The Dead Hand

Overview,” Aug. 9, 2004.

7 Jonathan B. Tucker, Scourge: The Once and Future Threat of Smallpox (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press), 2001, pp. 2–3.

8 This account is based on Domaradsky’s memoir as well as interviews with him, August 1999 and Sept. 6, 2004.

9 Based on a tour, May 24, 2000, and information from employees.

10 Secret military institutes and bureaus in Soviet times were usually identified by a post office box number.

11 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Department of Health and Human Services, “Consensus Statement: Tularemia as a Biological Weapon: Medical and Public Health Management,” July 1, 2005, drawn from D. T. Dennis, T.V. Inglesby, D.A. Henderson et al., Journal of the American Medical Association, June 6, 2001, vol. 285, no. 21: 2763–2773.

12 Lisa Melton, “Drugs in Peril: How Do Antibiotics Work?” and “Bacteria Bite Back: How Do Bacteria Become Resistant to Antibiotics?;” and Robert Bud, “The Medicine Chest: The History of Antibiotics,” The Wellcome Trust, http://www.wellcome.ahc.uk.

13 Alibek, p. 161.

14 The term was taken from five health problem commissions set up in the 1950s and 1960s. According to Raymond A. Zilinskas, “Problem No. 5” was responsible for defense of the population against bacteria, including biological weapons. The commission operated out of the N. F. Gamaleya Scientific Research Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology of the Soviet Academy of Medical Sciences, in Moscow, and all research was top secret. See Zilinskas, “The Anti-plague System and the Soviet Biological Warfare Program,” Critical Reviews in Microbiology, vol. 32, pp. 47–64, 2006.

15 On Lysenko, see Valery N. Soyfer, Lysenko and the Tragedy of Soviet Science (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994), Leo and Rebecca Gruliow, trans.; Zhores Medvedev, The Rise and Fall of T. D. Lysenko (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), I. Michael Lerner, trans.; Medvedev, Soviet Science (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978); and David Joravsky, The Lysenko Affair (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970). On Vavilov, see Peter Pringle, The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008).

16 George W. Christopher, Theodore J. Cieslak, Julie A. Pavlin, and Edward M. Eitzen, Jr., “Biological Warfare: A Historical Perspective,” in Biological Weapons: Limiting the Threat, Joshua Lederberg, ed., Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1999), p. 18. For additional details, see The Problem of Chemical and Biological Warfare, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Vol. 1, “The Rise of CBW Weapons,” Chapter 2, and “Biological and Toxin Weapons: Research, Development and Use from the Middle Ages to 1945,” SIPRI Chemical and Biological Warfare Studies, No. 18, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Erhard Geissler, John Ellis, Courtland Moon, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

17 SIPRI, The Problem of Chemical and Biological Warfare, Ch. 2, p. 128.

18 The U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee favorably reported the protocol in 1926, but there was strong lobbying against it, and it was withdrawn from Senate consideration because it lacked the necessary two- thirds vote. The protocol entered into force on Feb. 8, 1928, without the United States. The protocol was ratified by the United States in 1975. George Bunn, Gas and Germ Warfare: International History and Present Status, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, January 1970, vol. 65, no. 1, pp. 253–260; and U.S. Department of State, http://www.state.gov/tlac/trt/4784.htm.

19 “There is no evidence that the enemy ever resorted to this means of warfare,” said a U.S. report, “Biological Warfare, Report to the Secretary of War by Mr. George W. Merck, Special Consultant for Biological Warfare,” Jan. 3, 1946. But the history of this period shows the Japanese program was intense and deadly. See Sheldon Harris, Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932–1945, and the American Cover- up (New York: Routledge, 2002); Peter Williams and David Wallace, Unit 731: Japan’s Secret Biological Warfare in World War II (New York: Free Press, 1989); Daniel Barenblatt, A Plague upon Humanity: The Secret Genocide of Axis Japan’s Germ Warfare Operation (New York: HarperCollins, 2004); and Hal Gold, Unit 731 Testimony (North Clarendon, Vt.: Tuttle Publishing, 1996).

20 On the civil war, see Alibek, p. 32. The army in 1926 set up the Vaccine-Serum Laboratory, responsible for developing vaccines and sera against common infectious diseases, at Vlasikha, outside of Moscow. This laboratory undertook secret research on offensive germ warfare, according to Jonathan B. Tucker and Raymond A. Zilinskas, The 1971 Smallpox Epidemic in Aralsk, Kazakhstan, and the Soviet Biological Warfare Program, Occasional Paper No. 9, James Martin Center (Formerly the Center for Nonproliferation Studies), 2002, p. 5. The system was renamed the Biotechnical Institute in 1934, and in 1937 moved to Gorodomlya Island, in the Tver oblast. Zilinskas, communication with author. Documents in the Russian military archives indicate that in 1937 the laboratory was engaged in offensive biowarfare work, including gravity bombs and anthrax. Russian State Military Archive, Fond 4, Opis 14, Delo 1856. The author is indebted to Mikhail Tsypkin for these documents.

21 “Soviet Russia, Bacteriological Warfare,” January 17, 1927, CX 9767, a report from the British S.I.S., file WO 188/784, British National Archives. The report said tests were planned with anthrax, plague and encephalitis.

22 Alibek, pp. 33–37.

23 The Hirsch report contained detailed information on Soviet activities from 1939 to 1945, based on his interrogation of Soviet prisoners of war and material taken from German intelligence files. It identified the island as a BW proving ground. Wilson E. Lexow and Julian Hoptman, “The Enigma of Soviet BW,” Studies in Intelligence, vol. 9, Spring 1965. Also, Special National Intelligence Estimate, “Implications of Soviet Use of Chemical and Toxin Weapons for US Security Interests,” SNIE 11-17-83, September 15, 1983, Annex B.

24 “Soviet Capabilities and Probable Courses of Action Through Mid-1959,” NIE 11-4-54, Sept. 14, 1954, p. 24.

25 Lexow and Hoptman, “The Enigma.”

26 “U.S. Army Activity in the U.S. Biological Warfare Programs,” Feb. 24, 1977, Vol. 1. This is the official history. Vol. 2, Annex A, is the Merck report to the secretary of war, recapitulating the events of the biological weapons program during the war, Jan. 3, 1946. Also see Theodore Rosebury, Peace or Pestilence (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1949), pp. 6–7.

27 Milton Leitenberg, The Problem of Biological Weapons (Stockholm: National Defence College, 2004), pp. 49–94.

28 The United Kingdom, the United States and Canada began a joint program for an anthrax cluster bomb. The United States was to provide agent production, and Canada provide safe facilities for trials. It was called the “N-bomb” project. By war’s end, field trials had shown the feasibility of tactical use of biological weapons agents in cluster bombs, but the U.S. plant had not begun production, nor approved the use of biological warfare. Separately, at Porton Down, the United Kingdom created an unsophisticated anti-livestock weapon, a squat, cylindrical cattle cake of linseed meal laced with anthrax spores. The production lines made 5 million cattle cakes between late 1942 and April 1943. The plan was to spread the cattle cakes into German fields, dropping them from bombers, to cripple German animal production—only in retaliation if the Germans used such weapons first. The Germans did not; the cattle cakes remained unused and were destroyed after the war. Confidential source; also see Deadly Cultures, eds. Mark Wheelis, Lajos Rozsa and Malcolm Dando (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), p. 4; and Brian Balmer, Britain and Biological Warfare: Expert Advice and Science Policy, 1930–1965 (Hampshire and New York: Palgrave, 2001).

29 Ed Regis, The Biology of Doom: The History of America’s Secret Germ Warfare Project (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1999), pp. 71–74.

30 U.S. Army history, p. 38. Also, see Conrad C. Crane, “No Practical Capabilities: American Biological and Chemical Warfare Programs During the Korean War,” Perspectives in Biology and