Biohazard. Military Medicine in the USSR

Thinking about computer virus and hacker attacks tha more dangerous dark-side is still alive.
BIOHAZARD

Anthrax. Smallpox. Incurable and horrifying Ebola-related fevers. For two decades, while a fearful world prepared for nuclear winter, an elite team of Russian bioweaponeers begun to kill a new killing field: a bleak tract sown with powerful seeds of mass destruction by doctors who had committed themselves to creatin a biological Armageddon. Biohazard is the never-before-told story of Russia's darkest, deadliest, and most closely guarded Cold War secret.

No one knows morre about Russia's astounding experiments with biowarfare than Ken Alibek. Now the mastermind behind Russia's germ warfare effort reveals two decades of shocking breakthoughts... how Moscow's leading scientists actually reengineered hazardous microbes to make them even more virulent...the secrets behind the discovery of an invisible, untraceable new class of biological agents just for use in political assassinations...the startling story behind Russia's attempt to turn a sample of the AIDS virus into the ultimate bioweapon.

And in a chilling work of real-world intrigue. We will glance into a shadowy scientific underworld where doctors manufacture mass destruction, where witnesses to errors are silenced forever, and where ground zero is closer than we ever dare believe.

MILITARY MEDICINE IN SOVET UNION 

How it was.

History of Soviet Military Medicine in Great Patriotic War: 1941-1945. The first victims of tularemia were German panzer troops, who fell ill in such large numbers during the late summer of 1942 that Nazi campaign in southern Russia ground to a temporary halt. Thousand of Russian soldiers and civilians living ib the Volga region came down with tularemia within a week of the initial German outbreak. The Soviet high command rushed ten mobile military hospitals into the area, a sign of the extraordinary rise in the number of cases.

Most of the journal reported this as a naturally occurring epidemic but there had neve been such a widespread outbreak in Russia before. It seemed strange that so many men had first fallen sick on one side only. The opposing armies were so close together that a simultaneous outbreak was all but inevitable. Only exposure to a sudden and concentrated quantity of tularemia could explain the onslaught of infections in the German troops alone. Seventy persent of those infected came down with a pneumonic from of the disease, which could only have been caused by purposeful dissemination.

Years later, en elderly lieuntenant colonel who worked in the secret bacteriological weapons facility in the city of Kirov durin the war told that a tularemia weapon was developed in Kirov in 1941, the year before the Battle of Stalingrad. No doubt that the weapon had been used. The lesson of Stalingrad would not be forgotten by our biological warfare strategist. In the postwar years, the Soviet high command shifted its attention from battlefield deployment to "deep targets" far behind enemy lines, where there was no danger of infection one's own troops. The disease could be used as an instrument of war.

Early biological weapons work involved primitive methods. The pathogens were bred in chicken embryos or in live animals such as rats that were killed when the concentration of pathogens was highest and were liquiefied in large blenders. The liquid was then poured into explosives. The first Soviet facility used for biological warfare research was the Leningrad Military Academy. Small teams of military  and GPU scientists began to explore ways of growing significant quantities of typhus rickettsiae. By the 1930s, the Leningrad Academy had produced powdered and liquid versions of typhus, for use in a primitive aerosol. The biological weapons program soon expanded to harness other diseases. The Leningrad Military Academy sent some of its scientists and equipment one hundred miles north to the White Sea, a barren Arctic expanseflecked with tiny islands used to house political prisoners. By the mid-1930s Solovetsky Island, one of the largest, was the second major site of the Soviet biological warfare program.

THE ENZYME PROJECT            

In 1953, two young scientists, James Watson and Francis Crick, identified the shape of DNA, the genetic code that determines the behaviour of all life on earth. Over the next two decades, researcher found ways to manipulate DNA in the laboratory. They discovered that genes of separate organisms could be cloned and spliced together, a progress that opended a new frontier in the study if the behaviour and treatment of disease. In those time the russian Yury Ovchinnikov, vice president of the Soviet Academy of Science and a renowned molecular biologist.

In 1972 the Ministry of Defense to support a genetics program devoted to developing new agents for biological warfare.

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 warfare. The program was called ENZYME. The same year was found the Biopreparat. The nation's best biologists, epidemiologists and biochemists were recruited in an efford that would soon absorb to 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 russian military scientists but whose effects had been undermined by the development of antibiotics. But there were many other agents such as smallpox, Marburg, Ebola, Machupo, Junin and VEE.

Between 1979 and 1989, the Soviet Union conducted large-scale 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.

BIOHAZARD SECRETS

Scientists have spent decades trying to manifacture killing agents from the venom snakes and spidersand 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 diffiult 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 Science.

The scientists had been studing 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 of heightened emotion - anger, love, fear - or to fight disease. Some regulatory peptides affect the central nervous system. When present in large quantitites, they can alter mood and trigger psyhological changes. Some can contribute to more serious adverse reactions such as heart attacks, strokes, or paralysis when overproduced. In a series of traiblalizing 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 founc capable, when present in large quantities, of damaging the myelin protecting the thounds 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 in myelin toxin.

As with all peptides, it was hard to obtain enought for useful experimentation. Genetic engineering solved thisproblem: scientists could synthesize the genes that code for the production of myelin toxin, reproduce them artificially in the lab, and insert them into bacterial cells. If a bacterial strain compatible with myelin toxin could be found, the transplantated genes would multiply along with bacteria. The scientist's final argument was irresistible: weapons based on compounds produced in the human body were not prohibited by the Biological Weapons Convention. If all went as planned, the Soviet Union would soon have a new weapon, and Russian scienticts would at last be able to participate opendly in the biotechnoloogical revolution that was sweeping the world.

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