Biological warfare was the furthest thing from his mind, Ken Alibek explains (in Biohazard), when he entered the military faculty of the Tomsk Medical Institute in 1973 to begin graduate studies as a cadet intern:
I was planning to become a military psychiatrist, until a professor gave me an assignment that changed my relationship to medicine. He asked me to analyze a mysterious outbreak of tularemia on the German-Soviet front shortly before the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942.
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The first victims of tularemia were German panzer troops, who fell ill in such large numbers during the late summer of 1942 that the Nazi campaign in southern Russia ground to a temporary halt. Thousands of Russian soldiers and civilians living in the Volga region came down with tularemia within a week of the initial German outbreak. The Soviet high command rushed ten mobile military hospitals into the area, a sign of the extraordinary rise in the number of cases.
Most of the journals reported this as a naturally occurring epidemic, but there had never been such a widespread outbreak in Russia before. One epidemiological study provided a telling statistic: in 1941, ten thousand cases of tularemia had been reported in the Soviet Union. In the year of the Stalingrad outbreak, the number of cases soared to more than one hundred thousand. In 1943, the incidence of disease returned to ten thousand.
It seemed strange that so many men had first fallen sick on one side only. The opposing armies were so close together that a simultaneous outbreak was all but inevitable. Only exposure to a sudden and concentrated quantity of tularemia could explain the onslaught of infections in the German troops alone. Seventy percent of those infected came down with a pneumonic form of the disease, which could only have been caused by purposeful dissemination.
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“It suggests that this epidemic was caused intentionally.”
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He pointed to the paper I had left on his desk.
“I don’t want to see this until you’ve given it some thought. And never … never mention to anyone else what you just told me. Believe me, you’ll be doing yourself a favor.”
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Years later, an elderly lieutenant colonel who worked in the secret bacteriological weapons facility in the city of Kirov during the war told me that a tularemia weapon was developed in Kirov in 1941, the year before the Battle of Stalingrad. He left me with no doubt that the weapon had been used.
The lesson of Stalingrad would not be forgotten by our biological warfare strategists. In the postwar years, the Soviet high command shifted its attention from battlefield deployment to “deep targets” far behind enemy lines, where there was no danger of infecting one’s own troops.
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The moral argument for using any available weapon against an enemy threatening us with certain annihilation seemed to me irrefutable. I came away from that assignment fascinated by the notion that disease could be used as an instrument of war. I began to read everything I could find about epidemiology and the biological sciences.