The Soviet biological weapons program : a history / Milton Leitenberg and Raymond A. Zilinskas, with Jens H. Kuhn.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

The Soviet Union's biological warfare program, 1926-1972 -- Beginnings of the "modern" Soviet BW program, 1970-1977 -- The USSR Ministry of Defense facilities and the Soviet biological warfare program -- The open-air testing of biological weapons by Aralsk-7 on Vozrozhdeniye Island -- Soviet civilian sector defenses against biological warfare and infectious diseases -- Biopreparat's role in the Soviet biological warfare program and its survival in Russia -- Biopreparat's State Research Center for Applied Microbiology (SRCAM) -- All-Union Research Institute of Molecular Biology and Scientific Production Association ("Vector") -- Biopreparat facilities at Leningrad, Lyubuchany, and Stepnogorsk -- Soviet biological weapons and doctrines for their use -- Distinguishing between offensive and defensive biological warfare activities -- Assessments of Soviet biological warfare activities by Western intelligence services -- United States covert biological warfare disinformation -- Soviet allegations of the use of biological weapons by the United States -- Sverdlovsk 1979 : the release of bacillus anthracis spores from a Soviet Ministry of Defense facility and its consequences -- Soviet research on mycotoxins -- Assistance by Warsaw Pact states to the Soviet Union's biological warfare program -- The question of proliferation from the USSR biological warfare program -- Recalcitrant Russian policies in a parallel area : chemical weapon demilitarization -- The Soviet Union, Russia and biological warfare arms control -- The Gorbachev years : the Soviet biological weapons program, 1985-1992 -- Boris Yeltsin to the present -- United States and international efforts to prevent proliferation of biological weapons expertise from the former Soviet Union.

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 hugely expensive research that added nothing to the country's security. This history is the first attempt to understand the full scope of the USSR's offensive biological weapons research--its inception in the 1920s, its growth between 1970 and 1980, and its possible remnants in present-day Russia. We learn that between 1990 and 1992 the U.S. and U.K. governments never obtained clear evidence of the program's closure, raising the haunting question whether the means for waging biological warfare could be resurrected in Russia today. 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.

Print version record.

English.

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