“Biohazard” – Ken Alibek

“Biohazard” walks the line between popular science and terrifying cold war politics: it is a blood-curdling account of the Soviet Union’s bioweapons research program, written by Ken Alibek (or Kanatjan Alibekov, before defection), its deputy director and foremost scientist.

I read this during my search for useful quotes for my PhD thesis (which is not on bioweapons!) and couldn’t put it down because I needed to know whether he would end with a reassuring “and that was the end of all our evil mass destruction science”. He didn’t. This book caused quite a stir in 1999, when it was released and Alibek’s main point, beside a need to confess the sins of his past, is to warn the West that Russia and other parts of the former USSR still had much more advanced agents of biological warfare than anyone could imagine.

A lot of this book describes the workings of the Soviet machine, inter-relations between different directorates, agencies and organisations, vicious political blackmail and Cold War diplomacy, and that can be a little confusing for the politically disinterested. Then there are Alibek’s descriptions of the strains of Ebola and Marburg viruses, anthrax, smallpox, tularemia and many other deadly pathogens his Biopreparat institutes were working with and they leave little to the imagination: how much damage could have been done and the horrible deaths people would have died in the event of a biological attack. If the animal testing wasn’t graphic enough, there were also the occasional accidental outbreaks in the testing facilities that killed workers and residents.

Despite his responsibilities and actions, I ended up liking Alibek, as he slowly comes around to once again “honoring the medical oath [he] betrayed for so many years”.

I was a child in West Berlin when the Wall came down and had always seen Mikhail Gorbachev as some sort of gentle and peaceful hero of unification and therefore was distraught to read that he signed off on “the most ambitious program for biological weapons development ever given to our agency”, including funding for a “viral reactor to produce smallpox at the Russian State Center of Virology and Biotechnology”, the facility known as Vector, that is still one of only two centers in the world today legally holding a stock of smallpox.

This book made me so uneasy and should everyone, and I’m not sure I recommend it – only to those with a strong stomach and a sunny optimistic disposition.