Soviet Union Biopreparat

Soviet Union research began earlier, in 1928 with typhus. Following World War II, the Soviet Union expanded its research efforts after obtaining Japanese biological and chemical weapon research data (1). At its peak, the Soviet military biological research division, the Biopreparat, employed up to 55,000 microbiologists, physicians, engineers and nontechnical personnel (1,2). 

Ken Alibek, First Deputy Chief of the Russian Biopreparat system, alleged he was informed by a senior Soviet military officer that the Soviet Union attacked the Afghan Mujaheddin with glanders on at least one occasion. According to Alibek, this would have the dual effect of sickening the Mujaheddin and killing their horses, their main mode of transportation [120, 280,286]. 

Much that is known about the former Soviet Union s BW capacities was revealed by two defectors Vladimir Pasechnik, the Soviet defector to England who revealed the BW activites of Biopreparat in 1989, and Kanatjan Alibekov (now Ken Alibek), who has given the West more detailed information about biological weapons research. From these important sources and others, William C. Patrick III— who developed offensive biological research for the United States—has surmised that BW research and development in the USSR paralleled ours very closely. ... 

TRILATERAL PROCESS. During the early 1990s, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) (and, after its dissolution, Russia), the United Kingdom, and the United States engaged in a secret diplomatic process known as the trilateral process. The United Kingdom and United States used this process in an attempt to clarify the nature of violations of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC) that took place in the USSR and to verily future compliance with the BTWC by Russia. See also BIOPREPARAT. 

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