[iwar] [fc:Soviet.plans.for.germ.warfare.might.be.source]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2001-10-15 17:30:47
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From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net>
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Date: Mon, 15 Oct 2001 17:30:47 -0700 (PDT)
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Subject: [iwar] [fc:Soviet.plans.for.germ.warfare.might.be.source]
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             Soviet plans for germ warfare might be source
                       Irish Times, Oct. 15, 01

 The Soviet Union produced large quantities of biological and chemical
weapons some of which were far more deadly than anthrax. Seamus Martin
reports that experts have expressed concern lethal substances may have
been smuggled out in the chaos that followed the break-up of the USSR

RUSSIA: In the Urals city of Sverdlovsk, now Yekaterinburg, in 1979 an
outbreak of anthrax killed 69 people. The response of the local
Communist Party boss, Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin, was typically
Soviet. The disease had come from animals. It could not have had
anything to do with germ warfare because the USSR had signed an
international convention to stop producing biological weapons in 1972.

Nearly two decades later that same Party boss admitted, as
non-communist President of Russia, that the fatal outbreak was caused
by a leak from a secret unit producing germ warfare materials.
President Yeltsin issued a decree banning biological warfare
production. Western experts believe that this decree was ignored by
the military scientific complex and that anthrax was by no means its
most frightening product.
When I investigated biological and chemical warfare production for The
Irish Times in 1993 the Soviet Union had broken up and the chaos that
ensued led the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute
(SIPRI) to express its concern that materials could be smuggled out of
the former Soviet Union with relative ease.
With the utmost disregard for its international obligations Soviet
Union's biological weapons programme did not get seriously under way
until after the 1972 convention had been agreed.
An organisation known as Biopreparat was set up. It included 19
scientific research institutes, six production plants and a biological
weapons store in Siberia. More than 25,000 people were preparing germ
warfare materials.
Each branch of Biopreparat had a specific task. An institute in
Koltsov near Novosibirsk in Siberia dealt with haemorrhagic fevers and
Venezuelan encephalitis. In Obolensk 60 miles south of Moscow work was
done on plague and anthrax, in Leningrad (now St Petersburg) studies
were carried out on tularaemia and on increasing the combat
effectiveness of bacteria.
The Obolensk centre had aerosol dissemination test chambers in which
tethered animals were subjected to a fine spray from the ceiling. The
animals were subjected to plague, anthrax and other diseases as well
as new, genetically-engineered cocktails.
On November 20th, 1992, Russia issued regulations for the control of
the export of "infections, genetically changed forms and fragments of
genetic material which can be used in the creation of bacteriological
(biological) and toxic weapons". No specific end-user certificate was
required under these regulations thus allowing materials to be passed
on to unnamed third parties. But even the strictest of rules would
have been impossible to implement in the anarchic conditions which
prevailed after the dissolution of the USSR. In 1989, Dr Vladimir
Pasechnik, a director of one of the Biopreparat institutes, defected
to Britain and the first major breakthrough in western intelligence of
the Soviet biologocial weapons programme was effected. But the
research and production did not end. Dr Pasechnik was replaced by Dr
Yevgeny Sventitsky and a variant of plague which could survive a wide
range of temperatures and could resist 16 known western antibiotics
was developed. A single bomb containing this plague variant on a city
the size of Cork would have quickly killed half the population.
The centre's biological warfare production was mainly in European
Russia with some evidence of storage centres in the Muslim republics
of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan which have common frontiers with
Afghanistan. Chemical warfare plants, on the other hand, were in the
east giving reason to believe they were to be used in a possible war
with China.
In 1992, in total breach of an agreement by Presidents Gorbachev and
Bush Sr, to end chemical weapons production, the dissident scientist
Dr Vil Mirzayanov revealed that the Soviet Union had produced the most
lethal binary nerve agent known to mankind. Known as Novichok (The
Newcomer) it was up to 10 times more powerful than its nearest US
equivalent known as VX.
It worked by cutting off fluid to the brain, leading to severe spasms,
collapse of the lungs and death.
The Soviet Union had amassed a stockpile of chemical weapons of up to
70,000 tonnes, by far the largest in the world.
Scientists are convinced most was kept safely from undesirable
hands.ut the technology which produced Novichok may have been
exported.
Binary chemical weapons are usually produced by combining two agents
which are innocuous in themselves but lethal when combined.
But scientists working on Novichok managed, for the first time, to
combine two already deadly agents in order to produce a weapon of
unprecedented lethal power. In 1993 the SIPRI experts had already
acquired information that a similar programme was under way in Iraq.


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