanced biological warfare establishment in the world. We were among the 140 signatories of the convention, pledging “not to develop, produce, stockpile or otherwise acquire or retain” biological agents for offensive military purposes. At the same time, through our covert program, we stockpiled hundreds of tons of anthrax and dozens of tons of plague and smallpox near Moscow and other Russian cities for use against the United States and its Western allies.
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Less than a decade ago, I was a much-decorated army colonel, marked out for further promotion in one of the Soviet Union’s most elite military programs. If I had stayed in Russia, I would have been a major general by now, and you would never have heard my name. But in 1992, after seventeen years inside Biopreparat, I resigned from my position and fled with my family to the United States. In numerous debriefing sessions, I provided U.S. officials with their first comprehensive picture of our activities.
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Bioweapons are no longer contained within the bipolar world of the Cold War. They are cheap, easy to make, and easy to use.
He wrote that in 1999.
Biotech is arguably AI’s most promising application.