Biohazard

Where other governments saw a medical victory, the Kremlin perceived a military opportunity. A world no longer protected from smallpox was a world newly vulnerable to the disease. In 1981, Soviet researchers began to explore what the Kremlin hoped would be a better version of a smallpox weapon that had been in our arsenal for decades. The work was at first cursory. Military commanders were reluctant to devote energy and resources to an enterprise that promised no immediate results. The Soviet Union, they reasoned, had already gone further with smallpox weapons than any other country.

In 1947, the Soviet Union established its first smallpox weapons factory just outside the ancient cathedral town of Zagorsk, forty minutes' drive northwest of Moscow. Zagorsk (now Sergiyev Posad) is the site of the walled fourteenth-century Trinity-St. Sergius Monastery, one of the most revered places in the Russian Orthodox religion. A few miles away, in another walled compound, Soviet army scientists at the Virological Center of the Ministry of Defense devoutly cultivated smallpox, Q fever, and Venezuelan equine encephalitis in the embryos of chicken eggs.

It was a cumbersome process, but an effective one. Using tiny syringes, laboratory workers injected microscopic amounts of smallpox virus into eggs and sealed each egg with paraffin. The eggs were placed inside thermostatic ovens for several days while the embryo host cells stirred the virus into life. As it monopolized the cells' normal growth mechanisms, the virus spawned successive replications of itself until the host was engulfed or destroyed. The eggs were then punctured and the liquid inside poured into special vats and mixed with stabilizing materials. The resulting weapon could remain potent in refrigerated conditions for at least a year.

Every month, hundreds of thousands of eggs produced at nearby collective farms were consigned to Zagorsk's weapons-assembly lines. Under a state-controlled agricultural system it was easy to conceal the purpose of hijacking so many eggs from the marketplace. The "egg-weapon" process for smallpox proved so successful that a second production facility was opened at Pokrov, near Moscow, in a plant operated by the Ministry of Agriculture.

In 1959, a traveler from India infected forty-six Muscovites with smallpox before authorities realized what had happened. The traveler had been vaccinated, but smallpox vaccinations lose their effectiveness over time, and while his weakened immunity was enough to protect him from suffering the symptoms of the disease, he could still pass it on to others. The strain of Variola major in his system was so virulent that an epidemic was only narrowly averted. Partly in response to this incident, the Soviet government sent a special medical team to India to help purge the virus from the subcontinent.

KGB agents went with them.

They returned to Russia with a strain of Indian smallpox excellently suited to weapons production. It was highly virulent and was stable enough to retain its infectious qualities over time. This meant that, with the proper additives, it could be stored longer than the strains in Soviet stockpiles. Within a few years, India's unwitting gift became our principal battle strain of smallpox. It was dubbed India-1967, to commemorate the year of its isolation. In our secret code, it became India-1.

In the 1970s, smallpox was considered so important to our biological arsenal that the Soviet military command issued an order to maintain an annual stockpile of twenty tons. The weapons were stored at army facilities in Zagorsk. Annual quotas of smallpox were required as it decayed over time. We never wanted to be caught short.

The episode of the Indian traveler underlined some of Variola major's impressive qualities as a weapon. The smallpox virus is so hardy that it can remain infectious for long periods, even in the soiled linen of those who have been infected. Smallpox victims are infectious from the moment of their first symptoms until the healing of the last scar, two to three weeks later, and they can transmit the disease to others with as little as a cough.