Biohazard

The first victims of tularemia were German panzer troops, who fell ill in such large numbers during the late summer of 1942 that the Nazi campaign in southern Russia ground to a temporary halt. Thousands of Russian soldiers and civilians living in the Volga region came down with tularemia within a week of the initial German outbreak. The Soviet high command rushed ten mobile military hospitals into the area, a sign of the extraordinary rise in the number of cases.

Most of the journals reported this as a naturally occurring epidemic, but there had never been such a widespread outbreak in Russia before. One epidemiological study provided a telling statistic: in 1941, ten thousand cases of tularemia had been reported in the Soviet Union. In the year of the Stalingrad outbreak, the number of cases soared to more than one hundred thousand. In 1943, the incidence of disease returned to ten thousand.

It seemed strange that so many men had first fallen sick on one side only. The opposing armies were so close together that a simultaneous outbreak was all but inevitable. Only exposure to a sudden and concentrated quantity of tularemia could explain the onslaught of infections in the German troops alone. Seventy percent of those infected came down with a pneumonic form of the disease, which could only have been caused by purposeful dissemination.

When I walked into my professor's office with a draft of my paper, I thought I had solved the puzzle. He was concentrating on the latest edition of Krasnaya Zvezda, the official army newspaper.

"So, what have you discovered?" Aksyonenko asked, smiling up at me before returning to his paper.

"I've studied the records, Colonel," I said cautiously. "The pattern of the disease doesn't suggest a natural outbreak."

He looked up sharply. "What does it suggest?"

"It suggests that this epidemic was caused intentionally."

He cut me off before I could continue.

"Please," he said softly. "I want you to do me a favor and forget you ever said what you just did. I will forget it too."

I stared at him in confusion.

"All I asked you to do was describe how we handled the outbreak, how we contained it." Aksyonenko had begun to frown. "You have gone beyond your assignment."

He pointed to the paper I had left on his desk. "I don't want to see this until you've given it some thought. And never... never mention to anyone else what you just told me. Believe me, you'll be doing yourself a favor."

The final version of my paper did not mention the likelihood of deliberate infection. Yet Aksyonenko's reaction convinced me that I was on to something: Soviet troops must have sprayed tularemia at the Germans. A sudden change in the direction of the wind, or contaminated rodents passing through the lines, had infected our soldiers and the disease had then spread through the region.

Years later, an elderly lieutenant colonel who worked in the secret bacteriological weapons facility in the city of Kirov during the war told me that a tularemia weapon was developed in Kirov in 1941, the year before the Battle of Stalingrad. He left me with no doubt that the weapon had been used.

The lesson of Stalingrad would not be forgotten by our biological warfare strategists. In the postwar years, the Soviet high command shifted its attention from battlefield deployment to "deep targets" far behind enemy lines, where there was no danger of infecting one's own troops.

Stalingrad was a test of survival for the Soviet Union. If the city had been lost, the nation's industrial heartland in the Urals would have fallen before the advancing German-tanks. More than one million of our soldiers died defending the city. In forcing the Germans into a humiliating retreat, they had turned the tide of the war.

The moral argument for using any available weapon against an enemy threatening us with certain annihilation seemed to me irrefutable. I came away from that assignment fascinated by the notion that disease could be used as an instrument of war. I began to read everything I could find about epidemiology and the biological sciences.

Near the army barracks on Rebirth Island stands a grave marked by a small headstone with an illegible name. A young woman was buried there, a member of one of the first teams of army scientists to conduct weapons trials at the Aral Sea proving ground. She died of glanders, a disease that normally strikes down horses, in 1942.

Nothing else about her is known.

Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people have given their lives in the service of our scientific research. Occasionally their names crop up in classified files, but many deaths have gone unrecorded. The headstone on Rebirth Island was a rare public acknowledgment, for those who possessed the security clearances to see it, of the human cost of our program.