The Soviet Biological Weapons Program and Its Legacy in Today's Russia: Innovation Using Recombinant DNA Technology and Genetic Engineering, the Biopreparat BW Program, Biography of Smirnov

This excellent report has been professionally converted for accurate flowing-text e-book format reproduction. President Richard M. Nixon's November 25, 1969, terminated the U.S. offensive biological weapons program on November 25, 1969. This paper seeks to explain why the Soviet government, at approximately the same time, decided to do essentially the opposite, namely, to establish a large biological warfare (BW) program that would be driven by newly discovered and powerful biotechnologies. By introducing the innovation of recombinant DNA technology—commonly referred to as genetic engineering—the Soviets were attempting to create bacterial and viral strains that were more useful for military purposes than were strains found in nature.

Nixon's decision was widely publicized and documents revealing the reasons behind it are, in the main, available to the public in the National Archives, the Nixon Presidential Library in San Clemente, California, and publications written by members of the Nixon administration. In sharp contrast, the Soviet decision was highly secret at the time and remains so to this day. All contemporary documents pertaining to the Soviet offensive BW program remain classified and none of the military officers and officials who operated it has spoken or written about it except to deny that it existed or to belie its offensive intent.

The information that has become available about the program has been divulged by scientists and administrators who previously worked in the civilian component of the Soviet BW program, called Biopreparat. Some of them had defected to Western countries and there told their stories, while others chose to remain in Russia after the Soviet Union dissolved in December 1991 and later divulged details of their past secret activities in their own publications, or in broadcasts or print interviews. However, Biopreparat employees, even those who held managerial positions, did not have sufficiently high clearances to be informed about high-level BW-related decisionmaking. Decisions such as those that instituted what in effect was a new BW program, and ordered the Soviet Ministry of Defense (MOD) to develop strategies and tactics for the use of biological weapons, were made at the highest levels by members of the Politburo and Central Committee of the Communist Party (CCCP) and the MOD's General Staff (GS).