Soviet Union weapons

Unlike anthrax, plague bacteria do not form spores, therefore are much more susceptible to environmental stresses and usually die after several hours of exposure to sunlight. Nonetheless, compared to other bacteria that do not form spores, plague bacteria are hardy. (The Soviet Union weaponized it for their BW arsenals, but American scientists—during the heyday of the US BW program—were unable to master the technique of mass producing Yersinia pestis.)... 

As the verse indicates, a danger from skinning tularemia-infected rabbits (and other rodents) has long been recognized by hunters and people in the fur trade. Tularemia (also called rabbit fever ) is caused by the bacterium Francisella tularensis. Both the United States and the Soviet Union weaponized tularemia, finding it to be an incapacitating BW agent. 

Eroding controls in the former Soviet Union. Insecure and oversized nuclear weapons and materials stockpiles in the former Soviet Union, with little transparency in their management, coupled with an oversized and underfunded nuclear complex, pose severe threats to U.S. and international security. The possibility that the essential ingredients of nuclear weapons could fall into the hands of terrorists and proliferating states is all too real, and immediate actions are needed to reduce this threat to the security of America and the world.. . . ... 

The usual method for disposing of pesticides in the USSR was walling them into spent quarries and mine shafts. For example, more than 3000 tons of pesticides were walled into unfitted vertical boreholes in the Krasnodar Krai. The complete destruction of pesticides has become a large environmental problem, comparable in scale to the problem of destroying chemical weapons stocks. About 40,000 tons of unused pesticides (banned or too old to be used) had accumulated in the countries of the former Soviet Union, about half of which are located in Russia. 

The military uses of HCN were first realized by Napoleon III, but it was not until World War I (WW I) that this application received widespread consideration. About 3.6 million kg of hydrogen cyanide were manufactured by France as a chemical weapon and used in WW I in various mixtures called Manganite and Bincennite, although its use was not highly successful because of limitations in projectile size and other factors. During WW II, the Japanese were armed with 50-kg HCN bombs, and the United States had 500-kg bombs. More than 500,000 kg of HCN chemical weapons were produced during WW II by Japan, the United States, and the Soviet Union, but it is not known to what extent these weapons were used in that conflict (Way 1981). 

Military weapons tests conducted at the Pacific Proving Grounds in the 1940s and 1950s resulted in greatly elevated local concentrations of radionuclides, and an accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the former Soviet Union in 1986 resulted in comparatively low concentrations of radionuclides dispersed over a wide geographical area. Both cases are briefly reviewed. 

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