The US government keeps a list of nations and groups that it suspects either have clandestine stocks of smallpox or seem to be trying to buy or steal the virus. The list is classified, but it is said to include Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Cuba, Serbia, terrorist organization of Osama bin Laden and, possibly, the Aum Shinrikyo sect of Japan.
Ken Alibek, who was once Kanatjan Alibekov, a leading Soviet bioweaponeer and the inventor of the world's most powerful anthrax, defected, in 1992, and revealed how far the Soviet Union had gone with bioweapons. Alibek says that there were twenty tons of liquid smallpox kept on hand at Soviet military bases.
In 1989, a Soviet biologist named Vladimir Pasechnik defected to Britain. British intelligence spent a year debriefing him. By the end, the British agents felt they had confirmed that the U.S.S.R. had biological missiles aimed at the US. This information reached President George Bush and the British PM Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher then apparently confronted the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. She was furious, and so was Bush. Gorbachev responded by allowing a small, secret team of American and British bioweapons inspectors to tour Soviet biowarfare facilities. In January of 1991, the inspectors travelled across the U.S.S.R., getting whirlwind looks at some of the major clandestine bases of the Soviet biowarfare program, which was called Biopreparat. The inspectors were frightened by what they discovered. ("I would describe it as scary, and I feel a responsibility to tell the world medical community about what I saw, because doctors could face these diseases," said one inspector, Frank Malinoski, M.D., Ph.D.) On January 14th, the team arrived at Vector, the main virology complex, in Siberia, and the next day, they were shown into a laboratory called Building 6, where one of the inspectors, David Kelly, took a technician aside and asked him what virus they had been working with. The technician said that they had been working with smallpox. Kelly repeated the question three times. Three times, he asked the technician, "You mean you were working with Variola major?" and he emphasized to the technician that his answer was very important. The technician responded emphatically that it was Variola major [the killer strain]. Kelly says that his interpreter was the best Russian interpreter the British government has. "There was no ambiguity," Kelly says. The inspectors were stunned. Vector was not supposed to have any smallpox at all, much less be working with it -- a supreme violation of rules set down by the W.H.O.
Per Malinoski: "There were tons of smallpox virus made in the Soviet Union. The Russians admitted that to us. One of the Vector leaders when he said to us, 'Listen, we didn't account for every ampule of the virus. We had large quantities of it on hand. There were plenty of opportunities for staff members to walk away with an ampule. Although we think we know where our formerly employed scientists are, we can't account for all of them-we don't know where all of them are.' " Today, smallpox and its protocols could be anywhere in the world.
Sitting with D. A. Henderson [widely credited with the eradication of smallpox ] in his house, I mentioned what seemed to be the great and tragic paradox of his life's work. The eradication caused the human species to lose its immunity to smallpox, and that was what made it possible for the Soviets to turn smallpox into a weapon rivalling the hydrogen bomb.
Henderson responded with silence, and then said thoughtfully, "I feel very sad about this. The eradication never would have succeeded without the Russians. Viktor Zhdanov [who first raised the idea] started it, and they did so much. They were extremely proud of what they had done. I felt the virus was in good hands with the Russians. I never would have suspected. They made twenty tons -- twenty tons -- of smallpox. For us to have come so far with the disease, and now to have to deal with this human creation, when there are so many other problems in the world . . ." He was quiet again. "It's a great letdown," he said.
Immune people are like control rods in a nuclear reactor. The American population has little immunity [the vaccination begins wears off after 10 years], so it's a reactor with no control rods. We could have an uncontrolled smallpox chain reaction." This would be something that terrorism experts refer to as a "soft kill" of the United States of America.
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