Despite the end of the Cold War and the subsequent collapse of state capitalist USSR, the insanity of total war lingers on.
Niether the US or the USSR seemingly content with their abilities at the time to ensure that almost every living creature on the planet was destroyed in all out nuclear conflict, with the ravaged earth damaged for years afterwards, it seem accoridng to a new book that the Russians in particular wanted to ensure the survivors were as sick as possible too.
The Washington Post reports:
"The authors reveal new details about the deadly achievements of Soviet
weapons scientists — from multiple-drug-resistant anthrax to “stealth”
bugs that elude detection — and they say the strains probably still
exist inside the freezers of military laboratories inside Russia. The book also suggests that U.S. intelligence operatives may have
inadvertently fueled the Soviets’ experimentation with germ warfare, in
part by spreading false stories that convinced communist leaders that
the United States was also secretly making such weapons after the U.S.
program was officially halted in 1969
At minimum, Soviet officials appear to have increased production of
an anthrax weapon because they falsely believed that the United States
was doing the same, contend the authors of “The Soviet Biological Weapons Program,” an exhaustively researched, 890-page history of the Soviet Union’s 65-year effort to develop the tools for germ warfare. “It may have led to the massive expansion of the Soviet b. anthracis program,” write Milton Leitenberg and Raymond Zilinskas,
scientists and biological weapons experts who interviewed some of the
Soviet Union’s former top bioweaponeers during more than a decade of
research for the book.
Russia maintains a policy of official denial with regard to Soviet-era production of bioweapons, which were banned by an international treaty signed by the Soviet Union in 1972.
But former Russian president Boris Yeltsin confirmed the existence of a
secret Soviet program to top U.S. officials in the early 1990s, and
since then, defectors, former Soviet scientists, U.S. officials and
journalists have published extensive accounts. Such reports
revealed the outlines of a vast program that employed tens of thousands
of people at its peak, and they also shed light on the 1979 industrial accident
in a bioweapons plant in the Soviet city of Sverdlovsk, in which
anthrax spores spread through a residential area, killing at least 68
people.
Leitenberg and Zilinskas draw from hundreds of interviews, documents
and intelligence files to generate a catalogue of the Soviet bioweapons
arsenal and its intended use. Among their book’s revelations is an
account of a largely successful Soviet effort to engineer deadly new
strains, such as drug-resistant forms of the bacteria that cause anthrax and tularemia. In one of their more chilling accomplishments, Soviet scientists
learned to alter microbes to give them stealthy characteristics, the
authors say. The bacteria that cause plague, for instance — Yersina pestis
— were modified so that standard medical tests could not detect an
infection until the disease had progressed to an advanced stage, the
authors say.
Similar changes were made to a strain of the bacteria that cause Legionnaire’s disease.
In the altered state, the bacteria would stimulate the body’s immune
response to conceal symptoms of the disease, while simultaneously
secreting a toxin that attacks a critical component of the nervous
system known as myelin.
“The destruction of myelin . . . induces an illness similar to multiple sclerosis, but with a quick death,” the authors state. Despite
such achievements, the Soviet program suffered from deficiencies and
gaps, including a failure to perfect delivery vehicles such as missile
warheads.
The gaps suggest that Soviet leaders were conflicted
over how and when to use such weapons. One theory, explored by the
authors, is that biological weapons were “developed not for military
purposes, but for sabotage or terrorism.”
Details about the
dismantling of the bioweapons program after the Soviet Union’s collapse
have been kept secret for two decades. Despite repeated requests,
Russian officials also have refused to allow outside access to three
biological laboratories operated by the Defense Ministry. The labs
were part of the Soviet-era program, and it is “reasonable to conclude”
that collections of microbes from the weapons program are warehoused
there, in the same way that disease strains are kept in heavily guarded
military and civilian laboratories in the United States, the authors
say. They add that the lack of any transparency raises concerns about
the security of the collections and the possibility of continuing
research.
“One must assume that whatever genetically engineered bacterial and viral forms were created . . . remain stored in the culture collections of the Russian Federation Ministry of Defense,” the authors write."
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Its a scary thought that these things may still be hidden somwhere especially given the unpredictability of capitalisms leaders in Moscow. It also shows the insantiy of system based on profit at all costs, even mutually assured destruction (MAD) and the ongoing battle for markets and raw materials, the basis for all conflict.
SussexSocialist
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