Weapons of Mass Destruction
A closer look at the ugly legacy of nuclear, chemical and biological Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) and their unimaginable threat. Which countries possess them, how much each create havoc and severe wounds to humanity and how we can keep our generations safe from such lethal weapons.
Lewis Simons
Lewis M. Simons is a freelance writer who won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting... read his profile »
At Stepnogorsk about 20 years ago, the Soviet military flung up a huge bio-weapons factory on the Kazakh steppe in violation of the Biological Weapons Convention, which the Soviet Union had signed in 1972, joining the United States and more than a hundred other nations. On the site today, Yuriy Rufov is the director of an enterprise called Biomedpreparat, which is a big name for a little company. Except for Rufov and a few aides, huddling in their coats in a bare, unheated office building the subzero morning we visited, Biomedpreparat doesn't exist. It has no factory, no machinery, no laboratories.
It's been half a century since the soviets set off their first nuclear bomb here on Kazakh steppe, and 13 years since the latest test. So the arms race may seem like a scrapbook memory in the test blast photos of a security officer at the site. But its not: The weapons it spawned left a rail of ruin, and their menace is as real as ever.
In the Soviet era, Stepnogorsk was a "secret city," one of 30 or so locations that did not appear on maps, and the plant, part of the Soviet biotechnology program known as Biopreparat, manufactured anthrax for the military. Since 1996 the United States has spent 2.5 million dollars to turn most of the vast plant into rubble. Washington also agreed to help Biomedpreparat convert what remains into a pharmaceuticals factory and get the former staff back to work. That hasn't happened, to Rufov's frustration.
Rufov insisted that he and his colleagues wouldn't easily offer their services to other governments. He says:
We were all educated to believe in the rightfulness of the Soviet Union and the Communist Party. Going to work in the Middle East would go against everything we spent most of our lives believing in.
Yet thousands of those who were the Soviet Union's elite—granted the best of salaries, housing, food, schools, free vacations on the Black Sea, and other privileges that the state could offer—are today unemployed and barely able to put bread on the table. It doesn't take much imagination to realize that some of them, no matter how loyal or patriotic, could eventually be forced to sell what they know.
To this day, no one has ever told us that anthrax killed him. They gave us 40 rubles, and I used it to buy a dress for the funeral. (Olga Vyatkina)
The soviet authorities said it was bad meat that killed Olga's son and 67 other people in Sverdlovsk back in 1979, but people knew better - you didn't wear protective suits to treat victims of food poisoning. The city's bioweapons plant had accidentally released a plume of anthrax spores, causing the worst outbreak of inhalational anthrax ever recorded.
Of the 680 scientists and technicians who worked at the Stepnogorsk plant in its final days, said Rufov, 500 accompanied the departing Red Army to Russia; 112 remained in Stepnogorsk, paid by the United States to dismantle the plant; 16 were engaged in monitoring contamination of the ruins, also on the U.S. payroll; and 52 were working for a new medical manufacturing company nearby. According to Rufov, only a few former employees have ever gone to work abroad. Chief among them was Stepnogorsk's onetime director, a Kazakh named Kanatjan Alibekov.
A Soviet army physician and biologist, Alibekov fled to the United States in 1992 and filled the government's ear with chilling stories about the Soviet Bio Weapons Program. His crowning achievement had been the perfection of Anthrax 836, the U.S.S.R.'s most powerful weapons-grade anthrax, four times more deadly than its predecessor. Made operational in 1987, it is an extremely fine, silky, grayish brown powder that can drift invisibly for miles.
Today, his name Americanized to Ken Alibek, he is chief scientist at a Bio Defense company in northern Virginia, as well as a professor of microbiology at a local university. The day I visited Alibek in his office, he looked like most American academics, wearing a black turtleneck and skimming a research grant application.
As eventually happens to some defectors, Alibek has been chided by his former CIA handlers for exaggerating information in an attempt to enhance his value. Yet when I asked him about former Soviet bioweaponeers now working abroad, his reply was matter-of-fact.
"Most are in Russia," he said in heavily accented English. "Some are here in the U.S.; a few are in Europe and Asia. There may be a couple in Iran, but if so, we're not talking big numbers. Very few." But, he added, "A few is all it takes."Express Your Thoughts!
Resources
• A Feasibility Study of the Health Consequences to the American Population From Nuclear Weapons Tests Conducted by the United States and Other Nations, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, August 2001. Available online.• Cirincione, Joseph, with Jon Wolfsthal and Miriam Rajkumar. Deadly Arsenals: Tracking Weapons of Mass Destruction. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2002.
• Guillemin, Jeanne. Anthrax: The Investigation of a Deadly Outbreak. University of California Press, 1999
• Miller, Judith, Stephen Engelberg, and William Broad Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War. Simon and Schuster, 2001
• Ramana, M.V. and A.H. Nayyar "India, Pakistan, and the Bomb," Scientific American December 2001, 72-83