Biohazard

New buildings had risen from the desert floor, dramatically changing the skyline. One of them, Building 600, was the largest indoor testing facility constructed up to that time in the Soviet Union. It was more than fifty feet high, with two giant stainless steel testing chambers hidden inside. The first chamber, designed to withstand the force of a powerful explosion, would be used to analyze the decay rate and dissemination capacities of aerosol mixtures contained in our germ bombs. The second was for testing animals. We also constructed a network of underground bunkers to store our materials and an elaborate system of ventilation and waste pipes.

Bioweapons are not rocket launchers. They cannot be loaded and fired. The most virulent culture in a test tube is useless as an offensive weapon until it has been put through a process that gives it stability and predictability. The manufacturing technique is, in a sense, the real weapon, and it is harder to develop than individual agents.

At Stepnogorsk, the process of weaponizing anthrax would begin with a few grains of freeze-dried bacteria kept in a stoppered vial. Hundreds of tiny vials no bigger than test tubes were stored in metal trays inside a refrigerated vault, each over a soft towel soaked in disinfectant and each bearing a "passport" tag identifying the main features of the strain, including when it was created. One vial was enough to produce the munitions for an intercontinental war.

No one was ever allowed into the vault alone. At least two people — a lab technician and scientist — had to be present when a vial was taken down from the shelf, checked against a list, and wheeled i n a metal cart into the operating laboratory.

We standardized the process after months of testing our production lines. First, the scientist would pour a small amount of a nutrient medium into the vial. The composition of this medium varies according to the strain being cultured, and the special formulas developed for what we called, with no attempt at irony, the "mother culture" were classified.

With a tiny pipette, the scientist would draw the mixture out of the vial and transfer a small amount into several slightly larger bottles. The bottles would be wheeled into another room, placed inside heated boxes about the size of a microwave oven, and left to incubate for one or two days.

Heat can kill bacteria, which is why pasteurizers of milk turn the temperatures of their ovens as high as 55 degrees Celsius to ensure that no harmful organisms remain in the product that goes to the supermarket. Weapons makers want their bacteria to survive, so one of the central challenges of bioweaponeering is to find the right temperatures at which different pathogenic microorganisms can grow rapidly without being cooked to death. This process has much in common with techniques for making vaccines.

A seed stock in a standard vial will swell to billions of microorganisms after less than forty-eight hours, but it would take days or even weeks of patient brewing to produce the quantities required for weaponization.

Once this liquid culture emerges from the thermostatic oven, it is siphoned off into large flasks. The flasks are brought to another room where they are connected to air-bubbling machines, which turn the liquid into a light froth. With oxygen distributed more evenly around the mixture, the bacteria can now grow more efficiently.

At this stage the liquid culture is translucent and deep brown, something like the color of Coca-Cola. The greater the bacterial concentration, the lighter and more opaque it will become: by the time it reaches maximum concentration, it will look like coffee mixed with cream.

A bioweaponeer works with recipes. The raw ingredients are similar, but quantities and combinations of nutrient media, heat, and time vary. If the mixture overheats, one has to begin the entire process over again.

Each new generation of bacteria is transferred into progressively larger vessels, until there is enough anthrax to pipe under vacuum pressure into a room containing several fermenters. These giant cauldrons incubate the substance for one or two more days. The bacteria continue to multiply until the scientist judges that they have reached maximum concentration, at which point they are passed through a centrifuge to be concentrated as much as thirty times further.

Our centrifuges resembled the separators used to make milk, butter, and cream at any dairy. In fact, they were produced for us by a plant in Tula, south of Moscow, that manufactures dairy equipment.

Even at this stage, you do not yet have a weapon. The pathogen has to be mixed with additives to stabilize it over a long period. Like nutrient media, the additives are another "patented" element of the process.