Soviet program of biological weapons | Wikipedia audio article
Channel: wikipedia tts
Date: 2019-01-08

This is an audio version of the Wikipedia Article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_biological_weapons_program


00:02:43 1 History
00:02:51 1.1 Pre-World War II
00:04:04 1.2 World War II
00:06:45 1.3 The Cold War
00:09:54 1.3.1 Post-BWC developments
00:11:02 1.4 The post-Soviet era
00:13:54 2 List of Soviet/Russian BW institutions, programs and projects
00:15:52 3 Notable bio-agent outbreaks and accidents
00:16:04 3.1 Smallpox
00:17:46 3.2 Anthrax
00:18:21 3.3 Marburg virus
00:19:07 4 List of Soviet/Russian bioweaponeers
00:19:41 5 See also



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SUMMARY
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The Soviet Union began a biological weapons program in the 1920s. During World War II, Joseph Stalin was forced to move his biological warfare (BW) operations out of the path of advancing German forces and may have used tularemia against German troops in 1942 near Stalingrad.
By 1960, numerous BW research facilities existed throughout the Soviet Union. Although the USSR also signed the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), the Soviets subsequently augmented their biowarfare programs. Over the course of its history, the Soviet program is known to have weaponized and stockpiled the following eleven bio-agents (and to have pursued basic research on many more):

Bacillus anthracis (anthrax)
Yersinia pestis (plague)
Francisella tularensis (tularemia)
Burkholderia mallei (glanders)
Brucella spp (brucellosis)
Coxiella burnetii (Q-fever)
Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus (VEE)
Botulinum toxin (botulism)
Staphylococcal enterotoxin B
Smallpox
Marburg virusThese programs became immense and were conducted at 52 clandestine sites employing over 50,000 people. Annualized production capacity for weaponized smallpox, for example, was 90 to 100 tons. In the 1980s and 1990s, many of these agents were genetically altered to resist heat, cold, and antibiotics. In the 1990s, Boris Yeltsin admitted to an offensive bio-weapons program as well as to the true nature of the Sverdlovsk biological weapons accident of 1979, which had resulted in the deaths of at least 64 people. Defecting Soviet bioweaponeers such as  Colonel Kanatjan Alibekov confirmed that the program had been massive and still existed. An agreement was signed with the US and UK promising to end bio-weapons programs and convert BW facilities to benevolent purposes, but compliance with the agreement — and the fate of the former Soviet bio-agents and facilities — is still mostly undocumented.