Biohazard

Why did our rivals cooperate in guarding our secret? Disclosure of the information Pasechnik gave them would have caused us more harm than a dozen Sverdlovsks. After I settled in the United States, a senior official who had served in President Bush's administration told me American and British leaders believed that a public quarrel would endanger progress in other areas of arms control and perhaps weaken Gorbachev. They were also convinced that their covert pressure would force us out of the biological warfare business.

The West's diplomatic tact may have seemed sensible at the time, but it gave us unexpected breathing space. We continued to research and develop new weapons for two more years.

Bonfire

Bacteriological warfare is science stood on its head… a gross perversion.

— from an official paper published by the Soviet Union in 1951

Obolensk, 1989

In a forest clearing on the southern outskirts of Moscow stands a heavily guarded building. Part of a research complex operated by Biopreparat at Obolensk, an abandoned village transformed into a closed city, it housed our "Museum of Cultures." The hundreds of bacterial strains stored there in small glass flasks provided the raw material for many of the Soviet Union's groundbreaking experiments with genetically altered biological weapons in the late 1980s.

Building One, a giant glass biocontainment facility with Zone Two and Three labs, towered above all the other structures at Obolensk. Five of its eight stories were divided according to pathogens. The second floor was for work on plague. The third was for tularemia. Higher levels were earmarked for anthrax, glanders, and melioidosis. Other floors were devoted to work on new industrial techniques.

In November 1989, a month after Pasechnik's defection, I joined more than fifty of Biopreparat's senior scientists and military officials in the large and windowless auditorium of Building One for our annual review of the facility's work. We were not allowed to bring briefcases or bags inside the room. We could take notes, but they were gathered up by security guards after each meeting. We had to get special permission to see them again.

The second-to-last speaker was a young scientist from Obolensk. He approached the lectern to deliver a report on the status of a project known as Bonfire. Few paid attention at first. Work on Bonfire had dragged on for some fifteen years, and most of us had given up hope of ever obtaining results. The project was ambitious. It had been overseen by a brilliant and cantankerous molecular biologist named Igor Domaradsky, who would eventually denounce the entire Soviet biological weapons program. Its goal was to create a new kind of toxin weapon.

Scientists have spent decades trying to manufacture killing agents from the venom of snakes and spiders and the poisonous secretions of plants, fungi, and bacteria. Most nations with biological weapons programs, including the Soviet Union, eventually gave up on harnessing the toxins produced by living organisms. They were considered too difficult to manufacture in the quantities required for modern warfare. In the early 1970s the Soviet government was persuaded to try again, following a remarkable discovery by a group of molecular biologists and immunologists at the Soviet Academy of Sciences.

The scientists had been studying peptides, strings of amino acids which perform various functions in our bodies, from regulating hormones and facilitating digestion to directing our immune system. One important group of peptides, called regulatory peptides, is activated during times of stress or heightened emotion— anger, love, fear — or to fight disease. Some regulatory peptides affect the central nervous system. When present in large quantities, they can alter mood and trigger psychological changes. Some can contribute to more serious adverse reactions such as heart attacks, strokes, or paralysis when overproduced. In a series of trailblazing experiments, the scientists found a way to duplicate in the lab the genes for a handful of regulatory peptides with known toxic properties. One of these was found capable, when present in large quantities, of damaging the myelin sheaths protecting thousands of nerve fibers that transmit electric signals from the brain and spinal cord to the rest of the body. Unknown in the West, we called it myelin toxin.