Biopreparat

Biopreparat (Russian: Биопрепарат, "Biological substance preparation") was the Soviet Union's major biological warfare agency from the 1970s on. It was a vast, ostensibly civilian, network of secret laboratories, each of which focused on a different deadly bioagent. Its 30,000 employees researched and produced pathogenic weapons for use in a major war.

History

Establishment

Biopreparat was established in 1973 as a "civilian" continuation of earlier Soviet bio-warfare programs (see Soviet biological weapons program). The project was reportedly initiated by academician Yuri Ovchinnikov who convinced General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev that development of biological weapons was necessary.[1] A prominent supporter was identified by some authors in General-Polkovnik Taras Chepura, who stressed the importance of disguised research.[2] The research at Biopreparat constituted a blatant violation by the Soviet Union of the terms of the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972 which outlawed biological weapons. Its existence was steadfastly denied by Soviet officials for decades.

Exposure of Biopreparat in the West

In April 1979, a major outbreak of pulmonary anthrax in the city of Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg) caused the deaths of 105 or more Soviet citizens. The Soviets tried to hush things up, but details leaked out to the West in 1980 when the German newspaper Bild Zeitung carried a story about the accident. Moscow described allegations that the epidemic was an accident at a BW facility as "slanderous propaganda" and insisted the anthrax outbreak had been caused by contaminated food.

The first senior Soviet bioweaponeer to defect to the West was Vladimir Pasechnik (1937–2001) who alerted Western intelligence in 1989 to the vast scope of Moscow's clandestine program. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and U.S. President George H. W. Bush put pressure on Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev to open up Russia's germ warfare facilities to a team of outside inspectors. When the inspectors toured four of the sites in 1991, they were met with denials and evasions. Production tanks which had obviously been intended for making enormous quantities of something were clean and sterile; laboratories had been stripped of equipment.

Pasechnik's revelations that the program was 10 times greater than previously suspected were confirmed in 1992 with the defection to the United States of Colonel Kanatjan Alibekov (b. 1950), the No. 2 scientist for the program. Alibekov (now known as Ken Alibek) had been the First Deputy Director of Biopreparat from 1988 to 1992. He claimed that development of new strains of genetically engineered superweapons was still continuing.

Alibek later wrote the book Biohazard (1999) detailing publicly his extensive inside knowledge of the structure, goals, operations and achievements of Biopreparat. He was also featured in the October 13, 1998 episode of Frontline (PBS TV series).

1990s

The Biopreparat complex suffered with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Since then several large bioweapons production lines have been officially closed. Its current state is unknown, however it is likely that Biopreparat and successor entities continued bioweapons research and development at least through the 1990s.[1]

Operations

Biopreparat was a system of 18, nominally civilian, research laboratories and centers scattered chiefly around European Russia, in which a small army of scientists and technicians developed biological weapons such as anthrax, Ebola, Marburg virus, plague, Q fever, Junin virus, glanders, and smallpox. It was the largest producer of weaponized anthrax in the Soviet Union and was a leader in the development of new bioweapons technologies.

Biopreparat facilities

The project had 18 major labs and production centers:

This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.

Biopreparat pathogens

Pathogens that were successfully weaponized by the organization included (in order of completion):

Annual production capacities for many of the above listed pathogens were in the tens of tons, typically with redundant production facilities located throughout the Soviet Union.

See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Alibek,K. and S. Handelman. Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World - Told from Inside by the Man Who Ran it. 1999. Delta (2000) ISBN 0-385-33496-6
  2. ↑ Reese, Roger R. , Red Commanders: A Social History of the Soviet Army Officer Corps, 1918-1991, University Press of Kansas 2005. P. 263
  3. ↑ Pasternack, Alex (August 29, 2013). "The US is building a bioweapons lab in Kazakhstan". Salon.

External links

[1]

  1. ↑ http://allnewspipeline.com/Ebola_Pox_Ultimate_Doomsday_Virus.php