[quote]In 1992, Dr. Kanatjan Alibekov, a biologist from the Soviet Union, boarded a flight in Almaty, then Kazakhstan's capital, for New York. When Dr. Alibekov—now known as Ken Alibek—sat down with the CIA, he had a terrifying secret to reveal: that bio weapons program the Soviet Union stopped in the 1980's hadn't actually stopped at all. He knew this because he had led Moscow's efforts to develop weapons-grade anthrax. In fact, he said, by 1989—around the time that Western leaders were urging the USSR to halt its secret bioweapons program, known as Biopreparat—the Soviet program had dwarfed the US's by many orders of magnitude. (This is disregarding the possibility that the US was also developing some of these weapons in secret, and, like Russia, still is.)
One big problem, he added, was that, like the stockpiles of nuclear weapons left in the dust of the Soviet Union, the materials and the expertise needed to make a bioweapon—anthrax, smallpox, cholera, plague, hemorrhagic fevers, and so on—could still be lying about, for sale to the highest bidder. Of those scientists, Alibek told the Times in 1998, ''We have lost control of them."
Today, biologists who worked in the former Soviet Union—like those who responded to a case of the plague across the border in Kyrgyzstan this week—are likely to brush Alibek's fears aside. But they'll also tell you that the fall of the Soviet Union devastated their profession, leaving some once prominent scientists in places like Almaty scrambling for new work. That sense of desperation, underlined by Alibek's defection to the US, has helped pump hundreds of millions of dollars into a Pentagon program to secure not just nuclear materials but chemical and biological ones, in a process by which Washington became, in essence, their highest bidder.
This explains the hulking concrete structure I recently visited at a construction site on the outskirts of Almaty. Set behind trees and concrete and barbed-wire, Kazakhstan's new Central Reference Laboratory will partly replace the aging buildings nearby where the USSR kept some of its finest potential bioweapons—and where scientists study those powerful pathogens today. When it opens in September 2015, the $102-million project laboratory is meant to serve as a Central Asian way station for a global war on dangerous disease. And as a project under that Pentagon program, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the lab will be built, and some of its early operation funded, by American taxpayers.
The far-flung biological threat reduction lab may look like a strange idea at a time of various sequester outbreaks, but officials say it's an important anti-terror investment, a much-needed upgrade to a facility that has been described as an aging, un-secure relic of the 1950's, and one that the Defense Dept. fears can't keep pace in an era of WMD.
It's also an investment, they add, in a country where scientists are hungry for more international participation and better facilities—and where the U.S. is keen to keep sensitive materials and knowledge in the right hands and brains. [/quote]
[url]http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2013-08/why-us-building-high-tech-bubonic-plague-lab-kazakhstan[/url]
I thought we knew for a while that there are a LOT of WMD's that are literally sitting in a back lot for the last 30 years?
Defense Threat Reduction Agency
I bet their budget reads like a who's who of dirty dealers.
It's like a modern history lesson!
[QUOTE=frozensoda;42039718]Defense Threat Reduction Agency
I bet their budget reads like a who's who of dirty dealers.[/QUOTE]
Probably just did it so the acronym could spell out DeThRAy.
So like international law prohibits the usage of chemical/biological weapons, but the grown up nations like America and Russia aren't naive. They've got big ass stockpiles of everything dangerous ever known to man.
[QUOTE=cqbcat;42040192]So like international law prohibits the usage of chemical/biological weapons, but the grown up nations like America and Russia aren't naive. They've got big ass stockpiles of everything dangerous ever known to man.[/QUOTE]
All of the stuff the general public knows about is just what the governments of the world want the public to know about. It's only when war breaks out between superpowers will you see some truly strange shit.
Just think of all of the secret weapons of WWII that remained hidden and classified up until just a decade or two ago, and more are being discovered every year.
They're probably going to use it on those evil nitwits Uzbekistan.
[QUOTE=cqbcat;42040192]So like international law prohibits the usage of chemical/biological weapons, but the grown up nations like America and Russia aren't naive. They've got big ass stockpiles of everything dangerous ever known to man.[/QUOTE]
the thing is, or at least the excuse is, we heard they had them so we developed them so that we can counter them
[editline]1st September 2013[/editline]
because we cannot afford an anthrax gap! (or mineshaft gaps)
[quote]But plague is already a focus of work at the existing lab in Almaty because it occurs naturally in nearly 40 percent of the country. (The KSCQZD began life in 1949 as the Central Asian Anti-Plague Scientific Research Institute.) Though it's often spread by fleas, depending on lung infections or sanitary conditions, it also can be spread in the air, through direct contact, or by contaminated undercooked food.[/quote]
But the plague was already in Kazakhstan!
And another reason for me to night sleep at night.
Joy.
[QUOTE=froztshock;42047217]But the plague was already in Kazakhstan![/QUOTE]
why do u think they don't drink the water?
[QUOTE=Banhfunbags;42040306]They're probably going to use it on those evil nitwits Uzbekistan.[/QUOTE]
No, Uzbekistan living will be worse for them. How can you have a happy life when you live next a country with such great Potassium?
Full article was a good read and I'd recommend anyone interested to read it.
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