Weapons, biological Soviet research

The Washington Post published an article in August 1992 that stated that shortly after Yeltsin s admission, a confidential report on the extent of the Russian biological weapons program had been prepared by Anatoly Kuntsevich, a retired Russian general and a former director of Soviet research on chemical arms. Kuntsevich stated in the report that... 

America s participation in germ warfare research took an abrupt turn when, on November 25, 1965, President Richard Nixon proclaimed that the U.S. shall renounce the use of lethal biological agents and weapons, and all other methods of biological warfare. The U.S. will confine its biological research to defensive measures. In 1972, the United States, the Soviet Union, and more than 100 nations... 

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). 

There are currently two known stocks of the virus, one at the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta and the other at the State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology in Koltsovo, Russia. It is widely known that from 1980 until the mid-1990s researchers in the Soviet Union developed a highly virulent strain of Variola major for use as a biological weapon, with a significantly reduced incubation period (Henderson and Fenner 2001). 

The CBR perspective includes a discussion of the emphasis placed by the Soviet on chemical and biological warfare and the defensive measures that must be employed to assure that this country is adequately prepared to meet CW-BW aggression snould it occur. This effort must include an awareness of the existence of the threat, the need for accelerated research and development, and the necessity for full understanding of the nature of a chemical and biological attack. For unless the public fully understands the potentialities of biological and chemical weapons, we may be giving an enemy a crucial military advantage. 

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. ... 

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