In the Urals city of Sverdlovsk, now Yekaterinburg, in 1979 an outbreak of anthrax killed 69 people. The response of the local Communist Party boss, Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin, was typically Soviet. The disease had come from animals. It could not have had anything to do with germ warfare because the USSR had signed an international convention to stop producing biological weapons in 1972.
Nearly two decades later that same Party boss admitted, as non-communist President of Russia, that the fatal outbreak was caused by a leak from a secret unit producing germ warfare materials. President Yeltsin issued a decree banning biological warfare production. Western experts believe that this decree was ignored by the military scientific complex and that anthrax was by no means its most frightening product.
When I investigated biological and chemical warfare production for The Irish Times in 1993 the Soviet Union had broken up and the chaos that ensued led the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) to express its concern that materials could be smuggled out of the former Soviet Union with relative ease.
With the utmost disregard for its international obligations Soviet Union's biological weapons programme did not get seriously under way until after the 1972 convention had been agreed.
An organisation known as Biopreparat was set up. It included 19 scientific research institutes, six production plants and a biological weapons store in Siberia. More than 25,000 people were preparing germ warfare materials.
Each branch of Biopreparat had a specific task. An institute in Koltsov near Novosibirsk in Siberia dealt with haemorrhagic fevers and Venezuelan encephalitis. In Obolensk 60 miles south of Moscow work was done on plague and anthrax, in Leningrad (now St Petersburg) studies were carried out on tularaemia and on increasing the combat effectiveness of bacteria.
The Obolensk centre had aerosol dissemination test chambers in which tethered animals were subjected to a fine spray from the ceiling. The animals were subjected to plague, anthrax and other diseases as well as new, genetically-engineered cocktails.
On November 20th, 1992, Russia issued regulations for the control of the export of "infections, genetically changed forms and fragments of genetic material which can be used in the creation of bacteriological (biological) and toxic weapons". No specific end-user certificate was required under these regulations thus allowing materials to be passed on to unnamed third parties. But even the strictest of rules would have been impossible to implement in the anarchic conditions which prevailed after the dissolution of the USSR. In 1989, Dr Vladimir Pasechnik, a director of one of the Biopreparat institutes, defected to Britain and the first major breakthrough in western intelligence of the Soviet biologocial weapons programme was effected. But the research and production did not end. Dr Pasechnik was replaced by Dr Yevgeny Sventitsky and a variant of plague which could survive a wide range of temperatures and could resist 16 known western antibiotics was developed. A single bomb containing this plague variant on a city the size of Cork would have quickly killed half the population.
The centre's biological warfare production was mainly in European Russia with some evidence of storage centres in the Muslim republics of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan which have common frontiers with Afghanistan. Chemical warfare plants, on the other hand, were in the east giving reason to believe they were to be used in a possible war with China.
In 1992, in total breach of an agreement by Presidents Gorbachev and Bush Sr, to end chemical weapons production, the dissident scientist Dr Vil Mirzayanov revealed that the Soviet Union had produced the most lethal binary nerve agent known to mankind. Known as Novichok (The Newcomer) it was up to 10 times more powerful than its nearest US equivalent known as VX.
It worked by cutting off fluid to the brain, leading to severe spasms,collapse of the lungs and death.
The Soviet Union had amassed a stockpile of chemical weapons of up to 70,000 tonnes, by far the largest in the world.
Scientists are convinced most was kept safely from undesirable hands.ut the technology which produced Novichok may have been exported.
Binary chemical weapons are usually produced by combining two agents which are innocuous in themselves but lethal when combined.
But scientists working on Novichok managed, for the first time, to combine two already deadly agents in order to produce a weapon of unprecedented lethal power. In 1993 the SIPRI experts had already acquired information that a similar programme was under way in Iraq.