n 1992, Dr. Kanatjan Alibekov, a biologist from the Soviet Union, boarded a flight in Almaty, then Kazakhstan's capital, for New York. When Dr. Alibekov—now known as Ken Alibek—sat down with the CIA, he had a terrifying secret to reveal: that bio weapons program the Soviet Union stopped in the 1980′s hadn't actually stopped at all. He knew this because he had led Moscow's efforts to develop weapons-grade anthrax. In fact, he said, by 1989—around the time that Western leaders were urging the USSR to halt its secret bioweapons program, known as Biopreparat—the Soviet program had dwarfed the US's by many orders of magnitude. (This is disregarding the possibility that the US was also developing some of these weapons in secret, and, like Russia, still is.)
One big problem, he added, was that, like the stockpiles of nuclear weapons left in the dust of the Soviet Union, the materials and the expertise needed to make a bioweapon—anthrax, smallpox, cholera, plague, hemorrhagic fevers, and so on—could still be lying about, for sale to the highest bidder. Of those scientists, Alibek told the Times in 1998, "We have lost control of them."
Today, biologists who worked in the former Soviet Union—like those who responded to a case of the plague across the border in Kyrgyzstan this week—are likely to brush Alibek's fears aside. But they'll also tell you that the fall of the Soviet Union devastated their profession, leaving some once prominent scientists in places like Almaty scrambling for new work. That sense of desperation, underlined by Alibek's defection to the US, has helped pump hundreds of millions of dollars into a Pentagon program to secure not just nuclear materials but chemical and biological ones, in a process by which Washington became, in essence, their highest bidder.
This explains the hulking concrete structure I recently visited at a construction site on the outskirts of Almaty. Set behind trees and concrete and barbed-wire, Kazakhstan's new Central Reference Laboratory USSR .
The far-flung biological threat reduction lab may look like a strange idea at a time of various sequester outbreaks, but officials say it's an important anti-terror investment, a much-needed upgrade to a facility that has been described as an aging, un-secure relic of the 1950s, and one that the Defense Dept. fears can't keep pace in an era of WMD.
Kazakhstan secret soviet "soviet union" plague anthrax "research center" research stocks lab laboratory disease society capsule health healthcare doctor doc future "middle east" "eastern europe" russia test testing "animal testing" ill death extreme extremism terror fear truth risk , From a security and safety perspective, the new lab represents a giant leap. When documentarian Simon Reeve visited the existing facility in 2006, he saw Soviet-era buildings and security measures not likely to intimidate a determined terrorist—or a scientist—from sneaking some anthrax or plague out into the wild. Small locks on fridges were all that kept deadly vials from a fast escape.
This video suggests how easy it is for Al-Qaeda or a terrorist organisation to break into this factory/laboratory and steal containers of the bubonic plague. Simon Reeve visits a secret plague and anthrax laboratory in Kazakhstan, Central Asia, while making his TV series Meet the Stans. The Meet the Stans series, was shown on BBC2, BBC World and by broadcasters internationally.
we were told on the MSM about Al-Qaeda experimenting with the plague in Algeria.
Concentrated anthrax spores were used for bioterrorism in the 2001 anthrax attacks in the United States, delivered by mailing postal letters containing the spores.[59] The letters were sent to several news media offices as well as to two Democratic senators: Tom Daschle of South Dakota and Patrick Leahy of Vermont. As a result, 22 were infected and five died.[19] Only a few grams of material were used in these attacks and in August 2008 the US Department of Justice announced they believed that Dr. Bruce Ivins, a senior biodefense researcher employed by the United States government, was responsible.[60] These events also spawned many anthrax hoaxes.
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