Biohazard

Our practical-minded generals, like their counterparts everywhere in the world, were conservative and not easy to convince. Few of them knew the extent to which the Soviet Union was already committed to biological warfare, and even those who understood the concept had become skeptical of the extravagant claims for their importance made by old warhorses like Smirnov and Zhukov. They wanted weapons that would fire, explode, blast — not germs that no one could see. But Ovchinnikov was persuasive. The most skeptical military commander would have to agree that it was dangerous, if not outrageous, to be behind the West in anything.

Ovchinnikov found an influential ally in Leonid Brezhnev. The one-time metallurgical engineer who led the Soviet Union for eighteen years until his death in 1982 regarded the magisterial akademiks of the Soviet scientific establishment with a respect bordering on awe. Ovchinnikov was soon giving private lectures on genetics to Brezhnev and his aides. Slowly, the message sank in. Ovchinnikov, the youngest academician in the country, was appointed to a state commission exploring the military implications of the new gene-splicing technology.

The commission's work led to the most ambitious Soviet arms program since the development of the hydrogen bomb. Launched by a secret Brezhnev decree in 1973, the program aimed to modernize existing biological weapons and to develop genetically altered pathogens, resistant to antibiotics and vaccines, which could be turned into powerful weapons for use in intercontinental war-fare. The program was called Enzyme.

The 1973 decree led that same year to the founding of Biopreparat. The nation's best biologists, epidemiologists, and biochemists were recruited in an effort that would soon absorb billions of rubles from the state treasury and spawn the most advanced program for genetically engineered weapons in the world.

The Enzyme project focused on tularemia, plague, anthrax, and glanders — all diseases that had been successfully weaponized by our military scientists but whose effects had been undermined by the development of antibiotics. But there were many other agents under review, including viral agents such as smallpox, Marburg, Ebola, Machupo, Junin, and VEE.

The Soviet Union's biowarfare research was concentrated at army factories in the cities of Sverdlovsk, Kirov, and Zagorsk. These were the only sites classified as "hot mode" — sufficiently insulated for work with highly infectious organisms.

Over the next decade, dozens of biological warfare installations disguised as centers of pharmaceutical or medical research were built throughout the country. In Leningrad, the Institute of Ultra-Pure Biopreparations was created to develop new techniques and equipment for cultivating pathogenic agents. At Omutninsk, in the pine forests near Kirov, a bacteriological research and weapons production facility was constructed alongside an old munitions plant operated by the Ministry of Defense. An entire "research city" for genetic engineering went up at Obolensk, just south of Moscow, and the Lyubuchany Institute of Immunology was established in Chekhov, also in the Moscow region, to investigate antibiotic-resistant disease strains. For work on viruses, the enormous Vector research and testing compound was built near the Siberian city of Novosibirsk.

These were just some of the facilities opened by Biopreparat. Existing state laboratories and research centers were also sucked into the new world created by Brezhnev's program. Several biological facilities managed by the Ministry of Health, including the large anti-plague research complexes in Kuybyshev, Minsk, Saratov, Irkutsk, Volgograd, and Almaty, were given special funding for weapons-oriented genetic research. The Soviet Academy of Sciences also played a significant role, conscripting four Moscow-region institutes into the Enzyme project: the Institute of Protein, the Institute of Molecular Biology, the Institute of Biochemistry and Physiology of Microorganisms, and the Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry.

Meanwhile, our testing program accelerated. Between 1979 and 1989, the Soviet Union conducted large scale tests of an aerosol containing Bacillus thuringiensis — a harmless simulant — over the Novosibirsk region, using a plane with civilian markings. Similar experiments were run at a military proving ground near the city of Nukus in the Kara Kalpak Republic, and in the Caucasus. Another harmless agent, Serratia marcescens, was used in several tests conducted by the Institute of Biological Machinery inside the Moscow Metro system during the 1980s. Ballistic missiles containing simulants of biological agents were fired in tests over the Pacific Ocean between 1960 and 1980.