Biological Weaponry Poses Vicious
Threat Sunday, June 20, 1999
http://www.canoe.ca/EdmontonNews/es.es-06-20-0050.html
GENEVA -- U.S. and European intelligence agencies are
reporting mounting evidence that Russia and China have massively
violated the 1972 Biological and Toxic Weapons Convention and
subsequent international and bilateral agreements to control
biowarfare weapons.
The convention, signed by 169 nations, prohibits the
development, production, acquisition, stockpiling, transfer or use of
chemical and biological weapons.
All signatories with biowarfare arsenals are pledged to
eliminate such weapons over 10 years. While Russia and China appear to
have ceased adding to their huge stockpiles of chemical weapons, both
are developing new strains of highly lethal biological toxins.
According to Ken Alibek, a former deputy director of the
top secret Soviet-era biowarfare program, who defected to the West,
Moscow never ended its offensive biological warfare research. Alibek
claims Russia has stockpiled many hundreds of
tonnes of anthrax and plague, as well as smaller quantities of
smallpox, Ebola and Marburg viruses, and toxins designed to
attack plants and animals. Russia is also developing a new strain of
"invisible" biowarfare agents, known as bioregulators, that
destroy the body's immune or neurological systems.
The highest-ranking defector from Russia's biowarfare
program ever to come West also claims that in 1985 former Soviet
leader Mikhail Gorbachev secretly authorized a five-year program to
develop weaponized germs and viruses, some of which were mounted on
multiple warheads of the large SS-18 ICBMs targeted at North America.
Alibek also says China, which
claims to have abandoned biowarfare production and eliminated
stockpiles, is producing hemorrhagic viruses at Lop Nor in
Central Asia and suffered two major accidents in the late 1980s that
killed hundreds of people.
Many toxins being developed in Russia have been
biologically engineered to resist antibiotics, notably a super-strain
of anthrax that is apparently impervious to the anti-anthrax
inoculations now being given to NATO troops.
Alibek and other Russian defectors also confirmed the
Soviet Union used chemical and biological weapons in Afghanistan from
1980-89. While covering the war there, I saw numerous cases of grave
injuries or death inflicted on the Afghan mujahedeen by mysterious
Soviet weapons. After being sprayed by a fine chemical mist, or
exposed to gas, people would turn black and die, bleed profusely from
all body orifices, choke and vomit or become disoriented and dazed.
Bodies of some victims would
putrefy almost immediately.
The Soviets also employed glanders, a highly contagious
horse disease, to kill the animal transport used by the Afghan
resistance and ergot fungus to destroy wheat. None of the biowarfare
agents used by the U.S.S.R. in Afghanistan, save
glanders, have ever been identified by western scientists. The West,
while scourging Iraq for using chemical weapons against
Iran and its rebellious Kurds, chose to ignore employment by the
U.S.S.R. of more sophisticated toxic agents in Afghanistan.
Western protests over Russia's latest germ warfare
projects and demands for inspection of its four major biowarfare labs
have been rebuffed by Russia. The Bill Clinton administration,
influenced by the strongly pro-Russian Strobe Talbot, has repeatedly
rejected demands by Congress to cut off billions in U.S. aid in order
to pressure Moscow into ceasing its illegal biowarfare programs.
Europe, which also bankrolls Boris Yeltsin's regime, has been
similarly negligent in pressing Moscow on this vital issue.
Some of the 60,000 scientists and technicians formerly
employed in the Soviet biological warfare establishment have
reportedly been employed by Iraq, Israel, Iran, Syria and Serbia - all
of which have extensive biowarfare arsenals. India may also have
received substantial Russian aid to develop its growing biowarfare
capabilities.
Alibek testified before the U.S. Congress that he
defected after learning that while the West had virtually eliminated
its toxic arsenals, Russia was not only continuing Soviet biowarfare
programs but accelerating them, with 2,000 scientists alone working on
new, genetically engineered strains of anthrax at a top secret island
base in the Aral Sea. He claims such toxic agents have little tactical
military value and are of use only as mass terror weapons designed to
compensate for Russia's and China's relative backwardness in
conventional military systems.
These terror agents are being produced in a large
complex at Kirov, east of Moscow, Compound 19 at Ekaterinburg in the
Urals, Sergeiv Possad outside Moscow and at a new complex at Strizhy,
close to Kirov. The laboratory at Ekaterinburg
(formerly Sverdlovsk) was the site of a massive accidental release of
anthrax in 1979 that killed or injured over 1,000 people.
According to the 1990 U.S.-Russia Bilateral Destruction
Agreement, the two powers were to reduce their respective chemical
stockpiles to 5,000 tonnes each by 2002. In 1996, Russia backed off
even this agreement, citing financial problems. The UN was supposed to
take over supervision of biowarfare agents destruction and
implementation of the 1972 treaty, but it has failed dismally to
enforce the agreements or even to protest egregious violations by
Russia, China and other signatory states.
The West has destroyed or significantly reduced its
stocks of chemical agents, and ceased biological warfare research.
Russia and China continue to develop such weapons. The former balance
of terror has become unbalanced, as "friendly" regimes in Moscow and
Beijing not only violate international law but threaten all mankind
with their relentless development of hi-tech germ warfare.
by Eric Margolis
Toronto Sun