A panel of experts has urged Russia and the United States to expand their cooperation on biological security issues.
A U.S. program to secure and catalog biological agents at former Soviet laboratories has moved forward quickly in recent years, with increased cooperation from five former Soviet republics speeding progress.
The author proposes expanding U.S. cooperative threat reduction programs to address the threat from the Soviet Union's system to defeat bubonic plagure.
A new U.S. State Department report argues that Russia, Iran, North Korea and Syria all continue to maintain biological weapons programs. The authors also discuss ongoing efforts in Cuba and China but stop short of calling them biological weapons programs.
A new report from the Center for Nonproliferation Studies finds a growing threat from Soviet-era biological weapons facilities. "They often have culture collections of pathogens that lack biosecurity, and they employ people who are well-versed in investigating and handling deadly pathogens," said Raymond A. Zilinskas, a bioweapons expert and coauthor of the draft report on the antiplague system. "Some are located at sites accessible to terrorist groups and criminal groups. The potential is that terrorists and criminals would have little problem acquiring the resources that reside in these facilities."
The authors argue for increased funding for cooperative threat reduction programs to reduce the threat from Soviet-era biological weapon stockpiles.
Scientists at a heavily-guarded installation called Vector, deep in Siberia, are still conducting research on 120 strains of the Smallpox virus in order to study the origins of the virus and its genetic blueprint, and to seek new vaccines and anti-viral agents.
Scientists suspect that the gas pumped into the Moscow theatre was designed by Soviet military technicians during the Cold War. It would have been intended to penetrate nuclear bunkers and battlefield command centres, but has been refined since then for use in crowd control and sieges.
The unidentified gas used by Russian security forces in their raid on a Moscow theater appears to have been an incapacitating agent that may fall into the gray area of international restrictions on chemical weapons.
The decision by Russian security forces to use a powerful chemical agent to end the confrontation with Chechen rebels in a Moscow theater crossed a line that U.S. experts concluded years ago could lead to disaster in such a situation.