Soviet Union Sverdlovsk

In a rare concession, the Soviet news agency, Toss, admitted that there had indeed been outbreaks of anthrax in Sverdlovsk, caused by what it called poor standards of personal hygiene in handling contaminated food. The explanation did sound plausible, since it was well known that anthrax had not been eradicated from large areas of the Soviet Union, and that at the time of the Sverdlovsk incident articles had appeared in the local press advising people on how to treat Siberian Sore , as the disease was locally known. What little information had reached the west about Sverdlovsk tended to support this explanation.13... 

Robinson, J. P. P. Discussion of The Soviet Union and the Biological Weapons Convention , and a Guide to Sources on the Sverdlovsk Incident , Arms Control, vol. 3, no. 3, December, 1982. 

By the early 1990s, US intelligence was able to prove what it had suspected all along The Soviet Union had been producing weaponized bacteria at Sverdlovsk, in clear violation of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC) which it had signed and ratified years before in 1972. 

Before the 1980 meeting, the United States had gone pubHc with its suspicions about the incident. The Carter administration claimed that even though the Soviet Union had signed and ratified the BTWC, production of biological weapons had actually accelerated, and what had happened at Sverdlovsk was more than a case of tainted food. 

As the story finally emerged, seven years after the BTWC was promulgated and four years after it was put in force— with the Soviet Union one of its key signatories—a terrible accident occurred at a Soviet BW facihty in Siberia. A filter at the Compound 19 facihty in Sverdlovsk, where weaponized anthrax was being produced in massive quantities, was accidentally removed, allowing Bacillus anthracis spores to become aerosolized, and then vented from a high-level containment facility and into the air outside. The horrified Soviet scientists, as soon as they realized what had happened, raced to replace the missing filter, but it was too late. 

In 1930 Stranski received a Rockefeller fellowship and worked with Max Volmer in the Technische Hochschule (now Technische Universitdt), Berlin. In 1935 he joined the Ural Physical-Technical Institute in Sverdlovsk, Russia (at that time Soviet Union), and developed, together with E. K. Paped, the method of growing metal single crystals from a vapor phase. 

Apart from the uncertainty that the Sverdlovsk and yellow rain allegations have created with regard to the Biological Weapons Convention and the Geneva Protocol - uncertainty that encompasses the intentions of both superpowers - they have become involved in a wider controversy about the value of arms control agreements with the Soviet Union. Lawrence Eagleburger, a State Department official, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in February 1983,... 

Since the United States already had suspicions about Sverdlovsk (see, for example, J.P. Perry Robinson, Chemical and Biological Warfare Analysis of Recent Reports Concerning the Soviet Union and Vietnam, March 1980), the facility would presumably have been photographed prior to the incident comparison should have shown whether there was, for example, a new or patched roof. 

The World Health Organization (WHO) certifies that smallpox has been eradicated. 3 April At least 64 people die from anthrax in Sverdlovsk, Russia. Following the fall of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), the outbreak is shown to have been the result of an accidental release from a biological warfare (BW) production facility. 22 September The Vela Incident occurs, in which satellite Vela 6911 detects a double flash of the type known to occur during a nuclear explosion. 

---