The Soviet Biological Weapons Program

by Leitenberg, Milton; Zilinskas, Raymond A.; Kuhn, Jens H.

• ISBN13: 9780674047709
• ISBN10: 0674047702
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-07-20
• Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr

Summary

Russian officials claim today that the USSR never possessed an offensive biological weapons program. In fact, the Soviet government spent billions of rubles and hard currency to fund hugely expensive research that added nothing to the country's security. This history is the first attempt to understand the full scope of the USSR's offensive biological weapons research-its inception in the 1920s, its growth between 1970 and 1980, and its possible remnants in present-day Russia. We learn that between 1990 and 1992 the U.S. and U.K. governments never obtained clear evidence of the program's closure, raising the haunting question whether the means for waging biological warfare could be resurrected in Russia today. Based on interviews with important Soviet scientists and managers, papers from the Soviet Central Committee, and U.S. and U.K. declassified documents, this book peels back layers of lies, to reveal how and why Soviet leaders decided to develop biological weapons, the scientific resources they dedicated to this task, and the multitude of research institutes that applied themselves to its fulfillment. We learn that Biopreparat, an ostensibly civilian organization, was established to manage a top secret program, code-named Ferment, whose objective was to apply genetic engineering to develop strains of pathogenic agents that had never existed in nature. Leitenberg and Zilinskas consider the performance of the U.S. intelligence community in discovering and assessing these activities, and they examine in detail the crucial years 1985 to 1992, when Mikhail Gorbachev's attempts to put an end to the program were thwarted.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. ix
Note on Transliteration	p. xv
Introduction	p. 1
The Soviet Union's Biological Warfare Program, 1918-1972	p. 16
Beginnings of the "Modern" Soviet BW program, 1970-1977	p. 51
USSR Ministry of Defense Facilities and Its Biological Warfare Program	p. 79
Open-Air Testing of Biological Weapons by Aralsk-7 on Vozrozhdeniye Island	p. 121
Soviet Civilian Sector Defenses against Biological Warfare and Infectious Diseases	p. 138
Biopreparat's Role in the Soviet Biological Warfare Program and Its Survival in Russia	p. 153
Biopreparat's State Research Center for Applied Microbiology (SRCAM)	p. 177
All-Union Research Institute of Molecular Biology and Scientific-Production Association "Vector"	p. 205
Biopreparat Facilities at Leningrad, Lyubuchany, and Stepnogorsk	p. 250
Soviet Biological Weapons and Doctrines for Their Use	p. 282
Distinguishing between Offensive and Defensive Biological Warfare Activities	p. 323
Assessments of Soviet Biological Warfare Activities by Western Intelligence Services	p. 343
United States Covert Biological Warfare Disinformation	p. 397
Soviet Allegations of the Use of Biological Weapons by the United States	p. 407
Sverdlovsk 1979: The Release at Bacillus anthracis Spores from a Soviet Ministry of Defense Facility and Its Consequences	p. 423
Soviet Research on Mycotoxins	p. 450
Assistance by Warsaw Pact States to the Soviet Union's Biological Warfare Program	p. 458
The Question of Proliferation from the USSR Biological Warfare Program	p. 476
Recalcitrant Russian Policies in a Parallel Area: Chemical Weapon Demilitarization	p. 507
The Soviet Union, Russia, and Biological Warfare Arms Control	p. 523
The Gorbachev Years: The Soviet Biological Weapons Program, 1985-1992	p. 562
Boris Yeltsin to the Present	p. 631
United States and International Efforts to Prevent Proliferation of Biological Weapons Expertise from the Former Soviet Union	p. 679
Conclusion	p. 698
Acronyms and Russian Terms	p. 715
Glossary	p. 723
A Joint Decree of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, USSR, and the USSR Council of Ministers, dated 24 June 1981	p. 731
Joint US/UK/Russian Statement of Biological Weapons, September 1992	p. 733
Notes	p. 737
Acknowledgments	p. 889
Index	p. 891
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.