The Dead Hand

only two repositories for the remaining smallpox strains, one in the United States and the other in Moscow at the Ivanovsky Institute of the Ministry of Health. This is what the Soviet Union had pledged to the World Health Organization. What the world didn’t know until years later was that the Soviet Union had broken its word.¹³

In 1988, worried about foreign inspections, an order was given by the Soviet military to get rid of a large supply of anthrax spores that had been removed from Sverdlovsk after the accident. This Bacillus anthracis had been in storage at the town of Zima, near Irkutsk, in Siberia. When the order came to destroy it, more than one hundred tons of anthrax solution, in 250-liter stainless steel containers, was taken by train, and then by ship, to Vozrozhdeniye Island, where it was mixed with hydrogen peroxide and formic acid, and then buried in eleven graves dug in the earth. The graves, four to six feet deep, were unlined, so nothing would prevent the anthrax from seeping deeper into the ground. As they lay there under the earth, the anthrax spores were not all destroyed. Some remained active for many years to come.¹⁴

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One thousand miles east of Moscow, in a flatlands beyond the industrial city of Chelyabinsk, stood a nondescript rectangle-shaped compound, more than a mile long and nearly a mile wide, situated almost precisely on a north-south axis, with orderly rows of low-lying wood-plank warehouses and corrugated metal rooftops, surrounded by trees and traversed by rail lines. Inside the warehouses, berths cradled row upon row of projectiles, from 85mm artillery rounds to larger warheads for Scud missiles. They were set on racks like so many wine bottles in a dark cellar. In this one remote compound, near the town of Shchuchye in western Siberia, 1.9 million projectiles were filled with 5,447 metric tons of the nerve agents sarin, soman and a Soviet analogue of the nerve gas VX. All told, it was 13.6 percent of the Soviet chemical weapons arsenal.¹⁵ The projectiles were the legacy of a shadowy era of the arms race in which the United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union stockpiled massive amounts of chemical weapons, while negotiations to restrict them dragged on for two decades in Geneva without result. From the beginning of his disarmament drive, Gorbachev wanted to be rid of these chemical weapons.

The killing power of chemical weapons is monstrous. Less than ten milligrams of the American nerve agent VX—a small drop of fluid on the skin—could kill a grown man in fifteen minutes or less. A liter of such an agent contains enough lethal doses, theoretically, to kill one million people.¹⁶ Such nerve agents serve no peaceful purpose—they are solely agents of death. The author Jonathan Tucker described them as colorless, odorless liquids that enter the body through the lungs or skin and attack the nervous system. The victim falls to the ground, convulses and loses consciousness, after which inhibition of the breathing center of the brain and paralysis of the respiratory muscles cause death by asphyxiation within minutes.

The Soviets had amassed at least forty thousand tons of chemical agents, and the United States thirty-one thousand tons. While silent about biological weapons, Gorbachev openly sought to get rid of the chemical arms. He announced in Prague on April 13, 1987, that the Soviet Union would stop manufacturing them. He mothballed the Soviet factories for making the chemicals and filling the munitions.

After his speech on surprise inspections in Geneva, Shevardnadze invited foreign observers to a top-secret Soviet chemical weapons testing facility at Shikhany, on the Volga River 560 miles southeast of Moscow. Shevardnadze said he wanted to “build an atmosphere of trust.” On October 3–4, 1987, a delegation of 110 experts from 45 countries and 55 journalists were flown there in four airplanes. At the facility, on a freshly poured concrete slab, the delegation saw nineteen projectiles and containers, including hand grenades, rocket and artillery rounds, and a nine-foot-tall chemical warhead for the Scud.¹⁷ The visit seemed to be another sign of the Gorbachev glasnost. Yuri Nazarkin, the Soviet representative at arms control talks, declared, “We have nothing to hide.”¹⁸ This was not quite true. Missing from the lineup on the concrete pad was a new type of chemical weapon Soviet scientists were desperately trying to develop to keep pace with the United States.

Until the 1980s, both the United States and Soviet Union built chemical weapons that contained a single agent that would be dispersed when detonated. This was called a unitary chemical weapon. The agents tended to degrade over time. The United States stopped manufacturing them in 1969, when potential hazards were discovered in the U.S. arsenal. In 1985, Congress approved destroying the older weapons while authorizing the creation of a new type of chemical weapon, known as a binary. It would have two parts, each a stable ingredient that, when combined at the last minute in the shell or bomb, would turn into a toxic cocktail. This was a tricky engineering feat, but a binary weapon might have a longer shelf life. Reagan approved production of the new binary weapon right after the December 1987 summit with Gorbachev. “Maybe that will get the Soviets to join us in eliminating chemical warfare,” he wrote in his diary.¹⁹ The Soviets were already rushing—in secret— to create the same thing. They experimented with binary weapons in the 1970s, but failed to come up with a successful model. Then, in the 1980s, they launched another quest. One part of this new drive was to create a binary weapon out of ordinary chemicals that might be used in fertilizer or pesticides. These were called the novichok generation of agents, or the “new guy.”

Vil Mirzayanov was a witness to the potential power of these deadly nerve agents. He had worked for many years at the headquarters of chemical weapons research in Moscow. In May 1987, one of his friends, an experienced military chemist, Andrei Zheleznyakov, suffered an accident. He was a test engineer whose job was to check finished products. He was working on a binary weapon, one of the novichok generation. According to Mirzayanov, there was a chemical reactor under a fume hood, and then a pipe carrying the substance to a spectrometer, which was too big to put under the hood. It was in the room, with ventilation on the ceiling, but not protected by the hood.

The pipe somehow broke, and the poison leaked into the air. Zheleznyakov quickly sealed the leak, but it was too late. He felt the impact immediately—myosis, the constriction of the pupil of the eye. “I saw rings before my eyes—red, orange,” he later recalled. “Bells were ringing inside my head. I choked. Add to this the feeling of fear—as if something was about to happen at any moment. I sat down and told the guys: I think it has ‘got’ me. They dragged me out of the room—I was still able to move—and took me to the chief. He looked at me and said, ‘Have a cup of tea, everything will be fine.’ I drank the tea and immediately threw up.

“They took me to the medical unit,” he added, “where I was injected with an antidote. I felt a little better. The chief told me: ‘Go home and lie down. Come back tomorrow.’ They assigned me an escort, and we walked past a few bus stops. We were already passing the church near Ilyich Square, when suddenly I saw the church lighting up and falling apart. I remember nothing else.”

His escort dragged Zheleznyakov back to the medical unit. They called an ambulance and took him to the hospital, accompanied by KGB agents, who told doctors he had suffered food poisoning from eating contaminated sausage. The KGB agents made the doctors sign a pledge never to discuss the case. After eighteen days in intensive care, doctors managed to save his life.

At the end of the hospitalization, he was given a pension and told to remain silent. Zheleznyakov suffered aftereffects for a long time, including chronic weakness in his arms, toxic hepatitis, epilepsy, severe depression and an inability to concentrate. Zheleznyakov had been a jovial man and was known as a talented woodcarver, but the accident left him unable to work or be creative. He died five years after the accident.²⁰

Novichok had shown its teeth.

————— 14 ————— THE LOST YEAR

Reagan’s last hurrah with Gorbachev came on a warm spring day, May 31, 1988. Having finished the third plenary meeting of their fourth summit, they stepped out into the lilac-scented breezes for a walking tour around the Kremlin and Red Square, trailed by aides and journalists. They stopped near a thirty-nine-ton cannon dating from 1586 that stands in a plaza in the center of the Kremlin. Asked if he still considered the Soviet Union to be an evil empire, Reagan replied, “No.” Surprised, reporters asked why. Reagan paused, and tilted his head to one side. “You are talking about another time, another era,” he said.

The moment marked the end of Reagan’s cold war. On his first visit to the Soviet Union after so many decades of antipathy, Reagan and Gorbachev did not sign any nuclear arms treaties, a missed opportunity for deep