On April 2, 1979, a mysterious powder wafted unseen into the air from a chimney that rose 25 meters above a Soviet military camp some 1,400 kilometers east of Moscow. Over the course of the next few weeks, at least 80 residents in the surrounding Central Asian city of Sverdlovsk, now known as Yekaterinburg, fell ill with what at first seemed like flu. After a few days, however, they developed massive internal bleeding, among other problems, and 68 or more of them died. A few people inside the base, known as Compound 19, knew at the time what had happened: missing air filters had allowed the release of an unknown quantity of bacterial spores from a secret military research and production facility located within the confines of the site. The spores emerged from a strain of bacteria, known as Bacillus anthracis, which causes the disease known as anthrax and is naturally found in many regions around the world. But these particular spores had been milled to just the right size so that they could be easily inhaled into the lungs of animals or people, where they could do the most damage and cause the most deaths. Once inside the body, the spores germinated, adopting their original rod-shaped appearance. Then they began multiplying, spreading in the bloodstream and attacking various tissues. Indeed, inhalational anthrax usually kills within a matter of days unless patients are promptly treated with the proper antibiotics. The Soviet military did not, however, reveal the nature of the outbreak to anyone—including local health authorities, who might have saved more lives if they had understood what they were up against. Despite the KGB’s strenuous attempts to keep the event a secret, news of the accident eventually leaked to the outside world in the fall of 1979, stunning Western intelligence analysts, among others. They had completely missed any clue that the Soviet Union was manufacturing material for bioweapons—an action that placed it in direct violation of a treaty banning their development, production, stockpiling or use. More than 100 countries—including the Soviet Union and the U.S.—had signed the treaty, commonly known as the Biological Weapons Convention, in 1972. Even so, the U.S. declined to launch a formal complaint against the U.S.S.R., as provided under the terms of the agreement. Because the genetic engineering revolution had already begun in several other countries in the 1970s, Western intelligence analysts speculated at the time that Soviet researchers might have modified the B. anthracis at Sverdlovsk to be more deadly than normal. It took 37 years to disprove that mistaken supposition. The only enhancements were the addition of a few chemicals and other refinements to make the spores easier to disperse. The Soviet Union, for its part, eventually admitted that a number of people had died of anthrax in and around Sverdlovsk but denied that anything unusual had occurred. The true cause of the tragedy, they said, was gastrointestinal anthrax, caused by the butchering and consumption of animals infected with naturally occurring spores—a contention that was later disproved after international experts were able to examine autopsy samples that had been saved by local pathologists. Finally, in 1992, then Russian president Boris Yeltsin admitted that the former Soviet Union had in fact built and maintained a large program for researching and manufacturing agents for biological weapons. Although he said he had ordered the program’s immediate shutdown, declassified material has since made clear that the Russian military merely concealed what remained of the effort from the civilian leadership. At any rate, official policy changed again after Vladimir Putin was appointed president in 1999. Neither the Soviet Union nor the subsequent Russian government had ever undertaken an offensive bioweapons program, the new leadership maintained. Whatever research had taken place or continued to occur was purely for defensive purposes—to protect against an attack rather than to launch one—an activity that was allowed by the bioweapons treaty. Today, as a newly resurgent Russia asserts its power on the global stage, the lessons of the long-ago Sverdlovsk incident become increasingly important to appreciate and understand. Further investigations by us and others over the intervening decades have shown that it is not that difficult for a country (or terror organization) with a modicum of bioindustrial capability to build or conceal a bioweapons program. And yet the U.S., which had dismantled its own bioweapons program by the early 1970s, continues to drag its feet in making sure that others have done the same. Deadly Spores Under natural conditions, anthrax has historically been more of a problem for herders, wool sorters and tanners. But soon after researchers in the 19th century discovered the bacterium that causes the ailment, military strategists realized that the pathogen could be used to create incredibly deadly new weapons. In the late 1800s German scientist Robert Koch (who is often called the father of bacteriology for his work on pathogens) was the first to prove that a particular germ (B. anthracis) caused a particular illness (anthrax), based on experiments he conducted in his apartment lab. A few years later French researcher Louis Pasteur (the father of germ theory) developed an effective vaccine for it. Koch showed that the bacteria adopt long, rodlike shapes when they find themselves in an environment conducive to rapid growth—such as the moist, nutrient-rich insides of an animal. Under arid conditions, however, the microbes create hard, nearly indestructible spores that can lie dormant for a long time. When Koch injected these spores into healthy mice, they turned back into bacilli, triggering the disease and killing the animals. Early recognition and treatment of anthrax are key to survival. The death rate from untreated infections depends on where the germs first sneak into the body: inhaling even a few spores into the lungs can be fatal without proper medication. Mortality from untreated skin infections is about 10 percent, and the rate for gastrointestinal anthrax is unknown but thought to range from 25 to 60 percent. The advantages for unconventional warfare are obvious. Dried and kept in cold storage, the spores that cause anthrax will survive for years, allowing for industrial-scale production and stockpiling of the material long before it is used against soldiers on the battlefield. In addition, any soils seeded with spores will be contaminated for decades, seriously hampering an enemy’s ability to raise cattle, sheep or other livestock in the affected fields. Inhalational anthrax also offers the added edge—for anyone who wants to rain terror in addition to death on a civilian population—of being easily mischaracterized at first. The initial signs are often mild, with fever, fatigue and muscle aches reminiscent of influenza or pneumonia. Several days later infected patients suddenly develop shortness of breath, their lips turn blue, and fluid begins to accumulate in their chest, at which point death is generally unavoidable. Autopsies show characteristic patterns of internal bleeding in lymph nodes adjacent to the lungs and in tissues surrounding the brain. The Accident No foreigner has ever been allowed inside the gates of Compound 19—let alone the Scientific Research Institute of Microbiology located within it, where the accident occurred. Over the course of the past several decades, however, and particularly after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, we and others have pieced together a timeline of the accident. We conducted many interviews with scientists, physicians and technicians who worked in the city of Sverdlovsk or who were colleagues with others who had been inside the institute. Many of the facts that follow have been published previously by us as well as by Soviet defectors.
Killer microbes: Colonies of Bacillus anthracis grown on an agar plate in a lab. Credit: Scott Camazine Science Source
Based on this information, we believe the Soviet bioweapons scheme started in 1928. At its height, in the late 1980s it employed about 60,000 people. Bacillus anthracis quickly became one of the most important pathogens in the program. Research showed it could easily be “weaponized,” meaning it could be produced in a stable manner that would allow it to be widely dispersed. When a military lab was first established in 1949 at the site of an old infantry school near Sverdlovsk, the facility was well outside the city limits. Fifteen years later, however, the city had grown and spread around the secret installation. Despite the proximity of the civilian population, the Ministry of Defense decided to upgrade the setting in the 1960s so that it could produce the tons of B. anthracis spores necessary to fuel a robust bioweapons program. (Similar production facilities—later dismantled—we now know, had been established in Arkansas in the U.S. in the mid-1950s.) The Soviets equipped a four-story building at Sverdlovsk with fermenting vats for growing B. anthracis and drying equipment to force the bacteria to generate spores—pretty standard steps for any industrial facility dedicated to the production of living organisms. The real innovation lay in the next few stages. Certain chemicals (we still do not know which ones) were added to the spores so that they would not clump together, making them too large to inhale into the airspaces of the lungs. Then the resulting formulation was dried yet again and ground to a fine powder, capable of penetrating deep into the lungs. Eventually the finished product was stored in stainless steel tanks. Inevitably all that drying and grinding caused deadly spores to spread throughout the building. The workers wore bulky hazmat suits for their own protection, but the air inside the facility also had to be scrubbed before it could be vented to the outside world. The solution was fairly straightforward. Each dryer’s stream of contaminated exhaust, for example, was conveyed through a series of filters to remove large particles, such as regular dust, and small ones, such as the anthrax spores. At some point on April 2, 1979, while the dryers were off, the production unit’s day crew removed two filters to check on how well they were working. This crew later claimed that it had notified the operations center that that particular dryer was not to be used until the filters had been replaced. But for some reason, the night crew did not get the message, and the crew members started up the usual manufacturing and drying cycle when their shift began. Because some of the filters in the series were missing, another one became clogged and burst, causing a sudden increase of air pressure in the air-handling system. A worker immediately noticed the change, and the 30 or 40 members of the night crew raced to shut down the system. But the production process was complex and could not be immediately halted; it took three hours to wind down—three hours in which an unknown number of spores spewed unhindered out of the chimney. After the night crew realized what had happened, its leader told Compound 19’s commander, General V. V. Mikhaylov, of the accident. He informed the Ministry of Defense headquarters in Moscow and was told to keep quiet. Afterward, the KGB confiscated all the medical records and autopsy reports of victims. Although no one knows how many spores escaped Compound 19 during the incident, some experts later estimated that between 0.5 and one kilogram of contaminated material (containing between a few milligrams to about a gram of spores) was involved. Assuming the spores were fully viable and widely dispersed, they could have potentially sickened several hundred thousand of Sverdlovsk’s unsuspecting population, which then numbered about 1.2 million. Fortunately, the prevailing winds were blowing away from the urban center and over more sparsely populated neighborhoods. Aftermath Little by little, we have learned more about the underlying biology of the specific B. anthracis strain responsible for the Sverdlovsk tragedy. In the 1990s, for example, Harvard University researcher Matthew Meselson led a team of experts on two different medical and epidemiological investigations to Sverdlovsk. Click or tap to enlarge
Credit: Tami Tolpa
Advances in biotechnology have also allowed researchers to more fully analyze autopsy samples that Russian physicians shared with international teams during the more cooperative 1990s. One of us (Walker) accompanied Meselson on the first trip and met with local pathologists to better understand the event. Later one of them, Lev Grinberg, brought autopsy samples (safely fixed in formalin and embedded in paraffin) from the victims to the U.S. for further study. Another of us (Keim) worked with Paul Jackson, then at Los Alamos National Laboratory, to extract DNA from the samples, which confirmed that the patients had died of anthrax. Later research by other scientists revealed a unique genetic signature for the Sverdlovsk strain, also known as B. anthracis 836. With this molecular fingerprint in hand, scientists can now track the strain on a global basis. Critically, in 2001 researchers (including Keim) determined that the anthrax letter attacks in the U.S., which killed five people, did not use the Sverdlovsk strain. But still, only small portions of the accident genome were known, and many questions remained. Finally, in 2015, technology had advanced to the point that Keim and others were able to re-create the entire genetic sequence of the B. anthracis in the autopsy samples of two Sverdlovsk anthrax victims. Both bacteria samples proved to be identical to each other and to B. anthracis 836; the genetic analysis, which was published in 2016, showed that the strain was a member of the well-known “Trans Eurasia” group. In addition, the authors found no evidence of genetic engineering to enhance virulence, resist antibiotics or foil vaccine protection. In other words, Soviet military scientists had found and developed a highly suitable bacterium that was already lethal enough in its natural state to be used as a weapon. Everything we have learned about the Sverdlovsk matter also serves as a sobering reminder that the best way to minimize the casualties from an anthrax attack is to act before the spores have been dispersed. Despite spending billions of dollars on biodefense research, the U.S. government still struggles to coordinate and prioritize its activities across multiple agencies with different missions and goals. The only vaccine available in the U.S., which tests show can prevent illness after exposure to B. anthracis, requires multiple shots over several months, followed by regular boosters. No one knows whether any of the B. anthracis produced by the former Soviet Union still exist. Under agreements between the U.S., Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, many tons of spore-containing material were rendered inert and some production facilities were converted to civilian use in these former Soviet republics in the 1990s—and under the watchful eye of international scientists. But no foreign groups have been allowed to visit, let alone inspect, the three Ministry of Defense or five civilian “antiplague” institutes in Russia that played a role in researching and producing the agents for bioweapons. Since 2003 the U.S. Department of State has issued nine arms-control reports, and all contain statements that Russia might be supporting activities that violate the bioweapons treaty of 1972. The reports offer no details to support these allegations (presumably, the information is classified). But there are plenty of known reasons for concern. Among them, public satellite photographs show that certain buildings in Compound 19 have been upgraded with new equipment, which appear to be ventilation units, and that new buildings have been added. In addition, in 2012 Putin wrote an essay in a Russian newspaper saying that “weapon systems based on new principles (beam, geophysical, wave, genetic, psychophysical and other technology)” were likely to appear in the future; the minister of defense later proclaimed his department was making progress on these goals. Finally, in a related move, Putin allowed a nearly 25-year-old partnership between the U.S. and Russia to actively dismantle some of their nuclear stockpiles to lapse in 2015. Despite these worrisome public signals (and whatever top-secret information is possessed by Western governments), recent administrations, as far as can be discerned, have not confronted the Russian government on possible violations of the bioweapons treaty. Nor does the current administration appear likely to do so. By its inactivity, however, the U.S. government may be, in effect, giving Russia a green light to develop advanced biological weapons against which other countries would be ill prepared to defend themselves.
A few people inside the base, known as Compound 19, knew at the time what had happened: missing air filters had allowed the release of an unknown quantity of bacterial spores from a secret military research and production facility located within the confines of the site. The spores emerged from a strain of bacteria, known as Bacillus anthracis, which causes the disease known as anthrax and is naturally found in many regions around the world. But these particular spores had been milled to just the right size so that they could be easily inhaled into the lungs of animals or people, where they could do the most damage and cause the most deaths.
Once inside the body, the spores germinated, adopting their original rod-shaped appearance. Then they began multiplying, spreading in the bloodstream and attacking various tissues. Indeed, inhalational anthrax usually kills within a matter of days unless patients are promptly treated with the proper antibiotics. The Soviet military did not, however, reveal the nature of the outbreak to anyone—including local health authorities, who might have saved more lives if they had understood what they were up against.
Despite the KGB’s strenuous attempts to keep the event a secret, news of the accident eventually leaked to the outside world in the fall of 1979, stunning Western intelligence analysts, among others. They had completely missed any clue that the Soviet Union was manufacturing material for bioweapons—an action that placed it in direct violation of a treaty banning their development, production, stockpiling or use. More than 100 countries—including the Soviet Union and the U.S.—had signed the treaty, commonly known as the Biological Weapons Convention, in 1972. Even so, the U.S. declined to launch a formal complaint against the U.S.S.R., as provided under the terms of the agreement.
Because the genetic engineering revolution had already begun in several other countries in the 1970s, Western intelligence analysts speculated at the time that Soviet researchers might have modified the B. anthracis at Sverdlovsk to be more deadly than normal. It took 37 years to disprove that mistaken supposition. The only enhancements were the addition of a few chemicals and other refinements to make the spores easier to disperse.
The Soviet Union, for its part, eventually admitted that a number of people had died of anthrax in and around Sverdlovsk but denied that anything unusual had occurred. The true cause of the tragedy, they said, was gastrointestinal anthrax, caused by the butchering and consumption of animals infected with naturally occurring spores—a contention that was later disproved after international experts were able to examine autopsy samples that had been saved by local pathologists.
Finally, in 1992, then Russian president Boris Yeltsin admitted that the former Soviet Union had in fact built and maintained a large program for researching and manufacturing agents for biological weapons. Although he said he had ordered the program’s immediate shutdown, declassified material has since made clear that the Russian military merely concealed what remained of the effort from the civilian leadership. At any rate, official policy changed again after Vladimir Putin was appointed president in 1999. Neither the Soviet Union nor the subsequent Russian government had ever undertaken an offensive bioweapons program, the new leadership maintained. Whatever research had taken place or continued to occur was purely for defensive purposes—to protect against an attack rather than to launch one—an activity that was allowed by the bioweapons treaty.
Today, as a newly resurgent Russia asserts its power on the global stage, the lessons of the long-ago Sverdlovsk incident become increasingly important to appreciate and understand. Further investigations by us and others over the intervening decades have shown that it is not that difficult for a country (or terror organization) with a modicum of bioindustrial capability to build or conceal a bioweapons program. And yet the U.S., which had dismantled its own bioweapons program by the early 1970s, continues to drag its feet in making sure that others have done the same.
Deadly Spores
Under natural conditions, anthrax has historically been more of a problem for herders, wool sorters and tanners. But soon after researchers in the 19th century discovered the bacterium that causes the ailment, military strategists realized that the pathogen could be used to create incredibly deadly new weapons.
In the late 1800s German scientist Robert Koch (who is often called the father of bacteriology for his work on pathogens) was the first to prove that a particular germ (B. anthracis) caused a particular illness (anthrax), based on experiments he conducted in his apartment lab. A few years later French researcher Louis Pasteur (the father of germ theory) developed an effective vaccine for it.
Koch showed that the bacteria adopt long, rodlike shapes when they find themselves in an environment conducive to rapid growth—such as the moist, nutrient-rich insides of an animal. Under arid conditions, however, the microbes create hard, nearly indestructible spores that can lie dormant for a long time. When Koch injected these spores into healthy mice, they turned back into bacilli, triggering the disease and killing the animals.
Early recognition and treatment of anthrax are key to survival. The death rate from untreated infections depends on where the germs first sneak into the body: inhaling even a few spores into the lungs can be fatal without proper medication. Mortality from untreated skin infections is about 10 percent, and the rate for gastrointestinal anthrax is unknown but thought to range from 25 to 60 percent.
The advantages for unconventional warfare are obvious. Dried and kept in cold storage, the spores that cause anthrax will survive for years, allowing for industrial-scale production and stockpiling of the material long before it is used against soldiers on the battlefield. In addition, any soils seeded with spores will be contaminated for decades, seriously hampering an enemy’s ability to raise cattle, sheep or other livestock in the affected fields.
Inhalational anthrax also offers the added edge—for anyone who wants to rain terror in addition to death on a civilian population—of being easily mischaracterized at first. The initial signs are often mild, with fever, fatigue and muscle aches reminiscent of influenza or pneumonia. Several days later infected patients suddenly develop shortness of breath, their lips turn blue, and fluid begins to accumulate in their chest, at which point death is generally unavoidable. Autopsies show characteristic patterns of internal bleeding in lymph nodes adjacent to the lungs and in tissues surrounding the brain.
The Accident
No foreigner has ever been allowed inside the gates of Compound 19—let alone the Scientific Research Institute of Microbiology located within it, where the accident occurred. Over the course of the past several decades, however, and particularly after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, we and others have pieced together a timeline of the accident. We conducted many interviews with scientists, physicians and technicians who worked in the city of Sverdlovsk or who were colleagues with others who had been inside the institute. Many of the facts that follow have been published previously by us as well as by Soviet defectors.
Killer microbes: Colonies of Bacillus anthracis grown on an agar plate in a lab. Credit: Scott Camazine Science Source
Based on this information, we believe the Soviet bioweapons scheme started in 1928. At its height, in the late 1980s it employed about 60,000 people. Bacillus anthracis quickly became one of the most important pathogens in the program. Research showed it could easily be “weaponized,” meaning it could be produced in a stable manner that would allow it to be widely dispersed.
When a military lab was first established in 1949 at the site of an old infantry school near Sverdlovsk, the facility was well outside the city limits. Fifteen years later, however, the city had grown and spread around the secret installation. Despite the proximity of the civilian population, the Ministry of Defense decided to upgrade the setting in the 1960s so that it could produce the tons of B. anthracis spores necessary to fuel a robust bioweapons program. (Similar production facilities—later dismantled—we now know, had been established in Arkansas in the U.S. in the mid-1950s.)
The Soviets equipped a four-story building at Sverdlovsk with fermenting vats for growing B. anthracis and drying equipment to force the bacteria to generate spores—pretty standard steps for any industrial facility dedicated to the production of living organisms. The real innovation lay in the next few stages. Certain chemicals (we still do not know which ones) were added to the spores so that they would not clump together, making them too large to inhale into the airspaces of the lungs. Then the resulting formulation was dried yet again and ground to a fine powder, capable of penetrating deep into the lungs. Eventually the finished product was stored in stainless steel tanks.
Inevitably all that drying and grinding caused deadly spores to spread throughout the building. The workers wore bulky hazmat suits for their own protection, but the air inside the facility also had to be scrubbed before it could be vented to the outside world. The solution was fairly straightforward. Each dryer’s stream of contaminated exhaust, for example, was conveyed through a series of filters to remove large particles, such as regular dust, and small ones, such as the anthrax spores.
At some point on April 2, 1979, while the dryers were off, the production unit’s day crew removed two filters to check on how well they were working. This crew later claimed that it had notified the operations center that that particular dryer was not to be used until the filters had been replaced. But for some reason, the night crew did not get the message, and the crew members started up the usual manufacturing and drying cycle when their shift began. Because some of the filters in the series were missing, another one became clogged and burst, causing a sudden increase of air pressure in the air-handling system. A worker immediately noticed the change, and the 30 or 40 members of the night crew raced to shut down the system. But the production process was complex and could not be immediately halted; it took three hours to wind down—three hours in which an unknown number of spores spewed unhindered out of the chimney.
After the night crew realized what had happened, its leader told Compound 19’s commander, General V. V. Mikhaylov, of the accident. He informed the Ministry of Defense headquarters in Moscow and was told to keep quiet. Afterward, the KGB confiscated all the medical records and autopsy reports of victims.
Although no one knows how many spores escaped Compound 19 during the incident, some experts later estimated that between 0.5 and one kilogram of contaminated material (containing between a few milligrams to about a gram of spores) was involved. Assuming the spores were fully viable and widely dispersed, they could have potentially sickened several hundred thousand of Sverdlovsk’s unsuspecting population, which then numbered about 1.2 million. Fortunately, the prevailing winds were blowing away from the urban center and over more sparsely populated neighborhoods.
Aftermath
Little by little, we have learned more about the underlying biology of the specific B. anthracis strain responsible for the Sverdlovsk tragedy. In the 1990s, for example, Harvard University researcher Matthew Meselson led a team of experts on two different medical and epidemiological investigations to Sverdlovsk.
Click or tap to enlarge
Advances in biotechnology have also allowed researchers to more fully analyze autopsy samples that Russian physicians shared with international teams during the more cooperative 1990s.
One of us (Walker) accompanied Meselson on the first trip and met with local pathologists to better understand the event. Later one of them, Lev Grinberg, brought autopsy samples (safely fixed in formalin and embedded in paraffin) from the victims to the U.S. for further study. Another of us (Keim) worked with Paul Jackson, then at Los Alamos National Laboratory, to extract DNA from the samples, which confirmed that the patients had died of anthrax. Later research by other scientists revealed a unique genetic signature for the Sverdlovsk strain, also known as B. anthracis 836.
With this molecular fingerprint in hand, scientists can now track the strain on a global basis. Critically, in 2001 researchers (including Keim) determined that the anthrax letter attacks in the U.S., which killed five people, did not use the Sverdlovsk strain. But still, only small portions of the accident genome were known, and many questions remained.
Finally, in 2015, technology had advanced to the point that Keim and others were able to re-create the entire genetic sequence of the B. anthracis in the autopsy samples of two Sverdlovsk anthrax victims. Both bacteria samples proved to be identical to each other and to B. anthracis 836; the genetic analysis, which was published in 2016, showed that the strain was a member of the well-known “Trans Eurasia” group. In addition, the authors found no evidence of genetic engineering to enhance virulence, resist antibiotics or foil vaccine protection. In other words, Soviet military scientists had found and developed a highly suitable bacterium that was already lethal enough in its natural state to be used as a weapon.
Everything we have learned about the Sverdlovsk matter also serves as a sobering reminder that the best way to minimize the casualties from an anthrax attack is to act before the spores have been dispersed. Despite spending billions of dollars on biodefense research, the U.S. government still struggles to coordinate and prioritize its activities across multiple agencies with different missions and goals. The only vaccine available in the U.S., which tests show can prevent illness after exposure to B. anthracis, requires multiple shots over several months, followed by regular boosters.
No one knows whether any of the B. anthracis produced by the former Soviet Union still exist. Under agreements between the U.S., Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, many tons of spore-containing material were rendered inert and some production facilities were converted to civilian use in these former Soviet republics in the 1990s—and under the watchful eye of international scientists. But no foreign groups have been allowed to visit, let alone inspect, the three Ministry of Defense or five civilian “antiplague” institutes in Russia that played a role in researching and producing the agents for bioweapons.
Since 2003 the U.S. Department of State has issued nine arms-control reports, and all contain statements that Russia might be supporting activities that violate the bioweapons treaty of 1972. The reports offer no details to support these allegations (presumably, the information is classified). But there are plenty of known reasons for concern. Among them, public satellite photographs show that certain buildings in Compound 19 have been upgraded with new equipment, which appear to be ventilation units, and that new buildings have been added. In addition, in 2012 Putin wrote an essay in a Russian newspaper saying that “weapon systems based on new principles (beam, geophysical, wave, genetic, psychophysical and other technology)” were likely to appear in the future; the minister of defense later proclaimed his department was making progress on these goals. Finally, in a related move, Putin allowed a nearly 25-year-old partnership between the U.S. and Russia to actively dismantle some of their nuclear stockpiles to lapse in 2015.
Despite these worrisome public signals (and whatever top-secret information is possessed by Western governments), recent administrations, as far as can be discerned, have not confronted the Russian government on possible violations of the bioweapons treaty. Nor does the current administration appear likely to do so. By its inactivity, however, the U.S. government may be, in effect, giving Russia a green light to develop advanced biological weapons against which other countries would be ill prepared to defend themselves.
