Isegoria

Ken Alibek explains (in Biohazard) the Sverdlovsk anthrax leak of 1979:

The story went public a few months later—in a way. In November 1979, a Russian magazine published by anti-Soviet émigrés in what was then West Germany reported that an explosion in a military facility in the southwest section of Sverdlovsk had released a cloud of deadly bacteria the previous April. It claimed that as many as a thousand people had died. Western news agencies picked up the story, quoting U.S. intelligence officials who claimed that the accident was clear evidence of Soviet violation of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention.

Moscow denied the reports. On June 12, 1980, a statement published by the official Soviet news agency TASS declared that there had only been a “natural outbreak of anthrax among domestic animals” in the Sverdlovsk region.

“Cases of skin and intestinal forms of anthrax were reported in people, because dressing of animals was sometimes conducted without observing rules established by veterinary inspections,” the statement said, adding that all of the patients had been treated successfully in local hospitals.

This was a lie, of course.

[…]

I learned the truth by talking to people who had been at the plant when the accident happened, and to army officers who had been in charge of the cleanup.

[…]

As I rose higher in The System, I applied some of the lessons of Sverdlovsk to the plants under my control.

[…]

On the last Friday of March 1979, a technician in the anthrax drying plant at Compound 19, the biological arms production facility in Sverdlovsk, scribbled a quick note for his supervisor before going home. “Filter clogged so I’ve removed it. Replacement necessary,” the note said.

[…]

The fermented anthrax cultures had to be separated from their liquid base and dried before they could be ground into a fine powder for use in an aerosol form, and there were always spores floating in the air. Workers were given regular vaccinations, but the large filters clamped over the exhaust pipes were all that stood between the anthrax dust and the outside world.

After each shift, the big drying machines were shut down briefly for maintenance checks. A clogged air filter was not an unusual occurrence, but it had to be replaced immediately.

Lieutenant Colonel Nikolai Chernyshov, supervisor of the afternoon shift that day, was in as much of a hurry to get home as his workers. Under the army’s rules, he should have recorded the information about the defective filter in the logbook for the next shift, but perhaps the importance of the technician’s note didn’t register in his mind, or perhaps he was simply overtired.

When the night shift manager came on duty, he scanned the logbook. Finding nothing unusual, he gave the command to start the machines up again. A fine dust containing anthrax spores and chemical additives swept through the exhaust pipes into the night air.

Several hours passed before a worker noticed that the filter was missing. The shift supervisor shut the machines down at once and ordered a new filter installed. Several senior officers were informed, but no one alerted city officials or Ministry of Defense headquarters in Moscow.

In the next few days, all the workers on the night shift of a ceramic-making plant across the street from the facility fell ill. The plant had been directly in the path of the wind that night. Within a week, nearly all of them were dead.

By then hospitals were admitting dozens of patients from other areas of town who had worked in the plant’s vicinity. Curiously, there were few women or children among the victims. Years later, some Western analysts wondered if the Soviets had developed a “gender weapon” capable of attacking only adult males. But women seldom worked night shifts in production plants, and few children would have been playing in the streets late on a Friday night.

[…]

That it happened on a Friday night helps explain why the workers were so anxious to get home and why so many people had passed by that evening, heading for a drink at a nearby bar.

[…]

The Soviet Union later claimed that 96 people were stricken with the disease and 66 died. The scientist who was working in the Sverdlovsk facility at the time told me the death toll was 105, but we will probably never know for sure.

[…]

Sverdlovsk residents were informed that the deaths were caused by a truckload of contaminated meat sold on the black market. Printed fliers advised people to stay away from “unofficial” food vendors. More than one hundred stray dogs were rounded up and killed, on the grounds that they represented a danger to public health after having been seen scavenging near markets where the meat was sold. Meanwhile, military sentries were posted in the immediate neighborhood of the plant to keep intruders away, and KGB officers pretending to be doctors visited the homes of victims’ families with falsified death certificates.

[…]

A Northwestern University physics professor named Donald E. Ellis, who was in Sverdlovsk at the time on an exchange program, reported that he noticed nothing unusual in the city. “I don’t exclude the possibility that something may have occurred,” he told The New York Times years later, “but I think either I or my wife would have sensed some effort to protect us from it. We … were not aware of any restrictions.”

[…]

“We couldn’t understand why people continued to die,” a general who was there told me much later. “We assumed that this was a quick, one-time exposure and that our mopping-up would be completed in a few days, but there were deaths for a month and a half after the release.”

The coverup was responsible for turning what began as a medical emergency into a small epidemic.

The local Communist Party boss, who was apparently told that there had been a leak of hazardous material from the plant, ordered city workers to scrub and trim trees, spray roads, and hose down roofs. This spread the spores further through “secondary aerosols”—spores that had settled after the initial release and were stirred up again by the cleanup blitz. Anthrax dust drifted through the city, and new victims arrived at the hospitals with black ulcerous swellings on their skin.

The cutaneous form of anthrax, contracted when spores enter the body through a cut or abrasion on the surface of the skin, occurs naturally in rural areas around the world, especially those with large herds of domestic cattle, sheep, and goats. It is the most common form of anthrax and is rarely lethal when treated with antibiotics such as penicillin. Russians refer to it as the “Siberian ulcer,” as it manifests itself through the formation of small and localized lesions on the surface of the skin. An outbreak of cutaneous anthrax in the region was credible, but it wouldn’t explain why so many factory workers, who could have had no contact with animals, were suddenly sick, or why so many died.

Anthrax spores can survive for years—even decades—in a dormant state. Animals will become infected while foraging for food. The spores germinate in a matter of hours and multiply in their hosts, returning to spore form when they die or on contact with oxygen. Men and women who work with infected animals—butchers, tanners, farmers, and workers in textile mills—become infected in turn through abrasions, by inhaling spores or drinking contaminated water, or, in rare cases, by eating contaminated meat.

[…]

Inhalational anthrax was first identified in the early nineteenth century when workers in a textile mill were exposed to spores released into the air by the new industrial processes developed to make wool. It is often called wool sorters’ disease.

As soon as an anthrax spore enters the body it germinates and begins to multiply. A few days will pass before the anthrax bacteria produce toxins which, in the simplest terms, bind to the protective membranes of target cells and cripple the ability of white blood cells to fight off disease. It is the toxin, and not the bacterium itself, that ravages the body and is responsible for death. If an anthrax victim is treated with high doses of penicillin injected into the bloodstream at short intervals for a week to ten days before the first toxins are released, chances of survival are almost 100 percent. But antibiotics can do little to fight the anthrax toxin. Combinations of penicillin and streptomycin have been used at this stage, but the prognosis is grim.

The headlong trajectory of pulmonary anthrax can be blocked if penicillin is administered before the first symptoms appear. I was told that thousands of Sverdlovsk residents were given antibiotics and vaccinated immediately after the first cases were reported, but it was too late to save the victims who had already begun to suffer from the fever, shortness of breath, and distinctive dark swellings along their chest and neck that mark the onset of pulmonary anthrax.

[…]

I was told by army personnel involved in the cleanup that the corpses of the victims were bathed in chemical disinfectants and that much of the documentary evidence, including hospital records and pathologists’ reports, was destroyed. To add verisimilitude to the cover story, several black-market vendors in Sverdlovsk were imprisoned on charges of selling contaminated meat.

[…]

The Communist Party chairman of Sverdlovsk at the time of the accident was Boris Yeltsin, the first leader of post-Soviet Russia.

[…]

In 1981, Brezhnev signed a secret decree ordering the relocation of all biological weapons-making equipment and materials from Sverdlovsk to Stepnogorsk, a small biological research facility operated by Biopreparat in the remote deserts of northern Kazakhstan.

[…]

For the good of our biological warfare program, Chernyshov’s mistake had to be kept quiet. A thorough investigation of what had happened in Compound 19 would raise too many awkward questions even inside our own government about our activities. This was further proof that secrecy was valued above all else in our system—even if it endangered our own safety. In the West, an accident of such magnitude would have been investigated ad nauseam and its lessons distributed, however quietly, to those working in similar areas. Our coverup virtually guaranteed further disasters.

A few months later I ran into another veteran of Sverdlovsk, Lieutenant Colonel Boris Kozhevnikov. In the year following the accident, he told me, a work crew was ordered to take a boxload of 250-liter containers filled with dried anthrax to storage bunkers inside Compound 19. Kozhevnikov had been assigned to escort the workers as they rolled the containers on carts toward the bunker a few hundred feet away. One cart hit a bump, and a container fell open. I was aghast.

“What did you do?” I asked him.

“I just closed it.” He shrugged.

Hastily, he added that he had ordered disinfectant poured everywhere. No one had fallen sick. And, of course, his superiors were not informed.

Ken Alibek describes (in Biohazard) a time he was called into the lab to handle a problem:

I stripped my clothes off and stuffed them into one of the lockers lining the walls. Then I walked into a second room, where a young nurse sat behind a desk. I had a nodding acquaintance with her outside the lab, having seen her walking her large dog, and was embarrassed at first to appear before her naked. But she always maintained a businesslike air as she wordlessly stuck a thermometer under my armpit and examined every inch of my body, including my teeth and gums. Any sign of bleeding from a cut or bruise, even from a nick while shaving, was grounds for barring further entry.

The buzz of the ventilators grew louder as I passed through the next rooms, picking up the separate items of my anti-plague suit: white socks and long johns, hood and cotton smock, respirator, goggles, boots, and gloves. The entire procedure was reversed on the way out, although the gloves were always the last to come off. Even with long practice, I never managed to complete the process in under fifteen minutes. That night, I was faster than usual.

[…]

The air pressure in the pipeline feeding one of the tularemia rooms had begun to drop precipitously. A technician had been working there an hour or so before, but she had gone home. She may have forgotten to reset the valves.

[…]

I opened the door and took a few steps inside. It was pitch black. I reached back, groping in the darkness for the light switch. When I finally hit the switch and looked down, I found I was standing in a puddle of liquid tularemia.

It was milky brown—the highest possible concentration. The puddle at my feet was only a few centimeters deep, but there was enough tularemia on the floor to infect the entire population of the Soviet Union.

[…]

I was only two feet or so from the doorway, but I was trapped. If I tried to back out I would bring the disease with me into the corridor—and, potentially, into the rest of the zone.

[…]

I poured the solution over my boots. He handed me more bottles as I moved backward, tiny step by tiny step, pouring all the time.

[…]

The change in air pressure must have caused the culture to escape through the filter system.

[…]

I tried to imagine what might have happened if I had lost my footing on the slippery floor.

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When we regrouped in Zone One, I advised Nazil and the others to take the antibiotics we had on hand for emergencies.

[…]

It didn’t occur to me that such a minor mishap would need to be relayed up the chain of command, but the KGB chief in Kirov had called his bosses in Moscow, who called Kalinin early that morning.

By then, the story had become hopelessly mangled.

[…]

I had told Nazil and the others to take antibiotics, but for some inexplicable reason I hadn’t taken any myself.

[…]

By the time I’d left Building 107 that night, I had been completely disinfected. I must have caught the disease in a matter of seconds, between leaving the sanitary passageway and entering the shower. But how? Then it came to me. I must have brushed my face while taking off my mask and hood. A hundred cells, an amount smaller than a speck of dust, would have been enough to infect me through an imperceptible cut or scratch.

[…]

Tularemia can be inhaled or ingested or contracted through bites or scratches. It rarely passes directly from person to person, but it can be carried by fleas, ticks, rats, and other rodents and can enter the bloodstream through minor abrasions. The disease is marked by a sudden onset of fever and chills, often followed by an incapacitating headache. As soon as it enters the body, the bacteria will begin to multiply locally, gradually spreading to lymph nodes and distant organs, including the liver and spleen.

Even after successful antibiotics were developed in the 1940s, tularemia was considered an ideal weapon for the battlefield due to the speed with which it could overwhelm an opponent’s medical resources, leaving hospitals and physicians unable to cope with a flood of patients in need of constant treatment.

If taken immediately, antibiotics can contain the spread of the disease and kill invading bacteria in a matter of days. The later the drugs are administered, the longer a victim will suffer. Particularly acute cases have been known to linger for months.

Tetracycline was thought to be the best antidote for tularemia, but I had no way of knowing how well it would work against the strain we had produced in our lab. In exceptional cases, certain highly virulent strains are capable of overcoming ordinary antibiotic treatment and can be fatal.

I called a friend’s wife, a physician at the local hospital, and told her I needed tetracycline urgently. Under normal circumstances I would have required a prescription, but in a small town it was easy to cut corners.

“How much?” she asked, without registering the least surprise.

Calculating quickly, I asked for three times the customary dose. There were advantages to Soviet secrecy. I would have had a hard time getting that amount of tetracycline in the United States without a good explanation. I told her not to tell anyone.

I wanted a high-impact, crash dose. If it didn’t work, I’d have to check myself into the hospital. Self-treatment had its limitations.

[…]

By the end of the day, my fever had begun to drop. I stayed home the next day, after calling in with a cold. By Wednesday or Thursday, three days after my exposure, I was better, although I continued to take high doses of tetracycline for the next ten days. I was able to return to work the following Monday.

Ken Alibek describes (in Biohazard) the spotless gray three-story structure at Omutninsk that had been designated as the pilot plant for tularemia:

Building 107 was structured according to the box-within-a-box principle, to keep the deadliest organisms out of the surrounding countryside. If you could lift the roof, it would resemble a Russian matryoshka doll.

[…]

The outer shell of Building 107 was Zone One. It housed the offices of administrative and security personnel and laboratories used for noninfectious organisms. Workers dressed in plain white lab coats and white pants milled in the corridors. Daylight poured through the windows, and the walls were plastered with resolutely upbeat Party banners: “Fulfill our Five-Year Plan in four years!” “Long Live the Communist Party of the Soviet Union!” It was possible to spend an entire day in Zone One without being aware of what was happening deeper inside the building.

Zone Two contained “hot” laboratories for work with pathogenic materials, storage vaults, animal cages, and giant sixteen-ton and twenty-ton fermenters, which soared to the upper levels of the building.

Zone Three, nestled inside Zone Two, displayed the fruits of our engineering efforts since 1973: rows of gleaming steel centrifuges and drying and milling machines.

Both inner zones had their own air supply system. Noisy generators pumped air through an overhead latticework of exposed pipes, keeping the atmosphere inside at pressures slightly lower than normal to prevent contaminated air from seeping into Zone One. Hydrogen peroxide was sprayed into the air from nozzles in the ceiling. The distinctive smell of that particular disinfectant will stay with me forever. It wasn’t just its smell that made an impression: for the dozen or so years I worked inside the labs, my black hair was bleached a dirty blond.

In the early days of the Cold War, Ken Alibek explains (in Biohazard), when the USSR appeared to be leading the world in space and nuclear weapons technology, Soviet biology was paralyzed:

We had gone from being one of the world’s powerhouses of immunological and epidemiological research to a backwater of demoralized and discredited scientists. The cause was one man—a Russian agronomist named Trofim Lysenko.

[…]

Lysenko, who once bragged that he never reported the results of an experiment that contradicted his theories, claimed his work proved that environment was more important than heredity in the evolution of plants and animals. Calling genetics a bourgeois discipline that insulted the proletariat, he emerged as a paragon of the “new” Soviet science based on Marxist materialism.

[…]

Soviet biologists knew about the work in the West thanks to smuggled journals and reports, but research conducted in Russian labs was heavily restricted. The influence of Lysenko—who lived until 1976—was too powerful.

[…]

Only one scientist had the clout, and the courage, to speak up. His name was Yury Ovchinnikov, vice president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and a renowned molecular biologist.

[…]

He decided to resolve the crisis in Russian biology by appealing to the self-interest of the masters of our militarized economy. In 1972, he asked the Ministry of Defense to support a genetics program devoted to developing new agents for biological warfare.

[…]

Ovchinnikov found an influential ally in Leonid Brezhnev. The one-time metallurgical engineer who led the Soviet Union for eighteen years until his death in 1982 regarded the magisterial akademiks of the Soviet scientific establishment with a respect bordering on awe. Ovchinnikov was soon giving private lectures on genetics to Brezhnev and his aides.

[…]

Launched by a secret Brezhnev decree in 1973, the program aimed to modernize existing biological weapons and to develop genetically altered pathogens, resistant to antibiotics and vaccines, which could be turned into powerful weapons for use in intercontinental warfare. The program was called Enzyme.

[…]

The Enzyme project focused on tularemia, plague, anthrax, and glanders—all diseases that had been successfully weaponized by our military scientists but whose effects had been undermined by the development of antibiotics. But there were many other agents under review, including viral agents such as smallpox, Marburg, Ebola, Machupo, Junin, and VEE.

[…]

Over the next decade, dozens of biological warfare installations disguised as centers of pharmaceutical or medical research were built throughout the country. In Leningrad, the Institute of Ultra-Pure Biopreparations was created to develop new techniques and equipment for cultivating pathogenic agents. At Omutninsk, in the pine forests near Kirov, a bacteriological research and weapons production facility was constructed alongside an old munitions plant operated by the Ministry of Defense. An entire “research city” for genetic engineering went up at Obolensk, just south of Moscow, and the Lyubuchany Institute of Immunology was established in Chekhov, also in the Moscow region, to investigate antibiotic-resistant disease strains. For work on viruses, the enormous Vector research and testing compound was built near the Siberian city of Novosibirsk.

[…]

Between 1979 and 1989, the Soviet Union conducted large-scale tests of an aerosol containing Bacillus thuringiensis—a harmless simulant—over the Novosibirsk region, using a plane with civilian markings. Similar experiments were run at a military proving ground near the city of Nukus in the Kara Kalpak Republic, and in the Caucasus. Another harmless agent, Serratia marcescens, was used in several tests conducted by the Institute of Biological Machinery inside the Moscow Metro system during the 1980s. Ballistic missiles containing simulants of biological agents were fired in tests over the Pacific Ocean between 1960 and 1980.

[…]

When our biological warfare program was operating at its peak level, in the late 1980s, more than sixty thousand people were engaged in research, testing, production, and equipment design throughout the country. This included some thirty thousand Biopreparat employees.

Money was never a problem. As late as 1990, when Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was promising the world major cutbacks in our arsenals, I was authorized to spend the equivalent of $ 200 million, including $ 70 million for new buildings. The total figure spent that year on biological weapons development was close to a billion dollars.

‘…]

In April 1975, two months before I graduated from the Tomsk Medical Institute, a polite white-haired man in civilian clothes came from Moscow to the drab industrial town in Siberia where I had spent the previous two years in graduate study.

He wanted to meet several of the students who had specialized in epidemiology and infectious diseases. By then, I was one of them. In the intervening years, I had attended lectures on all forms of weapons of mass destruction and learned methods of protecting troops against nuclear, biological, and chemical attacks. No one ever suggested that we had a biological weapons program of our own. Instead, we were warned that as our enemies had them, it was vital for us to understand how they worked.

[…]

I also assumed he was not telling the entire truth when he spoke of biological defense. A special knowledge comes with growing up in a state like the Soviet Union. You were constantly alert to the probability that what you were being told had little relation to the message that was being conveyed.

[…]

“One more thing,” he called out. “Don’t tell your friends or teachers about this conversation. Not even your parents.”

One of the Soviets’ most successful biological warfare programs, Ken Alibek explains (in Biohazard), was created by the Ministry of Agriculture:

A special division was established to research and manufacture anti-livestock and anti-crop weapons. The division was given the uninspired title of Main Directorate for Scientific and Production Enterprises. The biowarfare program was code-named “Ecology.”

Scientists at the agriculture ministry developed variants of foot-and-mouth disease and rinderpest for use against cows, African swine fever for pigs, and ornithosis and psittacosis to strike down chickens. Like anti-personnel biological weapons, these agents were designed to be sprayed from tanks attached to Ilyushin bombers and flown low over a target area along a straight line for hundreds of miles.

This “line source” method of dissemination could cover large stretches of farmland. Even if only a few animals were successfully infected, the contagious nature of the organisms ensured that the disease would wipe out agricultural activity over a wide area in a matter of months.

Many of the ministry’s facilities were installed in the centers of towns and cities, to keep their military connection camouflaged. This suggests how little those who ruled our lives worried about our health.

Across the street from the apartment block where I grew up in Alma-Ata (now Almaty), the former capital of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Kazakhstan, a large, rusting factory served as a makeshift playground for children in the neighborhood. It was a fantastic world of hulking machinery and cavernous tunnels, made all the more alluring by the large Keep Out signs posted conspicuously on the property. We would crawl through the fence on afternoons after school and, shifting through piles of metal, would occasionally stumble on odd-smelling canisters, painted in army green. Luckily, we never managed to open them.

Many years later, going through some old reports, I discovered that the factory was used by the Ministry of Agriculture until the early 1960s to make anti-crop and anti-livestock agents. It was called Biokombinat.

The Soviet Union’s approach to biological warfare took a new turn in September 1945, Ken Alibek explains (in Biohazard), when Soviet troops in Manchuria overran a Japanese military facility known as Water Purification Unit 731:

The unit, commanded by Lieutenant General Shiro Ishii, experimented with anthrax, dysentery, cholera, and plague on U.S., British, and Commonwealth POWs. During the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, porcelain canisters of fleas infected with plague and other primitive biological weapons were used in air raids that killed thousands of rural Chinese.

The captured Japanese documents were sent to Moscow, where they made absorbing reading. They included blueprints for biological warfare assembly plants, far larger and more complex than our own. Japan’s program had been organized like a small industry, with a central production facility fed by continuous research and development.

[…]

In 1946, a year after the war ended, a new army biological research complex was established at Sverdlovsk.

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.

[…]

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.

[…]

“It suggests that this epidemic was caused intentionally.”

[…]

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.”

[…]

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.

[…]

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.

I don’t recall ever hearing the name tularemia growing up, but I’m pretty sure I was vaguely aware of something called rabbit fever — if only because I’d seen the warning against rabbititis in Hare Tonic:

“And then suddenly everything’d go black!”

Tularemia is a debilitating illness, Ken Alibek explains (in Biohazard), rife among wild animals and common in the Rocky Mountains, California, Oklahoma, parts of eastern Europe, and Siberia:

It is a hardy organism, capable of surviving for weeks, sometimes months, in decaying animal corpses. Tularemia is primarily transmitted to humans by ticks, mosquitoes, and wild rabbits, though squirrels, sheep, cats, and dogs have also been identified as carriers. While highly infectious, it almost never spreads directly from one person to another.

Victims can be laid up for weeks with chills, nausea, headaches, and fever. If left untreated, symptoms usually last two to four weeks, but they can continue for months. Francisella tularensis is lethal in 30 percent of untreated cases.

After World War II, scientists in the United States, Britain, and Canada developed tularemia for use on the battlefield, where it could immobilize an entire division through the intensive medical care required for each stricken soldier.

Soviet commanders considered tularemia an unpredictable weapon for close-quarter tactical maneuvers. The risk of infecting one’s own troops was high. But we had obtained, from a leading international research institute in Europe, a strain capable of overcoming immunity in vaccinated monkeys.

Our civilian credentials ensured that no questions were asked when we requested it. As far as we knew, there had never been an attempt anywhere in the world to weaponize a vaccine-resistant strain of tularemia. For Kalinin, the project represented a chance to prove what Biopreparat could do.

Five hundred monkeys were ordered from Africa for tularemia tests on Rebirth Island, he explains:

Importing that many animals at one time without arousing suspicion was not as difficult as it sounds. The arrangements were made well in advance by clandestine overseas trading associations run by the Soviet Ministry of External Trade, which also supplied us with the cages and other special equipment.

[…]

Since we were testing a vaccine-resistant weapon, all of the monkeys had to be immunized before they were exposed.

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There was no telephone at the test center, and the only communication with Aralsk was through cryptograms on the army’s closed-circuit communications network.

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Nearly all the immunized monkeys died.

[…]

The next year we conducted new tests with an even more efficient dry variant of tularemia, following all the procedures meticulously, and the new version of weaponized tularemia entered the Soviet arsenal.

[…]

Meanwhile, at Rebirth Island, everything connected to the tularemia test, from research notes to blood samples to the monkeys’ corpses, had to be incinerated.

[…]

Open-air testing at Rebirth Island stopped in 1992. Records of what happened there no longer exist.

Over the centuries, Ken Alibek explains (in Biohazard), armies have used primitive methods to spread pestilence:

The Romans dropped poison into wells to contaminate their enemies’ water supplies. The English gave blankets smeared with smallpox to Indians in the eighteenth century during the French and Indian Wars. Confederate troops in the American Civil War left corpses of animals to rot in ponds along the path of Union forces. And during World War II, Japanese planes dropped porcelain bombs containing billions of plague-infected fleas over Manchuria.

[…]

Soviet scientists combined the knowledge gained from postwar biochemistry and genetic research with modern industrial techniques to develop what are called “aerosol” weapons—particles suspended in a mist, like the spray of an insecticide, or a fine dust, like talcum powder.

Temperature and weather conditions will determine the success of an aerosol’s dissemination. Bacteria and viruses are generally vulnerable to sunlight; ultraviolet light kills them quickly. Heavy rain or snow, wind currents, and humidity impede their effectiveness.

[…]

A bioweaponeer will know to strike at dusk, during periods when a blanket of cool air covers a warmer layer over the ground—a weather condition called an inversion, which keeps particles from being blown away by wind currents.

We packed our biological agents in small melon-sized metal balls, called bomblets, set to explode several miles upwind from the target city.

[…]

Primitive aerosols lose their virulence and dissipate quickly. In our labs, we experimented with special additives to keep our agents from decaying when transported over long distances and to keep them alive in adverse weather conditions.

[…]

We tested a variety of animals, including rabbits and guinea pigs, but monkeys, whose respiratory systems are so similar to ours, were the most effective surrogates for humans. An average person takes in ten liters of air every minute. A monkey inhales four. If four particles of an agent in a given volume of air killed at least 50 percent of the monkeys exposed to an aerosol, we could assume that ten particles would have an equally lethal effect on human beings.

Our standard measure of success for a biological weapon was referred to as Q50, representing the amount needed to infect 50 percent of all exposed human beings in one square kilometer of territory. The Soviet Union devoted an enormous amount of time and money to developing concentrated aerosols that could reach the Q50 level with minuscule numbers of bacterial cells or viral particles.

The most effective biological weapons go on killing long after they are used. Some viruses, such as Marburg, are so hazardous that casually inhaling as few as three microscopic viral particles several days after an attack would be enough to kill you. Biowarfare strategists often look beyond the immediate target to focus on the epidemic behavior of disease-causing agents.

Unlike nuclear weapons, which pulverize everything in their target area, biological weapons leave buildings, transportation systems, and other infrastructure intact. They should properly be called mass casualty weapons, not weapons of mass destruction.