Название: The Soviet Union’s Invisible Weapons of Mass Destruction: Biopreparat’s Covert Biological Warfare ProgrammeАвтор: Anthony Rimmington
Издательство: Palgrave Macmillan
Год: 2021
Страниц: 278
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf (true), epub
Размер: 11.4 MB
This book focuses on Biopreparat, the Soviet agency created in 1974, which spearheaded the largest and most sophisticated biological warfare programme the world has ever seen. At its height, Biopreparat employed more than 30,000 personnel and incorporated an enormous network embracing military-focused research institutes, design centres, biowarfare pilot facilities and dual-use production plants. The secret network pursued major offensive R&D programmes, which sought to use genetic engineering techniques to create microbial strains resistant to antibiotics and with wholly new and unexpected pathogenic properties. During the mid-1980s, Biopreparat increased in size and political importance and also emerged as a major civil biopharmaceutical player in the USSR. In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, an acute struggle for control of Biopreparat’s most valuable assets took place and the network was eventually broken-up and control of its facilities transferred to a myriad of state agencies and private companies.
It is not only the scale of the Biopreparat programme which makes it so globally significant but also the apparent ease with which it enabled the Soviet Union to circumvent its obligations under the terms of the 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC). The offensive BW effort, subject to extraordinary levels of secrecy, was effectively concealed within the USSR’s civil microbiological industry, and with which it was intimately entwined. Elaborate cover stories were generated and adhered to, and, despite their best endeavours, Western intelligence analysts struggled to clearly understand what was going on. It was only through a lucky break, the defection of the high-level Biopreparat scientist, Pasechnik, to the UK, that the full scale and extent of the programme was eventually understood. All this serves to highlight a crucial flaw in the BTWC, the lack of provisions to ensure the compliance of nations that have signed and ratified it.
The military accomplishments of the Biopreparat programme are documented in the text. These briefly are reported to include, as part of the secret programme Bonfire , the genetic engineering of a range of bacteria including a strain of Bacillus anthracis (the causative agent of anthrax) which was made resistant to seven or eight antibiotics. In another innovative project, Francisella tularensis (the causative agent of tularaemia) bacteria were apparently coated with Protein A to allow them to bypass the immunodefence system in humans. In another genetic engineering project, the antigenic presentation of the surface of an F1-minus strain of Yersinia pestis (the causative agent of plague) was altered. It was anticipated that this would lead to delays in detecting and identifying the pathogen in any countries attacked with this strain. Biopreparat scientists are also reported to have developed technology for the production of a dry formulation of Marburg virus which could be easily dispersed in an aerosol. In perhaps, the most concerning of the programmes, Factor , researchers successfully created genetically engineered bacteria with the ability to produce various peptides which yielded strains with wholly new and unexpected properties.
One of the key features of the historical BW programmes pursued by the Soviet Union had been the occurrence of accidents in the wake of sometimes slipshod safety procedures. The most notorious of these incidents concerned the USSR Ministry of Defence’s Scientific-Research Institute of Bacterial Vaccine Preparations , part of Military Compound Number 19 in Sverdlovsk. On Monday, 2 April 1979, an anthrax aerosol was released from this facility which led directly to the deaths of at least 68 people in Sverdlovsk itself and to cases of animal anthrax in nearby villages (Rudnii, Bol’shoe Sedelnikovo, Maloe Sedelnikovo, Pervomaiskii, Kashino and Abramovo) to the south-east of the city. It was the first major indication in the West that the Soviet Union had embarked upon an offensive biological weapons effort.3 Biopreparat proved to be no exception with regard to the occurrence of major incidents, the most serious of which occurred in mid-April 1988 at its virology institute in Kol’tsovo during the pursuit of a Marburg virus weaponization project. During the course of an experimental procedure performed by an inexperienced colleague, Nikolai Vasil’evich Ustinov was stabbed in the finger with the needle of a syringe being used to extract blood from a guinea pig which had been previously injected with Marburg virus. Ustinov died on 30 April in terrible agony, bleeding profusely and unable to move or even open his eyes. During the period through to his death, Ustinov maintained a log in which he recorded his feelings and symptoms and which he hoped would lead to an improved understanding of the virus and its effects. Biopreparat scientists subsequently isolated a new Marburg virus variant, named Variant U, from samples of Ustinov’s organs and this was absorbed into the institute’s culture collection.
Anthony Rimmington is a former Senior Research Fellow at Birmingham University’s Centre for Russian, European and Eurasian Studies, UK. He has published widely on the civil life sciences sector in the post-Soviet states and on the USSR’s offensive biological warfare programme, including The Soviet Union’s Agricultural Biowarfare Programme: Ploughshares to Swords (Palgrave, 2021).
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