Sverdlovsk accident

We re a healthy few klicks out of Sverdlovsk. South-east, I reckon. Coughs and splutters broke up the announcement like static on a news broadcast. I m told they put a degree of spatial divergence on every beam, so any accidents occur well out in the open. ... 

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. 

The article was similar to one which had appeared some three weeks earlier in an emigre journal, Possev In January 1980 Possev ran another article, now claiming that the accident had taken place at Sverdlovsk, where it alleged there had been an outbreak of anthrax caused by an explosion at a military base. A cloud of anthrax bacteria was reported to have been released, causing deaths at a rate of 40 or 50 a month. In February the Daily Telegraph took up the story, reporting that a thousand people had died after an explosion at a... 

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