The Soviet Organic Weapons Program: A Historical past

Russian officers declare as we speak that the united states by no means possessed an offensive organic weapons program. In truth, the Soviet authorities spent billions of rubles and laborious foreign money to fund a massively costly weapons program that added nothing to the nation’s safety. This historical past is the primary try to know the broad scope of the united states’s offensive organic weapons analysis―its inception within the Twenties, its development between 1970 and 1990, and its attainable remnants in present-day Russia. We be taught that the U.S. and U.Okay. governments by no means obtained clear proof of this system’s closure from 1990 to the current day, elevating the important query whether or not the means for waging organic warfare may very well be resurrected in Russia sooner or later.

Primarily based on interviews with vital Soviet scientists and managers, papers from the Soviet Central Committee, and U.S. and U.Okay. declassified paperwork, this ebook peels again layers of lies, to disclose how and why Soviet leaders determined to develop organic weapons, the scientific sources they devoted to this activity, and the multitude of analysis institutes that utilized themselves to its success. We be taught that Biopreparat, an ostensibly civilian group, was established to handle a prime secret program, code-named Ferment, whose goal was to use genetic engineering to develop strains of pathogenic brokers that had by no means existed in nature. Leitenberg and Zilinskas take into account the efficiency of the U.S. intelligence neighborhood in discovering and assessing these actions, they usually look at intimately the essential years 1985 to 1992, when Mikhail Gorbachev’s makes an attempt to place an finish to this system have been thwarted as they have been below Yeltsin.