The Dead Hand: The Anthrax Factory, Excerpt-3

More than one year ago i posted 4 chapters (Excerpt-1 & Excerpt-2) of David E. Hoffman’s book ‘The Dead Hand’, And now here i am posting excerpt from Chapter-5 of The Dead Hand. Posting excerpt gets delay because it's really time consuming to select important paragraphs and find photographs, references & links related to all topics of this book.

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Part One

Chapter 5 - The Anthrax Factory

Ground zero for testing smallpox and other biological weapons in the Soviet Union was a hot, arid and sandy island, isolated and remote. It was named Vozrozhdeniye, or Rebirth Island, and located in the middle of the Aral Sea, ...

In mid-July 1971, a Soviet civilian research ship, the Lev Berg, named after a famous Russian biologist and geologist, set sail from Aralsk, a city of fifty thousand then at the northern tip of the sea. On those summer days, the mission of the Lev Berg was to sample the ecological damage. The ship left July 15 and made a long circle around the shoreline. Winds across the water always drifted in a southerly direction. On July 31, the Lev Berg was south of Vozrozhdeniye Island. The ship then returned to home port August 11. A twenty-four-year-old woman who had worked on the deck of the ship, hauling nets and archiving samples, went home and became very ill. In the weeks that followed, she came down with smallpox, then spread it to nine other people in Aralsk. Three died, including two infants under one year old.

No direct evidence exists that a smallpox test was the reason for the outbreak, but a senior Soviet official, Pyotr Burgasov, said years later that a test had been conducted there. At the time of the smallpox outbreak, Burgasov was Soviet deputy minister of health. He recalled: “A highly potent smallpox formula was being tested on Vozrozhdeniye Island in the Aral Sea …

Suddenly I got a report saying that deaths from unknown causes had been registered in the town of Aralsk. Here is what happened: A research vessel from the Aralsk Shipping Company came within 15 kilometers of the island (it was forbidden to approach closer than 40 kilometers) and a lab assistant went out on deck twice a day, taking plankton samples. Smallpox pathogen—a mere 400 grams of the formula had been exploded on the island—“got” her; she contracted smallpox, and when she returned home to Aralsk, she infected several more people, some of them children. There were no survivors. ...

This is what real bacteriological weapons are like! Minimum efective range: 15 kilometers. You can easily imagine what would have happened had there been not just one lab assistant, but 100 or 200 people around at the time. 

The smallpox outbreak was hushed up by the Soviet authorities and never reported to the World Health Organization.

In 1971, the same year as the Aralsk outbreak, a renewed diplomatic effort was made to strengthen international control over germ warfare. The 1925 Geneva Protocol had covered both chemical and biological weapons. The British proposed at the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva to separate germ warfare from chemical weapons, and to tackle biological weapons first. The idea was that it would be easier to ban germ warfare before moving on to chemical weapons. Nixon’s decision to close down the American biological weapons program had given a new impetus to negotiations.

The Soviet Union had long insisted on an “immediate and simultaneous ban” on both biological and chemical weapons. But in March 1971, they suddenly agreed to split the two issues. The Soviet Union and the United States approved a new treaty prohibiting biological weapons, which was sent to the United Nations in August and approved unanimously by the General Assembly in December. The Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention was signed in London, Washington and Moscow on April 10, 1972. The four-page agreement banned the development and production of biological weapons, and the means of delivering them. ...

But just as the Geneva Protocol a half century earlier had been weak, so was the new biological weapons treaty. It lacked on-site inspection mechanisms, because the Soviets had refused to accept any. It did not prohibit research if carried out for defensive purposes. ...

Nixon had little faith in the new treaty. He was reluctant to even attend the signing ceremony. On the day he signed it, Nixon privately told Kissinger it was a “silly biological warfare thing which doesn’t mean anything,” ...

The Biological Weapons Convention, which took effect on March 26, 1975, was the first post–World War II disarmament treaty in which an entire class of weapons was to be done away with. ...

In the winter months of 1972, Igor Domaradsky was recuperating from tuberculosis at a rest home outside of Moscow. One day, an official car arrived unexpectedly to pick him up. Domaradsky was driven to the Soviet health ministry in Moscow, and then to the Kremlin. High-Ranking officials told him that he was being officially transferred from Rostov to Moscow to work for an organization involving microbiology. ...

He was assigned to work at a government agency, Glavmikro-bioprom, which was a shortened name for the main directorate of the microbiological industry. ...

In the West, genetics and molecular biology were accelerating. The experiments of cutting, pasting and copying DNA fragments by Herb Boyer and Stanley Cohen in California were pushing the science of molecular biology to new levels. Many of the advances came just as Domaradsky was transferred to Moscow. The 1973 experiments of Cohen and Boyer marked the dawn of genetic engineering.

Soviet leaders made a momentous decision. Up to this point, their germ warfare program had been a military one. They had signed the new biological weapons treaty. But in deepest secrecy, they decided to violate the agreement, and to expand their pursuit of offensive biological weapons to exploit the new advances in genetic engineering. In the past they had used natural pathogens for weapons. Now they rushed to modify nature and create dangerous new agents. Domaradsky was recruited to be at the center of the program.

The germ warfare effort was far different from the nuclear arms race. Both superpowers formally negotiated on nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons were legal by the rules of the day. The countries made treaties, set limits and went to great lengths to regulate the competition by arms control negotiations, which they discussed in the open. To protect against cheating, they created verification regimes. But when the Soviet leaders expanded their biological weapons program in the early 1970s, they moved into a dark underside of the arms race. ...

Almost every participant in the Soviet program has said they assumed the United States was also cheating. But in fact the U.S. program had stopped.

At the time, Brezhnev was influenced by a leading molecular biologist, Yuri Ovchinnikov, vice president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. He and several colleagues persuaded Brezhnev to harness the new genesplicing technology for offensive military purposes. According to Ken Alibek, who became deputy director of the Soviet biological weapons program, Ovchinnikov “understood the significance of what he had read in Western scientific journals, and he knew that there were no Soviet laboratories, and few Soviet scientists, equipped to match that level of work.” ...

The message was: they had to catch up. As part of the effort, Domaradsky recalled that several prominent Soviet scientists scoured the West for literature on molecular biology and genetics. Among them was Victor Zhdanov, a noted virologist who had initially proposed the global campaign to eradicate smallpox in 1958. Zhdanov won the high regard of Western scientists, and was often permitted to travel abroad. ...

In microbiology, a fine line exists between research that offers the promise of improved human life—better vaccines, drugs and agricultural products—and research that could be used to exploit human vulnerability to toxins and infectious disease. ...

This allowed the Soviet leaders to hide their weapons program.

In 1973, soon after the treaty was signed but before it took effect, Brezhnev established a new organization, Biopreparat. The cover story would be that Biopreparat was making medicines and vaccines. But the truth was that Biopreparat was the dual-use mechanism for a recharged and ambitious Soviet effort to discover new offensive biological weapons. Under the cover of civilian pharmaceuticals, Biopreparat would be researching the most dangerous pathogens known to man. To guide it, Brezhnev ordered the creation of a secret, inner council. Brezhnev put the respected virologist Zhdanov in charge of the council, and Domaradsky was named deputy director.

Within the council, Domaradsky was also put in charge of a “special department” for planning biological weapons development. He had frequent contact with the military bioweapons laboratories, government ministries, Academy of Sciences, and security services. He was now at the “brain center” of the germ warfare research program. The code word for the new offensive weapons drive was “Ferment.” ...

In 1974, the Soviet government issued another decree, this one public, seeking to accelerate Soviet work in microbiology. ...

... But once again, the open decree was intended to conceal the truth. The Biopreparat-run laboratories were secretly intended for weapons work and were being erected at Koltsovo and Obolensk. By Alibek’s account, it was the most ambitious Soviet arms program since development of the hydrogen bomb.

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In his new assignment, Domaradsky was to work in the shadows. All documents concerning Ferment were transported with armed escort in special vehicles. Meetings of the council were held in a specially soundproofed hall, which was checked for bugs by the security services before every meeting. Domaradsky’s subscriptions to scientific literature had to be screened in advance by the security service. He was prohibited to travel outside the Soviet bloc, and often not even there. “I knew too much,” he acknowledged. ...

Domaradsky and his researchers held ten “inventor’s certificates,” for introducing genetic material into plague, but these papers were classified. ...

... To see his own certificates he had to enter a special security room and could not take any documents out.

Domaradsky was deeply conflicted. He desired to explore science, yet was aware he was contributing to instruments of death. The pathogens he developed would eventually be turned into weapons, although he did not deal with the actual bombs, just the germs. ...

Moreover, Domaradsky felt a “vaulting pride” at being in the heart of the Soviet effort. ...

... He knew of the treaty prohibiting biological weapons, but assumed Americans were also cheating.

... As Biopreparat took shape, Domaradsky drafted a plan, approved in 1975, to expand the drive for genetically engineered germ weapons in five major directions, including resistance to antibiotics. This was a key turning point. Programs got underway to transfer the genes from various deadly agents into the cells of bacteria, or into the DNA of viruses, to boost the pathogenetic factors. Domaradsky wanted to inject the genetic material directly into plague. These programs were called “Bonfire” and “Factor.” While Domaradsky worked as deputy director of the council in Moscow, the council also set up a parallel program to use genetically altered viruses and germ weapons to devastate crops and livestock, Project “Ecology.”

... According to Domaradsky, the “Problem No. 5” for civil defense became a cover story for weapons work. The institutes were asked to gather dangerous pathogens they found on the steppe, and to study what made them virulent, so they could be fed into the Biopreparat flasks.

The Biological Weapons Convention entered into force on March 26, 1975. That June, Alexei A. Roshchin, the Soviet ambassador to the disarmament committee in Geneva, declared: “At the present time, the Soviet Union does not have in its possession any bacteriological (biological) agents or toxins, weapons, equipment or means of delivery specified in Article 1 of the Convention.”

Whether Roshchin was aware of the reality is unknown, but Domaradsky certainly knew the truth. ...

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Soon after the biological weapons treaty was ratified, U.S. intelligence satellites picked up signs of unusual new factories being built in the Soviet Union. ...

Then in April 1979 came the Sverdlovsk anthrax epidemic. Fragmentary reports began to reach the West. The intelligence community had long suspected a secret Soviet biological weapons program existed. Now perhaps there was evidence.

The first reports began filtering into the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency through Soviet émigrés. A top-secret CIA intelligence report on October 15, 1979, cited an unnamed Soviet émigré as saying that three close friends had told him in May “of an accident at a biological warfare (BW) institute in Sverdlovsk which resulted in 40 to 60 deaths. Other sources have also heard rumors of such an accident.” ...

In December, Soviet forces invaded Afghanistan. The SALT II treaty was endangered. If the Soviets were found to have violated the five-year-old biological weapons treaty, it would be yet another serious setback to ratification of the nuclear arms agreement.

Unexpectedly, fresh intelligence arrived in Washington about Sverdlovsk. A secret CIA report on January 28, 1980, said: “Recent intelligence strengthens allegations that an accident at a BW installation caused civilian casualties in southern Sverdlovsk during April 1979.” This report added the claim of a possible explosion at the plant that caused the release. This report added the claim of a possible explosion at the plant that caused the release. The report said that “pathogenic bacteria allegedly escaped into the air and spread over industrial and residential areas of southern Sverdlovsk.” The report also took note that, “An announcement about an anthrax epidemic in a public health context appears to have been designed to prevent a possible panic among Sverdlovsk’s million-plus population.'' ...

In January and February 1980, a practicing surgeon from a Sverdlovsk hospital gave U.S. intelligence agencies a new and more detailed account, which the Defense Intelligence Agency described in a top-secret report March 3. Although some details were vague, the surgeon was correct about many specifics. He said the accident occurred inside a military installation where “dispersible biological weapons” were produced. ...

...  intelligence agency concluded in the report that the information “presents a very strong circumstantial case for biological weapons activity” at the facility.

In Moscow on Monday, March 17, 1980, the U.S. ambassador, Thomas Watson, raised the Sverdlovsk anthrax epidemic in a quiet inquiry with the Soviet Foreign Ministry. The ministry did not respond right away. In Washington on Tuesday, March 18, a State Department spokesman, responding to questions from journalists, read out a public statement saying there were “disturbing indications” that “a lethal biological agent” might have hit Sverdlovsk in 1979 and this had raised questions “about whether such material was present in quantities consistent with” the biological weapons treaty. The Soviets were surprised by the State Department’s public announcement, which they hadn’t expected. The Soviet response came on Thursday, March 20, that the outbreak was caused by contaminated meat. The issue was extremely sensitive because that same week in Geneva, diplomats from fifty-three countries were winding up the first five-year review conference of the Biological Weapons Convention. They were on the verge of approving a final declaration. The U.S. ambassador to the talks, Charles Flowerree, told his Soviet counterpart, Victor Israelyan, about the message of concern over Sverdlovsk delivered in Moscow.

The Soviets decided to keep stonewalling. On Friday, March 21, acting on instructions from Moscow, Israelyan made a public statement to the conference. He reassured the conference there was nothing to worry about. “There are no grounds whatsoever” for the questions raised by the United States, he said. ...

The same day, after this statement, the conference approved a final declaration on the Biological Weapons Convention. The treaty was working, the member states declared. No one had filed any complaints about violations. ...

A week later, the United States passed a secret message back to Moscow, saying that “reports available to us indicate a prolonged outbreak of pulmonary anthrax in Sverdlovsk, involving a large number of fatalities. Based on our experience, we would expect an outbreak of anthrax resulting from contaminated meat to have been of relatively short duration and to have resulted in only a small number of fatalities.”

In Washington, the Central Intelligence Agency turned to experts, including Matthew Meselson, the Harvard molecular biologist who had earlier urged Nixon to outlaw biological weapons. Meselson got a call from Julian Hoptman, the CIA’s longtime analyst of biological weapons. For a week, Meselson stayed at Hoptman’s home, and, with secret clearances, worked at Hoptman’s office at CIA headquarters. ...

... there were many unanswered questions, especially about the diagnosis. In notes he made from that week, Meselson wrote, “The main technical question in my mind at this point concerns the diagnosis of respiratory anthrax.” Was the anthrax inhaled by the victims, which might point to biological weapons dispersed in an aerosol, or was it ingested by them, which could be explained by distribution of bad meat? Or was it some other respiratory disease altogether?

A related puzzle was why the cases continued for seven weeks. The textbooks Meselson consulted had suggested the incubation period for anthrax was a few days. If there was a single cloud of spores, there should have been a rapid fall-off of new cases. Instead, people kept getting sick for quite some time. ...

Biological weapons were the ultimate challenge for spies, soldiers and scientists. From space, satellites could photograph intercontinental ballistic missile silos, and they could be counted. But germs were another matter. A satellite might spot an unusual building compound, like the one in Sverdlovsk, but seeing flasks in laboratories proved nearly impossible. That is why understanding Sverdlovsk was so important. It was a tantalizing bit of genuine evidence. With Sverdlovsk, the enormity of the Soviet germ warfare program had been glimpsed, but was still not proven.

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After the Sverdlovsk accident, Soviet officials shipped a large supply of anthrax bacteria out of the city to a distant storage facility at Zima, near Irkutsk in Siberia. They wanted to get anthrax production running again, but they needed a new location. ...

... Soviet officials wanted to hide the anthrax production more carefully. The best cover was Biopreparat, the supposedly civilian pharmaceutical enterprise. In 1981, Brezhnev approved relocating the Sverdlovsk facility. The destination was a remote desert town, Stepnogorsk, in northern Kazakhstan. This was a Biopreparat operation, and Ken Alibek was chosen to run it.

Alibek was an ethnic Kazakh. After graduation from the Tomsk Medical Institute as a military doctor, he was assigned to a biopesticide factory at Omutninsk in western Russia, a training ground for those who would work on biological weapons. From the start, he recalled, “there were no orientation lectures or seminars, but if we had any doubts as to the real purpose of our assignment, they were quickly dispelled.” They were asked to sign a pledge of secrecy, then called in one by one to meet their KGB instructors.

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Alibek was sent to Stepnogorsk in 1983. The new germ warfare plant was attached to a civilian facility, the Progress Scientific and Production Association, which made pesticides and fertilizer and provided a cover story. Within a few weeks of his assignment, Alibek was summoned to Moscow for briefings. Biopreparat had moved to a headquarters at No. 4a Samokatnaya Street, ...

... Inside, Alibek was shown a secret decree Brezhnev had signed in 1982. “An intelligence officer pulled the decree from a red folder tied with a string, placed it gravely on a desk, and stood behind me while I read,” he recalled. “I already knew the gist of the order: we were to transform our sleepy facility in northern Kazakhstan into a munitions place that would eventually replace Sverdlovsk.”

The weapon was to be the “battle strain,” known as Anthrax 836. “Once I’d worked out the technique for its cultivation, concentration, and preparation, I was to develop the infrastructure to reproduce it on a massive scale—a goal that had eluded our military scientists for years. ...

“My job in Stepnogorsk was, in effect, to create the world’s most efficient assembly line for the mass production of weaponized anthrax.”

Officially, Alibek was deputy director of Progress, the civilian enterprise, but he had a secret title as “war commander” of the entire installation.  “I was expected to take control of the factory during what the army called ‘special periods’ of rising tensions between the superpowers. Upon receipt of a coded message from Moscow, I was to transform Progress into a munitions plant. Strains of virulent bacteria would be pulled from our vaults and seeded in our reactors and fermenters. Anthrax was our main agent at Stepnogorsk, but we also worked with glanders and were prepared to weaponize tularemia and plague.” The pathogens would be poured into bomblets and spray tanks and loaded onto trucks for shipment to a railroad station or airfield. “I was to maintain production until I received an order from Moscow to stop, or until our plant was destroyed.”

Alibek said he took seriously the prospect of a Cold War confrontation with the United States. Reagan’s election and military buildup were alarming. “Our soldiers were dying in Afghanistan at the hands of U.S.-backed guerrillas, and Washington was about to deploy a new generation of cruise missiles in Western Europe, ...

“We didn’t need hawkish intelligence briefings to persuade us of the danger,” he added. “Our newspapers chafed over Reagan’s description of our country as an evil empire, and the angry rhetoric of our leaders undermined the sense of security ...

...  it was easy to believe that the West would seize upon our moment of weakness to destroy us.”

On a plain nine miles from Stepnogorsk, an old uranium-mining town, the Progress enterprise was lined with high gray walls and an electric-wire fence. The surrounding land had been stripped of all vegetation, partly as a safeguard in the event of a leak. ...

... New buildings rose off the desert floor. Building 221 was the main production facility; building 231 for the drying and milling of agents. Building 600 was the research center and housed the largest indoor testing facility built in the Soviet Union up to that time. ...

“Bioweapons are not rocket launchers,” Alibek explained in his memoir. “They cannot be loaded and fired. The most virulent culture in a test tube is useless as an offensive weapon until it has been put through a process that gives it stability and predictability. The manufacturing technique is, in a sense, the real weapon, and it is harder to develop than individual agents.”

... In the end, after mixing with stabilizing substances, the mixture would be loaded into munitions. The grounds were dotted with underground bunkers for storage and filling the bombs, and laced by rail lines to haul them away. If the order were given, Stepnogorsk was to make 300 tons of anthrax a year.

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Copyright © 2009 by David E. Hoffman / Random House, Inc.

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Images from: Various Sources

Excerpts from Halfway to Freedom

 

Halfway to Freedom: A Report on the New India
Authoress: Margaret Bourke-White
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

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~ Direct Action in Calcutta

Why had the fearful Great Migration come to pass? Why were millions of people wrenched from their ancestral homes and driven toward an unknown, often unwanted "Promised Land"? For years Hindus and Muslims had struggled side by side for independence from British rule. With freedom finally on the horizon why should India begin to tear herself in two along religious lines?

The overt act that split India began in the streets of Calcutta. But the decision was made in Bombay. It was a one-man decision, and the man who made it was cool, calculating, unreligious. This determination to establish a separate Islamic state came not -- one might have expected -- from some Muslim divine in archaic robes and flowing beard, but from a thoroughly Westernized, English-educated attorney-at-law with a clean-shaven face and razor-sharp mind. Mahomed Ali Jinnah, leader of the Muslim League and the architect of Pakistan, had for many years worked at the side of Nehru and Gandhi for a free, united India, until in the evening of his life he broke with his past to achieve a separate Pakistan.

Jinnah lived to see himself ruler of the world's largest Islamic nation before he died in September, 1948, at the age of seventy-two, but I think of him as reaching his pinnacle of power two years before his death, when freedom-with-unity appeared on the verge of becoming a reality and he took the momentous steps that crushed all hopes for a united India.

Jinnah's press conference at his Bombay home on fashionable Malabar Hill, in late July, 1946, marked the public turning point. It was so unusual for the Quaid-i-Azam, or "Great Leader," to call a press conference that both foreign and Indian reporters rushed eagerly to attend it. Nor were they disappointed. On that mid-summer morning, Jinnah intimated -- rather boldly -- the coming of Direct Action Day. Two and one half weeks later this day touched off a chain of events that led, after twelve explosive months, to a divided India and the violent disruptions of the Great Migration.

Until then most of us had thought the differences between the Congress Party and the Muslim League would somehow be resolved and that freedom would bring a united nation. Jinnah's arguments for division were all familiar: that the Muslims in India were outnumbered three to one by Hindus and would be crushed under Hindu domination; that Hindus worshiped the cow while Muslims ate the cow; that religion, customs, culture all made Muslims different from Hindus. Opponents of the two-nation theory maintained that Hindus and Muslims could not be so different, since there was no racial difference. Ninety-five per cent of India's Muslims were just converted Hindus. Even Mr. Jinnah, they were fond of pointing out, had a Hindu grandfather.

For my part, I believe that the tragic weakness of the Indian leaders during this crucial period was their failure to take a firm stand against the forces of Indian feudalism. A spellbinder with slogans found it all too easy to galvanize the pent-up suffering of centuries into one powerful current of religious hatred. That this was done by an ambitious lawyer in Western dress and of unorthodox habits makes it all the clearer that religion was used like a document plucked from a briefcase.

There was a good deal of the successful lawyer about Jinnah that midsummer morning of the press conference, as he stood on the steps of his spacious veranda receiving the reporters. A pencil-thin monochrome in gray and silver, with perfectly tailored suit and tie and socks precisely matching his hair, his manner with us was courteous but formal. As he fitted his monocle to his eye and began to speak, there was something consciously theatrical about Mr. Jinnah -- throwback perhaps to that most un-Islamic chapter of his past when he was a Shakespearean actor in England.

His statement to the press was in the form of a monologue, delivered in an icy voice, which was forecast of fiery events to come. "We are preparing to launch a struggle. We have chalked a plan." We reporters, although we sat around Jinnah in a closed circle, had almost to stop our breathing to hear his curiously hushed words. He had decided to boycott the Constituent Assembly. He was rejecting in its entirety the British plan for transfer of power to an interim government which would combine both the League and the Congress. He lashed out against the "Hindu-dominated Congress" in his flat, chilled monotone. It seemed clear, now the bondage to the British was drawing to an end, that he was free to concentrate all his fire against the opposite party.

"We are forced in our own self-protection to abandon constitutional methods." His thin lips slit into a frigid smile. "The decision we have taken is a very grave one." If the Muslims were not granted their separate Pakistan they would launch "direct action." The phrase caught all of us. What form would direct action take, we all wanted to know. "Go to the Congress and ask them their plans," Mr. Jinnah snapped. "When they take you into their confidence I will take you into mine."

There was silence for a moment, broken only by the cooing of pigeons, hopping over Jinnah's manicured lawn. Then he added in the same toneless voice, so strangely unmatched to his words: "Why do you expect me alone to sit with folded hands? I also am going to make trouble."

Next day the Quaid-i-Azam changed out of his double-breasted suit and put on Muslim dress and fez for the Muslim masses. Standing on a platform liberally decorated with enlargements of his portrait, he announced that the sixteenth of August, two and a half weeks hence, would be "Direct Action Day." His vituperation against the Congress was acidly explicit. "If you want peace, we do not want war," he declared. "If you want war we accept your offer unhesitatingly. We will either have a divided India or a destroyed India." And the Muslim Leaguers jumped up on their seats and tossed their fezzes in the air.

It was a battle between top-flight politicians now. The papers blazed with accusations from both sides -- League and Congress equally intolerant in their attacks. The opposing streams of fiery words had a terrible effect on the emotional Indian people. Passions mounted during the crucial fortnight; Direct Action Day dawned in an atmosphere of dread and foreboding.

Most of what I learned about that day came from a little tea-shop keeper in Calcutta, where the explosion began. As soon as I heard of the incredible events taking place, I had flown from Bombay to Calcutta. The disruption of normal city life was so great that it was some time before I could make my way to the ruined heart of the bazaar district. Hunting for a survivor who had been an eyewitness to the first stroke of direct action, I found Nanda Lal, in the wreckage of his teashop. ........

On the morning of August 16th, Nanda Lal started his oven and set out his tray of sweetmeats as usual. When his little son came out with the jars of mango pickle and chutney, he commented to the child that the streets looked reassuringly quiet. The sacred cows that roam freely through the thoroughfares of Calcutta were sleeping as usual in the middle of the car tracks, and rose to their feet reluctantly, as they always did, when the first streetcar of the day clanged down Harrison Road.

It was the sight of that first tram that confirmed Nanda Lal's fears that this day was to be unlike all other days. Normally it was so crowded with commuters that they bulged from the platform and clung to the doorsteps and back of the car. Today there was hardly a passenger on board.

Then things began happening so quickly that Nanda Lal could hardly recall them in sequence. But he did remember quite clearly the seven lorries that came thundering down Harrison Road. Men armed with brickbats and bottles began leaping out of the lorries -- Muslim "goondas," or gangsters, Nanda Lal decided, since they immediately fell to tearing up Hindu shops. Some rushed into the furniture store next to the Happy Home and began tossing mattresses and furniture into the street. Others ran toward the Bengal Cabin, but Nanda Lal was fastening up the blinds by now, shouting to his son to run back into the house, straining to bar the windows and close the door. .......

During the terrible days that followed, Nanda Lal huddled with his family and relatives in the upper hallway. Sometimes bricks and stones crashed through the windows of the outside rooms. The children cried a great deal; they were hungry as well as terrified. .......

On the fourth day Nanda Lal noted that the weapons in the street fighting had grown heavier. Soda-water bottles had given way to iron staves, and unfortunately the neighborhood had a plentiful supply of rails from the fence surrounding the near-by Shraddhananda Park. Finally, as the skirmish of the iron pikes reached its fiercest, a convoy of three military tanks rolled through and machine-gunned the mobs, and along with them the police made their belated appearance. ......

When peace returned to Calcutta on the fifth day, the streets were a rubble of broken bricks and bottles, bloated remains of cows, and charred wrecks of automobiles and victorias rising above the strewn figures of the dead. The human toll had reached six thousand according to official count, and sixteen thousand according to unofficial sources. In this great city, as large as Detroit, vast areas were dark with ruin and black with the wings of vultures that hovered impartially over the Hindu and Muslim dead.

Thousands began fleeing Calcutta. For days the bridge over the Hooghly River, one of the longest steel spans in the world, was a one-way current of men, women, children, and domestic animals, headed toward the Howrah railroad station. ......

But fast as the refugees fled, they could not keep ahead of the swiftly spreading tide of disaster. Calcutta was only the beginning of a chain reaction of riot, counter-riot, and reprisal which stormed through India for an entire year.

The next link in the chain was the Noakhali area in southeastern Bengal. Here in the uncharted recesses of swampy lowlands and hyacinth-choked bayous I talked with Hindus who had abandoned their villages en masse and fled to the riverbanks. They had strange tales to tell of forced conversion to Islam, of being compelled to throw the images of their gods into the water and to eat the meat of the sacred cow. ......

Gandhi -- though he was far too old to endure such hardship -- went to Noakhali and tramped on foot through marshes and jungle trying to restore confidence to the villagers. Trade-unions and peasant organizations threw their weight toward unity. It is significant that throughout the worst of the disruption in Bengal, five million Hindu and Muslim sharecroppers campaigned together in the Tebhaga movement for long-overdue land reforms. Wherever there was constructive leadership toward some goal of social betterment, religious strife dwindled to the vanishing point.

But between these small islands of Hindu-Muslim cooperation were the burning villages, the blazing fanaticisms. The sparks of Bengal flew westward to the state of Bihar, where Hindus wreaked merciless vengeance on the Muslim minority. The flames of Bihar fanned out to the Punjab and touched off explosions that dwarfed even the Calcutta riots.

Months of violence sharpened the divisions, highlighted Jinnah's arguments, achieved partition. On August 15,1947, exactly one day less than a year after Nanda Lal had seen direct action break out on his doorstep, a bleeding Pakistan was carved out of the body of a bleeding India.

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~ The Great Migration

With the coming of independence to India, the world had the chance to watch a most rare event in the history of nations: the birth of twins. It was a birth accompanied by strife and suffering, but I consider myself fortunate to have witnessed and been able to document the historic early days of these two nations: India and Pakistan.

When I went to the Punjab area, in the North of India, in the fall of 1947 to begin photographing the newborn sovereign states, massive exchange of populations was under way. The roads connecting the Union of India with Pakistan looked as our Pulaski Skyway or Sunset Boulevard looks during the rush hour. But instead of the two-way stream of motorcars there were endless convoys of bullock carts, women on donkey back, men on foot carrying on their shoulders the very young or the very old.

Babies were born along the way. People died along the way. Some died of cholera, some from the attacks of hostile religious communities. But many of them simply dropped out of line from sheer weariness and sat by the roadside to wait patiently for death. Sometimes I saw children pulling at the arms and hands of a parent or grandparents, unable to comprehend that those arms would never be able to carry them again. The name "Pakistan" means Land of the Pure: many of the pure never got there. The way to their Promised Land was lined with graves.

The hoofs of countless cattle raised such continuous columns of dust that a pillar of a cloud trailed the convoys by day. And in the evenings when the wayfarers camped by tens of thousands along the roadsides, and built their little fires and made their chapatties -- good deal, I suppose, like the unleavened bread of the Bible -- the light of their campfires rose into the dust-filled air until it seemed as if a pillar of fire hung over them at night.

Indeed, there was such a Biblical atmosphere about this mammoth two-way exodus that I turned to the Old Testament to compare its size with the migration of the Israelites. I found that the Children of Israel numbered eight hundred thousand, but since the Book of Exodus counted men only, this number would have to be tripled or quadrupled. Even so, the exodus of the Children of Israel was dwarfed by the great migration of Muslims, Sikhs, and Hindus which took place upon the partition of India. At the time that I was photographing it for Life magazine there were five million people on the move, with several more million due to follow as soon as room could be found for them. This, for these wretched millions, was the first bitter fruit of independence. ......

They flowed in a two-way stream across the border. Into the Indian Union came the Hindus and Sikhs . ; the Muslims poured into their new Pakistan, which they looked on as their Promised Land. All were led by fear, by highly questionable leadership, by ever dwindling hope. What had been merely arbitrarily drawn areas on a map began emptying and refilling with human beings -- neatly separated into so-called "opposite" religious communities -- as children's crayons fill in an outline map in geography class. But this was no child's play. This was a massive exercise in human misery.

As though the travail of a people divided by pen strokes was not great enough, North India, in this year of all years, suffered the worst floods since 1900. In the Punjab, which means Land of Five Rivers, all five began overflowing their banks, tearing away the earth barriers in the network of canals, spilling into the fields, and trapping entire encampments of refugees. I was almost caught myself in the rising of the River Ravi. .......

Thousands of peasants less lucky than I were trapped -- they had no jeep, no one to warn them. The River Beas claimed the most victims. When the water began receding sufficiently for me to get to it, I photographed one meadow between the river and a railroad ramp where four thousand Muslims had gone in to camp for the night. Only one thousand had come out alive. That meadow was like a battlefield: carts overturned wildly, household goods and farm tools pressed into a mash of mud and wreckage. .......

More fearful than flood and starvation was the ever present threat of attack by hostile religious hordes along the way. Hatreds had been so whipped up by the political pressures which had divided the nations that a new morality had developed. All members of a different religious group were fair prey for loot and murder. Travel by train was still more dangerous than by road because of the ease with which a crowded refugee train could be switched off the main tracks and, while being shunted back and forth, attacked and looted. The railroad station in Amritsar was a place of dread for Muslims. Amritsar, the holy city of the Sikhs and therefore the center of an especially militant form of fanaticism, was the last big junction which Muslim refugee trains had to pass through before crossing into Pakistan. I remember visiting the frightfully littered railroad station after an attack which had cost the lives of a thousand Muslim refugees, and seeing a row of dignified-looking Sikhs, venerable in their long beards and wearing the bright blue turbans of the militant Akali sect, sitting cross-legged all along the platform. Each patriarchal figure held a long curved saber across his knees -- waiting quietly for the next train. The Muslims were not always the victims. Trainloads of Sikhs and Hindus emigrating to India had hours of equal dread when passing through Lahore, the last great rail junction before they escaped from Pakistan. Hindu-Sikh convoys on the Pakistan highroads were a constant temptation to Muslim raiders. .....

For the first time, Lee [a LIFE reporter] and I saw cholera; we had visited an improvised hospital in Kasur where I photographed eight hundred victims lying on the floor. Some, we were told, would pull through, although their appearance made us doubtful. Their lives depended partly on how much nourishment they had been able to get on the roads before the disease struck them down. The sight of these helpless sufferers had made me very angry. These were innocent peasants; some had been driven from their ancestral homes; the others had listened to the drumming of religious slogans and left home to pursue a dream.

Driving back to Lahore in the dusk, we suddenly saw the fields come alive, as though dragons' teeth had sprouted, with hordes of men carrying long poles mounted with knives. They were running forward, and as we rounded a bend in the road we came on a truckload of refugees, apparently Hindus ambushed in hostile Muslim territory. Already swarming figures had reached the top of the truck, throwing down bedrolls and other loot, while one of the attackers thrashed away with a hatchet. The screams were terifying. ....

Lee and I went on with the convoys week after week until our all our hair became stiff and gray with dust, our clothes felt like emery boards, my cameras became clogged with grit, and the endless procession of misery we were portraying seemed, as Lee described it, to be "wrapped in a horrible nightmarish gray lighting, where the heartbreaking sight of human suffering was mercifully blurred by our own physical weariness." But long after the last of my negatives and Lee's captions had been dispatched by air to Life, and Lee herself had flown to another part of the world on a new assignment, those millions of peasants were still trudging blindly forward on their tragic journey. The total of Sikhs and Hindu leaving Pakistan had reached four million, but with six millions Muslims coming in, this infant Land of the Pure seemed in danger of being swept away by the very numbers of the pure pouring into it. ....

Since the time of my first arrival in India a year and a half before Independence Day, I had watched the constant jockeying for position which had finally resulted in the creation not of a single, free, united nation but of these handicapped twins. I remember the many times when bloodshed had broken out during the preliminary sparring and the Pakistan promoters had said, "We must have our separate nation, or we will not have peace." But now that this separate nation had become a reality the people had not achieved peace. It was a little too soon to find out just what they had achieved.

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~ The Messiah and The Promised Land

Pakistan was one month old. Karachi was its mushrooming capital. On the sandy fringes of the city an enormous tent colony had grown up to house the influx of minor government officials. There was only one major government official, Mahomed Ali Jinnah, and there was no need for Jinnah to take to a tent. The huge marble and sandstone Government House, vacated by British officialdom, was waiting. The Quaid-i-Azam moved in, with his sister, Fatima, as hostess. Mr. Jinnah had put on what his critics called his "triple crown": he had made himself Governor-General; he was retaining the presidency of the Muslim League -- now Pakistan's only political party; and he was president of the country's lawmaking body, the Constituent Assembly.

"We never expected to get it so soon," Miss Fatima said when I called. "We never expected to get it in our lifetimes."

If Fatima's reaction was a glow of family pride, her brother's was a fever of ecstasy. Jinnah's deep-sunk eyes were pinpoints of excitement. His whole manner indicated that an almost overwhelming exaltation was racing through his veins. I had murmured some words of congratulation on his achievement in creating the world's largest Islamic nation.

"Oh, it's not just the largest Islamic nation. Pakistan is the fifth-largest nation in the world!"

The note of personal triumph was so unmistakable that I wondered how much thought he gave to the human cost: more Muslim lives had been sacrificed to create the new Muslim homeland than America, for example, had lost during the entire second World War. I hoped he had a constructive plan for the seventy million citizens of Pakistan. What kind of constitution did he intend to draw up?

"Of course it will be a democratic constitution; Islam is a democratic religion."

I ventured to suggest that the term "democracy" was often loosely used these days. Could he define what he had in mind?

"Democracy is not just a new thing we are learning," said Jinnah. "It is in our blood. We have always had our system of zakat -- our obligation to the poor."

This confusion of democracy with charity troubled me. I begged him to be more specific.

"Our Islamic ideas have been based on democracy and social justice since the thirteenth century."

This mention of the thirteenth century troubled me still more. Pakistan has other relics of the Middle Ages besides "social justice" -- the remnants of a feudal land system, for one. What would the new constitution do about that? .. "The land belongs to the God," says the Koran. This would need clarification in the constitution. Presumably Jinnah, the lawyer, would be just the person to correlate the "true Islamic principles" one heard so much about in Pakistan with the new nation's laws. But all he would tell me was that the constitution would be democratic because "the soil is perfectly fertile for democracy."

What plans did he have for the industrial development of the country? Did he hope to enlist technical or financial assistance from America?

"America needs Pakistan more than Pakistan needs America," was Jinnah's reply. "Pakistan is the pivot of the world, as we are placed" -- he revolved his long forefinger in bony circles -- "the frontier on which the future position of the world revolves." He leaned toward me, dropping his voice to a confidential note. "Russia," confided Mr. Jinnah, "is not so very far away."

This had a familiar ring. In Jinnah's mind this brave new nation had no other claim on American friendship than this - that across a wild tumble of roadless mountain ranges lay the land of the BoIsheviks. I wondered whether the Quaid-i-Azam considered his new state only as an armored buffer between opposing major powers. He was stressing America's military interest in other parts of the world. "America is now awakened," he said with a satisfied smile. Since the United States was now bolstering up Greece and Turkey, she should be much more interested in pouring money and arms into Pakistan. "If Russia walks in here," he concluded, "the whole world is menaced."

In the weeks to come I was to hear the Quaid-i-Azam's thesis echoed by government officials throughout Pakistan. "Surely America will build up our army," they would say to me. "Surely America will give us loans to keep Russia from walking in." But when I asked whether there were any signs of Russian infiltration, they would reply almost sadly, as though sorry not to be able to make more of the argument. "No, Russia has shown no signs of being interested in Pakistan."

This hope of tapping the U. S. Treasury was voiced so persistently that one wondered whether the purpose was to bolster the world against Bolshevism or to bolster Pakistan's own uncertain position as a new political entity. Actually, I think, it was more nearly related to the even more significant bankruptcy of ideas in the new Muslim state -- a nation drawing its spurious warmth from the embers of an antique religious fanaticism, fanned into a new blaze.

Jinnah's most frequently used technique in the struggle for his new nation had been the playing of opponent against opponent. Evidently this technique was now to be extended into foreign policy. ....

No one would have been more astonished than Jinnah if he could have foreseen thirty or forty years earlier that anyone would ever speak of him as a "savior of Islam." In those days any talk of religion brought a cynical smile. He condemned those who talked in terms of religious rivalries, and in the stirring period when the crusade for freedom began sweeping the country he was hailed as "the embodied symbol of Hindu-Muslim unity." The gifted Congresswoman, Mrs. Naidu, one of Jinnah's closest friends, wrote poems extolling his role as the great unifier in the fight for independence. "Perchance it is written in the book of the future," ran one of her tributes, "that he, in some terrible crisis of our national struggle, will pass into immortality" as the hero of "the Indian liberation."

In the "terrible crisis," Mahomed Ali Jinnah was to pass into immortality, not as the ambassador of unity, but as the deliberate apostle of discord. What caused this spectacular renunciation of the concept of a united India, to which he had dedicated the greater part of his life? No one knows exactly. The immediate occasion for the break, in the mid-thirties, was his opposition to Gandhi's civil disobedience program. Nehru says that Jinnah "disliked the crowds of ill-dressed people who filled the Congress" and was not at home with the new spirit rising among the common people under Gandhi's magnetic leadership. Others say it was against his legal conscience to accept Gandhi's program. One thing is certain: the break with Gandhi, Nehru, and the other Congress leaders was not caused by any Hindu-Muslim issue.

In any case, Jinnah revived the moribund Muslim League in 1936 after it had dragged through an anemic thirty years' existence, and took to the religious soapbox. He began dinning into the ears of millions of Muslims the claim that they were downtrodden solely because of Hindu domination. During the years directly preceding this move on his part, an unprecedented degree of unity had developed between Muslims and Hindus in their struggle for independence from the British Raj. The British feared this unity, and used their divide-and-rule tactics to disrupt it. Certain highly placed Indians also feared unity, dreading a popular movement which would threaten their special position. Then another decisive factor arose. Although Hindus had always been ahead of Muslims in the industrial sphere, the great Muslim feudal landlords now had aspirations toward industry. From these wealthy Muslims, who resented the well-established Hindu competition, Jinnah drew his powerful supporters. One wonders whether Jinnah was fighting to free downtrodden Muslims from domination or merely to gain an earmarked area, free from competition, for this small and wealthy clan.

The trend of events in Pakistan would support the theory that Jinnah carried the banner of the Muslim landed aristocracy, rather than that of the Muslim masses he claimed to champion. There was no hint of personal material gain in this. Jinnah was known to be personally incorruptible, a virtue which gave him a great strength with both poor and rich. The drive for personal wealth played no part in his politics. It was a drive for power. ......

Less than three months after Pakistan became a nation, Jinnah's Olympian assurance had strangely withered. His altered condition was not made public. "The Quaid-i-Azam has a bad cold" was the answer given to inquiries.

Only those closest to him knew that the "cold" was accompanied by paralyzing inability to make even the smallest decisions, by sullen silences striped with outbursts of irritation, by a spiritual numbness concealing something close to panic underneath. I knew it only because I spent most of this trying period at Government House, attempting to take a new portrait of Jinnah for a Life cover.

The Quaid-i-Azam was still revered as a messiah and deliverer by most of his people. But the "Great Leader" himself could not fail to know that all was not well in his new creation, the nation; the nation that his critics referred to as the "House that Jinnah built." The separation from the main body of India had been in many ways an unrealistic one. Pakistan raised 75 per cent of the world's jute supply; the processing mills were all in India. Pakistan raised one third of the cotton of India, but it had only one thirtieth of the cotton mills. Although it produced the bulk of Indian skins and hides, all the leather tanneries were in South India. The new state had no paper mills, few iron foundries. Rail and road facilities, insufficient at best, were still choked with refugees. Pakistan has a superbly fertile soil, and its outstanding advantage is self-sufficiency in food, but this was threatened by the never-ending flood of refugees who continued pouring in long after the peak of the religious wars had passed.

With his burning devotion to his separate Islamic nation, Jinnah had taken all these formidable obstacles in his stride. But the blow that finally broke his spirit struck at the very name of Pakistan. While the literal meaning of the name is "Land of the Pure," the word is a compound of initial letters of the Muslim majority provinces which Jinnah had expected to incorporate: P for the Punjab, A for the Afghans' area on the Northwest Frontier, S for Sind, -tan for Baluchistan. But the K was missing.

Kashmir, India's largest princely state, despite its 77 per cent Muslim population, had not fallen into the arms of Pakistan by the sheer weight of religious majority. Kashmir had acceded to India, and although it was now the scene of an undeclared war between the two nations, the fitting of the K into Pakistan was left in doubt. With the beginning of this torturing anxiety over Kashmir, the Quaid-i-Azam's siege of bad colds began, and then his dismaying withdrawal into himself. ....

Later, reflecting on what I had seen, I decided that this desperation was due to causes far deeper than anxiety over Pakistan's territorial and economic difficulties. I think that the tortured appearance of Mr. Jinnah was an indication that, in these final months of his life, he was adding up his own balance sheet. Analytical, brilliant, and no bigot, he knew what he had done. Like Doctor Faustus, he had made a bargain from which he could never be free. During the heat of the struggle he had been willing to call on all the devilish forces of superstition, and now that his new nation had been achieved the bigots were in the position of authority. The leaders of orthodoxy and a few "old families" had the final word and, to perpetuate their power, were seeing to it that the people were held in the deadening grip of religious superstition.

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- Excerpts Copyrights: Simon & Schuster, 1949 / Margaret Bourke-White

- Photograph Copyrights: Time Inc., LIFE photo archive hosted by Google / Margaret Bourke-White

Dead Hand: The Germ Nightmare, Excerpt–2

After posting excerpt of 1st three chapters from David E. Hoffman’s ‘The Dead Hand’ in August this year, here i am posting 2nd part of the excerpt.

This excerpt is from Chapter-4 of The Dead Hand.

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PART-1

Chapter 4 - The Germ Nightmare

In the years after World War II, the United States built an offensive biological weapons program, but it was abandoned by President Nixon in 1969. Three years later, the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention was signed, prohibiting the development and production of germs for warfare. The Soviet Union joined, and became one of the three nations to serve as a depository, or custodian, of the agreement. Then, in an audacious turn, Soviet leaders secretly broke their obligations and expanded research on offensive biological weapons through a vast and concealed complex of laboratories and institutes disguised as civilian facilities. ...

... One part of the effort was called “Project Factor,” which was shortened from “virulence factor,” or “pathogenic factor.” Virulence is the relative ability of a pathogen to cause death. Boosting the virulence of bacteria and viruses made them more lethal. In parallel to Factor, other projects included “Bonfire,” a quest to create a new generation of germs that would resist antibiotics, while “Flute” attempted to fashion mind-altering compounds—a weapon that might cause a whole army to go crazy. “Ferment” was the name given to a drive for genetic engineering. Chemical weapons were “Foliant.” Separately, Soviet scientists were also working on germs to wither crops and devastate livestock. This was called “Ecology.”

In 1984, Sergei Popov was among the scientists at the forefront of Project Factor.

... Popov worked in a scientific institute at Koltsovo, a small town amid the forests in western Siberia, twenty miles southeast of a much larger city, Novosibirsk.

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In 1984, at Vector, Popov was head of the chemistry department. He was facing a new challenge, the dawn of an ambitious quest to penetrate the secrets of the smallpox virus. Four years earlier, the World Health Organization had triumphantly announced that smallpox had been eradicated from the face of the Earth. Millions of lives had been spared. But what the outside world didn’t know was that smallpox was an object of experimentation for the scientists at Vector.

Global Smallpox Cases.

The virus, which had killed more people than all the wars of the twentieth century combined, was itself to be made into a weapon of war.

When he started at Koltsovo, Popov was dreaming only about science. He and his wife were lured by the promises of Lev Sandakhchiev, a compact, intense, chain-smoking scientist of Armenian descent who was assistant scientific director of Vector, and became director in 1979. ...

... Sergei and Taissia arrived with high hopes. “It was very attractive, and we knew nothing about biological weapons at that time,” Popov said. “Nobody even said a single word about it. It’s not like we were invited to do some kind of biological weapons research. No, no. Not at all. So we were completely naïve and we did not understand what was going on. And we were invited to join a new institution, and that was it.”

Sandakhchiev was in a hurry. He wanted to push the frontiers of genetic engineering in biological weapons. ...

... His institute did achieve some gains in civilian research, but at the core, it was a laboratory to discover new methods of using viruses to kill people on a massive scale.

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... In 1978, Popov was promoted to head of the chemistry department, and he began to learn the true goals Sandakhchiev had in mind. He got his clearance for access to top-secret information. “And at that point I became irreversibly involved in the biological weapons program.”

... They asked him to sign a statement promising to keep the deepest secrets. “That was the beginning,” he said, “a very critical step. I committed myself. I signed the papers because there was no choice. Everybody was polite and nobody insisted, but I know very few people in my position who refused to cooperate. The refusal would be a kind of suicide, meaning the KGB would be after you for the rest of your life, and you would never get a decent job. I admire those people who had the courage to say ‘no.’ They were more mature than I was.”

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The KGB had a large presence at the institute, supervising documents, watching management, keeping an eye out for spies. Each employee went through a meticulous background check. Links to the outside world were forbidden, and contacts with foreigners rare.

... The true purpose of Koltsovo was concealed with a “legend,” or cover story. “The so-called open legend provided to everybody was that the purpose of the institute was to push the development of industrial microbiology. ...

... It was a legitimate goal, which covered up the biological weapons program, because its purpose sounded exactly like the peaceful program.

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Viruses are extraordinarily small, submicroscopic particles, hundreds of times smaller than a grain of sand, that infect a biological organism and cause disease. They were first discovered by Dmitri Ivanovsky, a Russian microbiologist, in 1892, and six years later by Martinus Beijerinck, a Dutch microbiologist and botanist.

 

Dmitry Ivanovsky (Left) and Martinus Beijerinck (Right).

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... Sandakhchiev’s dream was to build viral demons the world had never known—viruses that would attack troops or populations. But there were formidable hurdles to be overcome in this still-backward realm of Soviet science. The researchers had to learn to walk before they could run, and one of the early challenges was to synthesize genetic material, to make artificial DNA. At the time, methods were known in the West for creating simple genes, but the Soviet Union was still far behind. In the first six months of 1980, Sandakhchiev sent Popov on an extraordinary mission. Popov went to the University of Cambridge, England, to the famous Laboratory of Molecular Biology, a center of many of the world’s advances in microbiology, to absorb and copy the technology for DNA synthesis and bring it back. ...

Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge.

When he returned to Koltsovo, laborious and time-consuming synthesis of DNA got underway.
 
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... Sandakhchiev came up with the idea to build a huge warehouse or factory with automatic robots assembling DNA of different viruses. One virus a month, that would be an ideal productivity. And you could assemble biological weapons one after another.

The World Health Organization campaign against smallpox had taken more than a decade to complete. Now Sandakhchiev was proposing to create a new virus every month.

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Meanwhile, behind the curtain, Vector began to study smallpox, hoping to give it new life as a biological weapon.

Variola Major, Smallpox Virus.

The smallpox virus is called Variola. The most severe and common is Variola major. Over the course of human history, Variola major claimed hundreds of millions of lives, and caused the most feared of deadly scourges. Historically, Variola major had an overall fatality rate of about 30 percent. ...

A long campaign to eradicate smallpox ended with the World Health Organization (WHO) declaration of success May 8, 1980. The WHO recommended the end of vaccinations worldwide. ...

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There were different possible targets considered in the research, Popov said, but a decision was made to have the immune system turn against the body’s nervous system. Thus, if developed into a real weapon, it would cause victims to suffer in two waves. The first might be smallpox. But then, perhaps after a period of recovery, the body would turn on its own nervous system, and the victims would be paralyzed and die. The second wave would be unexpected; no vaccine could stop the process. “As a weapon, the thing would be absolutely untreatable,” he said.

“Absolutely untreatable, because first of all it may come as a surprise after the initial disease has gone away, the person may recover completely. And then the new wave of disease would be the death response …”

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At Koltsovo, scientists like Popov broke through barriers of knowledge, but building actual weapons was the job of the military, which maintained its own separate laboratories. Vector was a research facility. The “customer” was the 15th Main Directorate of the Ministry of Defense. ...

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Secluded in the forests outside of Moscow, another scientist was fighting his own battle. While Vector sought to alter viruses, Igor Domaradsky attempted to reengineer the genetic makeup of bacteria into an unstoppable warrior. ...

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In 1984, he was fifty-nine years old. During the week, he lived alone in Protvino, a small town one hundred miles south of Moscow. He drove through the mixed forests of birch and bogs each day to start work at a secret laboratory. The location was called Obolensk, after ancient princes who once ruled the forests. ...

The laboratory at Obolensk was known as Post Office Box V-8724, one of dozens of closed Soviet cities and laboratories devoted to Cold War military work. ...

The enforced solitude caused him to ponder all that he had done. In the apartment, he began collecting papers and hiding notes of his life’s work, making illicit photocopies so the evidence of his achievements would not be destroyed by the secret services that watched over him.

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Tularemia, commonly known as “rabbit fever,” is caused by a bacterium that is highly infectious. It is formally known as Francisella tularensis and is found in animals, especially rodents, rabbits and hares. In the early 1980s, the microbe became the object of Domaradsky’s research. ...

In general, the Soviet military preferred to use contagious pathogens like the smallpox virus and plague because they could cause epidemics. The military would simply light the spark, and the disease would spread like wildfire on its own. Tularemia is not contagious, and thus cannot be passed from human to human. Yet the military retained interest in tularemia because it required as few as ten microorganisms inhaled or ingested to infect someone. Tularemia is also stable and easy to aerosolize; the microorganism can survive for weeks at low temperatures.

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The goal of Domaradsky’s research was to build a new microbe that would be resistant to many antibiotics. As an instrument of war, it would slice through helpless populations or armies like a scythe. According to Ken Alibek, who rose to become deputy director of the Soviet bioweapons program in the late 1980s, Domaradsky had once proposed to develop a strain of tularemia that would stand up against a whole spectrum of antibiotics, overcome vaccines and at the same time not lose its virulence. “The Soviet army wasn’t satisfied with weapons resistant to one type of antibiotic,” Alibek said. “The only worthwhile genetically altered weapon, for military strategists, was one that could resist all possible treatments.” ...

Dr. Ken Alibek

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Domaradsky had been appointed scientific director of Obolensk in 1978. Four years later, a new general director was appointed, Major General Nikolai Urakov, who had come from a military laboratory in Kirov. ...

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If the virulence fell, or if a test animal managed to survive a day longer, the military regarded it as a serious setback. “The desired bioweapons strain had to be fully virulent and deliverable in aerosol form. One germ cell had to be enough to start a lethal infection in a monkey,” Domaradsky said. “Furthermore, the infection had to be incurable.”

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In the Cold War years of the 1950s and 1960s, both superpowers built arsenals of biological weapons from existing, known pathogens. ...

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... Domaradsky considered one of his triumphs the development of an antibiotic-resistant strain of plague that could be used for vaccines. It was developed for civil defense, he told himself; the Rostov institute had never been working directly on weapons. “On the other hand, there was a dark side to that research,” Domaradsky later acknowledged, “though I did not realize it at the time.” The dark side was that his discovery could just as easily be applied to Yersinia pestis to create a new, killer plague.

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For centuries, humans have sought to use toxins and toxic agents in war. ...

In World War I, advances in science and military technology gave rise to widespread use of chemical weapons. The use of German chlorine gas at Ypres on April 22, 1915, opened an epoch of horror. Over the next three years, 113,000 tons of chemical weapons agents were used in battle, killing more than 91,000 and wounding 1.2 million.17 In the aftermath, 128 nations signed an international agreement, the Geneva Protocol, on June 17, 1925, pledging never to use chemical or biological agents in war. The United States, despite being the country that championed the treaty, did not ratify the agreement at the time, and many nations signed but said they would reserve the right to retaliate with chemical weapons as a deterrent.

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Chemical weapons consist of inert substances, such as arsenic, while biological weapons are made from living things, such as bacteria and viruses. A third category are toxins, which are isolated from living organisms, but unlike bacteria or viruses, they can’t replicate.

In the years that followed the Geneva Protocol, the race to discover biological weapons did not stop.
 

Japan’s quest was horrific. After reading of the Geneva accord in 1927, a Japanese military scientist, Lieutenant General Shiro Ishii, traveled the globe, and concluded Japan should arm itself with the weapon others were forsaking. The Japanese biological weapons program included four biological warfare units in China between 1936 and 1945. The largest of them during World War II was known as Unit 731, at Ping Fan in occupied Manchuria. Japan cultivated deadly bacteria and carried out large-scale, open-air testing of live pathogens, including anthrax as bacterial slurry in bombs. Japan also tested pathogens on prisoners of war. The precise death toll is not known but was in the thousands, and perhaps more if various epidemics are included. Japanese aircraft also dropped ceramic bombs containing plague-infested fleas, and grain to attract rats, in a series of field tests of aerial biological bombs on eleven Chinese cities in 1940. In the end, the military effectiveness of the Japanese weapons remains unclear. But the toll in death and suffering overall was large.

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In 1928, a full-scale biowarfare program was ordered by the Soviet Union’s Revolutionary Military Council. The decree ordered the transformation of typhus into a battlefield weapon. The main biowarfare laboratory was located in Leningrad. ...

At the start of World War II, with the German advance, all the Soviet germ warfare facilities were hurriedly evacuated eastward by rail to the city of Kirov, where the whole effort was reassembled in the regional hospital.
 

At war’s end, the Soviet Union had acquired and weaponized a group of biological warfare agents they referred to as the golden triangle: plague, anthrax and cholera. Soviet troops had overrun the Japanese biological weapons headquarters in Manchuria in 1945. They found buildings destroyed by the retreating Japanese, but they seized prisoners and documents. In 1949, the Soviets tried a dozen Japanese prisoners who testified about germ warfare experiments. Details of the Japanese biological weapons program were sent to Moscow, including “blueprints for biological warfare assembly plants, far larger and more complex than our own.” ...

Through the 1950s and 1960s, American intelligence agencies struggled to learn more about Soviet biological weapons, but without much success. ...

In 1957, high-altitude photography of the island in the Aral Sea by U-2 spy planes showed more than 150 buildings, grouped into two settlements about two and a half miles apart. ...

The CIA analysts were puzzled because they expected to find a Soviet germ warfare program, but had not. They titled their report “The Enigma of Soviet BW.”

U-2 Spy Plane

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The United States entered the search for biological weapons early in World War II, following Great Britain, which feared the Axis powers would use the weapons. ...

... Alarm about a possible German biological weapon led British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to ask the United States for 500,000 anthrax munitions. ...

... The Germans never weaponized biological agents; it turned out the Japanese program was much more active. During the war, the American biological weapons program was conducted with the secrecy equivalent of the Manhattan Project, and details were unveiled only in January 1946 by Merck. ...

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A facility built at Pine Bluff, Arkansas, for large-scale fermentation, concentration, storage and weaponization of microorganisms began production in 1954. Human experimentation using military and civilian volunteers started in 1955. Biological bombs were detonated inside a one-million-liter hollow metallic spherical aerosolization chamber at Fort Detrick, Maryland, known as “the 8 ball.” An open-air testing site was built at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. In May 1962, the army created a biological and chemical warfare coordinating organization, the Deseret Test Center, located at Fort Douglas, Salt Lake City, Utah. This center served as the headquarters for the biological warfare test operation. The United States carried out as many as 239 open-air trials between 1949 and 1969. Among them, American cities were unknowingly used as laboratories to test aerosols and dispersal methods; the test sites included tunnels on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. ...

... In the 1950s, an American program known as St. Jo developed and tested bombs and delivery methods for possible wartime use of anthrax weapons against Soviet cities. ...

... Much more ambitious tests with live agents were used in sea trials carried out in 1965 and 1968 against monkeys as targets on ships and islands in the Pacific Ocean. The 1968 test showed that a single airborne dissemination tank could disperse a virulent infectious agent over nearly a thousand square miles. ...

There was growing concern among scientists about the use of chemical and biological weapons in war. On February 14, 1967, some five thousand scientists, including seventeen Nobel Prize winners and 129 members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, asked President Lyndon Johnson in a petition to “re-establish and categorically declare the intention of the United States to refrain from initiating the use of chemical and biological weapons.” ...

... The petition prompted a White House effort to draft a statement saying the United States would not be the first to use biological weapons in the future, but the military objected, and Johnson never issued the statement.

Then came an accident. It involved a chemical weapons test but had much broader repercussions. At 5:30 P.M. on Wednesday, March 13, 1968, an air force jet roared over a circular target grid laid out at Dugway Proving Grounds on the Utah desert floor and sprayed 320 gallons of the lethal nerve gas VX. As the plane zoomed up, a valve failed to close. The deadly VX continued to pour from the plane, was picked up by wind gusts and spread as far as forty-five miles away. Within three days, thousands of sheep in the Skull and Rush valleys were sickened or died. The incident came to light only a year later when revealed in a television newsmagazine broadcast. …

… Although some scientific research results from the U.S. program were openly published, there were also secret parts, including the Pacific Ocean field tests.

Nixon had just taken office. His new defense secretary, Melvin Laird, a former eight-term congressman from Wisconsin, aware of the congressional mood, wrote to National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger that “it is clear the administration is going to be under increasing fire” from Congress. Laird urged a full-scale review of American germ warfare policy.

Melvin Laird, Richard Nixon & Henry Kissinger (From L to R)

... United Nations issued a startling report by fourteen scientists emphasizing the powerful impact of biological weapons, which, if used, could transform a society and its environment. The scientists said that in an attack, biological weapons would infect a wide area. The use of ten tons of agent might cover 38,610 square miles, slightly larger than the state of Indiana. The notion of using biological weapons in war “generates a sense of horror,” the scientists said. “Mass disease, following an attack, especially of civilian populations, could be expected not only because of the lack of timely warning of the danger but because effective measures of protection or treatment simply do not exist or cannot be provided on an adequate scale.” The World Health Organization, providing the scientific and medical details for the UN panel, estimated that 110 pounds of dry anthrax, if used by a single bomber against a target city in a suitable aerosol form, would affect an area far in excess of 7.7 square miles, “with tens to hundreds of thousands of deaths.”

Anthrax & Immune Response.

On November 25, 1969, Nixon announced the United States would unilaterally stop all offensive biological weapons research and destroy the stocks, while maintaining a program of defensive research. He also pledged no first use of chemical weapons, but said the United States would retain them. He vowed to finally send the 1925 Geneva Protocol to the Senate for ratification and he endorsed a British proposal for a follow-up treaty to limit biological weapons. …

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Nixon also adopted the view that nuclear weapons were the supreme deterrent and made biological weapons unnecessary. …

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A few months after the toxins announcement, Laird sent an inventory of the U.S. biological weapons arsenal to the White House. It included 220 pounds of anthrax dried agent. According to Laird’s list, the U.S. also had 804 pounds of dried tularemia bacteria and 334 pounds of the incapacitating agent Venezuelan equine encephalomyelitis virus, dried, with another 4,991 gallons in liquid suspension. Also in liquid suspension were 5,098 gallons of Q fever. The list said the United States had filled 97,554 munitions with toxins, biological agents or simulants. The United States also stockpiled 158,684 pounds of wheat rust and 1,865 pounds of rice blast, both to be used as anti-crop weapons. No missiles were armed with biological warheads, although a bomblet-containing warhead for the short-range surface-to-surface Sergeant missile had been designed. There were eight aircraft sprayers. …

Sergeant missile

In his original declaration, Nixon expressed hope that other nations would follow the U.S. example. The Soviet Union did not.