Biohazard

They came to a stop at Kirov, west of the Ural Mountains. The commanders of the expedition expropriated an army hospital for the severely wounded on Oktyabrsky Prospekt in the center of town (the patients were sent elsewhere) and the equipment was hastily reassembled. A new production line was working within weeks. It soon proved its value to the war effort. The lieutenant colonel who told me about the tularemia production line at Kirov also suggested that an outbreak of Q fever among German troops on leave in Crimea in 1943 was the result of an attempt to use another one of the biological warfare agents developed by his facility. I was never able to investigate this further, but Q fever was practically unheard of in Russia prior to that outbreak.

The region was swamped with refugees, transplanted munitions factories, and relocated airplane assembly plants when the production team arrived in Kirov. Scientists worried that the loss of Solovetsky Island left them with no place to test their agents. They started a search for a new testing ground, safe from the Germans and remote enough to avoid infecting the civilian population. The search led them to Rebirth Island.

The Soviet Union's approach to biological warfare took a new turn in September 1945, when Soviet troops in Manchuria overran a Japanese military facility known as Water Purification Unit 731.

Unit 731 operated Japan's secret germ warfare program. Rumors of the unit's activities in northern China had been circulating in Russia and the West since the late 1930s, but the details finally emerged through captured documents and the testimony of Japanese prisoners of war. The unit, commanded by Lieutenant General Shiro Ishii, experimented with anthrax, dysentery, cholera, and plague on U.S., British, and Commonwealth POWs. During the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, porcelain canisters of fleas infected with plague and other primitive biological weapons were used in air raids that killed thousands of rural Chinese.

The captured Japanese documents were sent to Moscow, where they made absorbing reading. They included blueprints for biological warfare assembly plants, far larger and more complex than our own. Japan's program had been organized like a small industry, with a central production facility fed by continuous research and development.

Stalin ordered his most trusted aide, the sadistic KGB chief Lavrenty Beria, to match and if possible surpass what the Japanese had accomplished. In 1946, a year after the war ended, a new army biological research complex was established at Sverdlovsk. Construction engineers followed the designs laid out in the captured Japanese blueprints.

Stalin died in 1953. Beria was executed the same year, after an abortive attempt to seize power in the Kremlin. Under the new Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, the responsibility for biological warfare was transferred to the Fifteenth Directorate of the Red Army. Colonel General Yefim Smirnov, chief of army medical services during World War II, became commander.

Smirnov was an impassioned advocate of biological weapons. He believed that they would dominate the battlefield of the future. A physician who had served briefly under Stalin as minister of health, he transformed the program into a strategic arm of the military and remained a dominating presence in the Soviet biological warfare program for the next twenty years. Smirnov worked so swiftly that Defense Minister Marshal Georgi Zhukov could announce in 1956 that Moscow was capable of deploying biological as well as chemical weapons in the next war — an announcement that set off a flurry of new offensive research in the West. Few Soviet citizens were aware of it.

By the late 1950s, facilities investigating every aspect of biological warfare were dotted across the country.

One of the most successful programs was created by the Ministry of Agriculture. A special division was established to research and manufacture anti-livestock and anti-crop weapons. The division was given the uninspired title of Main Directorate for Scientific and Production Enterprises. The biowarfare program was code-named "Ecology."

Scientists at the agriculture ministry developed variants of foot-and-mouth disease and rinderpest for use against cows, African swine fever for pigs, and ornithosis and psittacosis to strike down chickens. Like anti-personnel biological weapons, these agents were designed to be sprayed from tanks attached to Ilyushin bombers and flown low over a target area along a straight line for hundreds of miles.

This "line source" method of dissemination could cover large stretches of farmland. Even if only a few animals were successfully infected, the contagious nature of the organisms ensured that the disease would wipe out agricultural activity over a wide area in a matter of months.