Biopreparat

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Biopreparat ( Russian Биопрепарат , preparation of biological substances ) has been the main biological warfare agency in the Soviet Union since the 1970s. It was a network of secret laboratories, each dealing with a different deadly agent. Its 30,000 employees researched and produced biological weapons .

history

Facility

Biopreparat was established in 1973 as a "civilian" continuation of the earlier Soviet biological weapons program. According to reports, the program was initiated by academician Yuri Ovchinnikov , who convinced the General Secretary of the CPSU , Leonid Brezhnev, of the importance of developing biological weapons. Some authors identified Colonel General Taras Chepura as a prominent supporter who stressed the importance of covert research. Research at Biopreparat was a serious violation of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention , which prohibits the development and manufacture of biological weapons. Their existence was denied by the Soviet Union for decades.

Discovery of biopreparation in the west

In April 1979, the anthrax accident in Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg ) caused the deaths of at least 105 Soviet citizens.

The Soviet Union tried to cover up the incident, but details leaked out in 1980 when the Bild newspaper ran an article about the incident. Moscow called the allegations that the epidemic was a biological weapon accident "defamatory propaganda" and insisted that the outbreak was caused by contaminated food.

The first important bioweapons expert to leave the West was Vladimir Passechnik . He alerted Western intelligence agencies in 1989 about the huge scale of Moscow's secret program. The British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and US President George HW Bush practiced out pressure on the Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev made to open the Russian facilities for biological warfare a team of foreign inspectors.

When the inspectors visited four of the facilities in 1991, they were met with denial and excuses. Production tanks, apparently intended for mass production, were cleaned and sterilized; the equipment had been removed from laboratories.

Passechnik's revelation that the program was ten times larger than originally thought was confirmed by the escape of Colonel Kanachan Alibekov (known as Ken Alibek) , the program's second chief scientist , in 1992 . Alibekow was Deputy Director of Biopreparat from 1988 to 1992. He claimed that the development of new strains of genetically engineered super weapons would continue.

Alibek later wrote the book Biohazard (1999) in which he published in detail his extensive inside knowledge of the structure, goals, operation and successes of Biopreparat. He also appeared on October 13, 1998 in the American documentary series Frontline of the American television network Public Broadcasting Service .

1990s

The biopreparation complex suffered from the collapse of the Soviet Union. Since then, some large bioweapons manufacturing facilities have officially closed. The current state is unknown, but it is likely that successor institutions continued research and development into biological weapons at least into the 1990s.

business

Biopreparat was a system of 18 nominally civil research institutions and centers (located mainly in the European part of Russia) where a small army of scientists and technicians developed biological weapons including anthrax , Ebola , plague , Q-fever and smallpox . It was the largest producer of weapons-grade anthrax in the Soviet Union and a leader in the development of new bioweapons technologies.

Biopreparat facilities

The project had 18 major manufacturing plants and facilities of which the following are known:

Biopreparat pathogens

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Pathogens Successfully Developed into Weapons (in order of completion):

The annual production capacity of many of the pathogens listed above was tens of thousands of tons, typically with redundant production facilities spread across the Soviet Union.

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c 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. ↑ Zilinskas, Raymond A., Anthrax in Sverdlovsk ?, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, June / July 1983. pp. 24-27