Russia's secret weapons

摘要

In 1992, President Boris Yeltsin admitted that the former Soviet Union had supported a secret biological-warfare programme, in violation of the Biological Toxin and Weapons Convention, which the Soviet Union ratified in 1975. Some of the researchers and officials who operated the programme, such as Ken Alibek, Igor Domaradskii and Serguei Popov, have provided personal accounts that shed light on the clandestine system. However, the compartmental-ization and secrecy so prevalent in the former Soviet Union mean that such accounts describe only a fraction of the nations bioweapons programme. Almost nothing is known about the biological-warfare activities of the Soviet ministries of defence, health and agriculture, the security agencies and the national academies.