The Soviet Biological Weapons Program: A History

by Milton Leitenberg, Raymond A. Zilinskas

Russian officials claim today that the USSR never possessed an offensive biological weapons program. In fact, the Soviet government spent billions of rubles and hard currency to fund a hugely expensive weapons program that added nothing to the country’s security. This history is the first attempt to understand the broad scope of the USSR’s offensive biological weapons research—its inception in the 1920s, its growth between 1970 and 1990, and its possible remnants in present-day Russia. We learn that the U.S. and U.K. governments never obtained clear evidence of the program’s closure from 1990 to the present day, raising the critical question whether the means for waging biological warfare could be resurrected in Russia in the future.Based on interviews with important Soviet scientists and managers, papers from the Soviet Central Committee, and U.S. and U.K. declassified documents, this book peels back layers of lies, to reveal how and why Soviet leaders decided to develop biological weapons, the scientific resources they dedicated to this task, and the multitude of research institutes that applied themselves to its fulfillment. We learn that Biopreparat, an ostensibly civilian organization, was established to manage a top secret program, code-named Ferment, whose objective was to apply genetic engineering to develop strains of pathogenic agents that had never existed in nature. Leitenberg and Zilinskas consider the performance of the U.S. intelligence community in discovering and assessing these activities, and they examine in detail the crucial years 1985 to 1992, when Mikhail Gorbachev’s attempts to put an end to the program were thwarted as they were under Yeltsin.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Military History, Science, Russia

1339 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 29, 2012

Reviews

[Tech Historian · Rating 5 out of 5]

The landmark study.

For at least 20 years (1972-1992) the Soviet Union hid a ~65,000 person offensive biological weapons program. This Soviet program had at least five R&D centers and 7 massive mobilization production centers with weapons filling stations. These were not defensive vaccine research centers. They produced _tons_ of weaponized anthrax, plague, smallpox genetically modified for virulence and designed to bypass existing vaccines.

The Soviet Union and now Russia has lied continually about the existence of the program.

While we missed a few dozen attackers on 9.11, missing 65,000 people in a weapons program was the largest failure of U.S. intelligence in American history. It was the largest failure of the U.S. arms negotiations.

This book lays it all out it in excruciating and painful detail. This book is the reference standard for the history of the Soviet biological weapons program.

[James T]

Great topical depth. 1st hand accounts and great info. Like a text book.

[teohjitkhiam · Rating 4 out of 5]

A sobering account of the Soviet biological weapons program and its subsequent assumption by Russia.