On the front lines of biowar Analysis/Commentary Not satisfied with their advanced nuclear arsenal, the Russians, so Ken Alibek reveals in his book Biohazard (1999), have been stockpiling weaponized anthrax, smallpox, plague, Marburg, Ebola, tularemia, and other dangerous diseases. In the event of war, the Russian military will be able to launch missile warheads containing the diseases deep into enemy lines. The Americans gave up their bioweapons program in 1969 by President Nixon's order. In 1972, the U.S., China, and Russia signed a bioweapons convention aimed at stopping all research in biological warfare. But the Russians simply secretized and institutionalized their program. Under efficient administrators like Alibek, it blossomed, intensified, and spread to 130 institutions. Only in 1992 did they scale back their efforts. (According to Alibek, bioweapons research continues in Russia.) The apparent advantage to bioweapons is that they won't subject the globe to the nuclear winter threatened by massive ICBM attacks. Bioweapons maintain first assault capability: many of the diseases in the Russian arsenal surface within hours or at most days, and they're usually completely debilitating. Anthrax causes convulsions and choking, and is fatal in 90 percent of untreated cases. Prepared for battlefield use, it can be stored indefinitely at room temperature. The Russians have even developed a genetically-engineered double "hammer" that combines the effects of two diseases in a single agent. Before 1972, the high point in biological weapons research occurred during World War II, when the British, Americans, Russian, and Japanese all had fairly advanced programs. The Japanese tested plague weapons (aerial bombs) on the Chinese in Manchuria, and the Russians infected the German Panzer Divisions near Leningrad in 1942. A problem seems to have been that the Russian military's artificial epidemic crossed lines and caused high casualties among Russian civilians and military alike. The event was hushed up. Later, the Russian program was revived; it thrived and grew between 1972 and 1992, partly on its own momentum. Technicians learned to develop stockpiles of industrial proportions. Obviously, this looked good on paper: on the one hand, the weapons were increasingly potent, and on the other, they were increasingly manageable and cost-reliable. Scientists focused on vaccine- and antidote-resistant strains, while the military-industrial complex gave jobs to 60,000 scientists and technicians. It was the Manhattan Project carried over a decade and a half, at a time when the Americans were showcasing their space superiority and their Star Wars determination. Since the Russians couldn't compete with the U.S. toe-to-toe, they developed a secret doomsday machine. In terms of glitches, a ghastly accident occurred in 1979 in Sverdlovsk, a Russian bioweapons research center. An anthrax leak caused 100 or more deaths. The military attributed the accident -- probably involving a defective/missing filter -- to meat contamination. Elsewhere, Alibek witnessed the death of a colleague who inadvertently injected himself in the thumb with the Marburg virus. (This pathogen dissolves the walls of organs, causing great pain and death within days. ) In 1989, a senior scientist with Biopreparat (the main bioweapons agency), Vladimir Pasechnik, defected to the U.K. In 1992, Ken Alibek followed suit. In 1993, Russian President Boris Yeltsin signed an agreement to dismantle the Russian biowar facilities, but Alibek suspects they remain either operative, or able to be reconstituted within a short time. March 28, 2001