toogoodreports.com
Plague Island: A Terrorist's Candy Store
By Beth Goodtree
Imagine a place that is totally unguarded and holds many of the world´s
most sophisticated weaponized germs, just ripe for the gathering. All you
need is a HAZMAT suit and a scientist with the ability to mass-produce
cultures of the spores. Well, imagine no more, because it exists. It´s
called Vozrozhdeniye Island (Renaissance Island, in English) and is located
in the Aral Sea.
Until the military left in 1992, it had been the Soviet Union's major
open-air testing site. Today, Vozrozhdeniye Island , which the former
Soviet republics of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan now share, is the world's
largest anthrax burial ground. Nor is anthrax the only bioweapon there.
Such germ weapons as tularemia, Q-fever, brucellosis, glanders and plague
were tested on Vozrozhdeniye beginning in the 1970s. And in 1986 and 1987,
a strain of plague that was resistant to standard antibiotics was tested.
In the spring of 1988, Soviet germ warfare scientists from the city of
Sverdlovsk, 850 miles east of Moscow, transferred hundreds of tons of
anthrax bacteria into stainless-steel canisters, poured bleach into them to
decontaminate the deadly powder, and sent the cargo to this far-flung
island in the Aral Sea. Then Russian soldiers dug pits and poured the
anthrax-with-bleach slurry into the island's soil, burying a serious
political and biological threat. But calling Vozrozhdeniye Island a burial
ground for bioweapons is a gross misnomer. Many of the germs there are
still active.
Meanwhile, at the behest of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, American military
scientists and intelligence experts have secretly been traveling to the
island for the past four years. Their tests show that some of the spores
are still active and potentially deadly.
And as if this wasn´t threat enough, the island is rapidly growing and will
soon connect to the mainland. This is because the Aral Sea is shrinking. As
a result of the Soviet irrigation policies, this deserted island has grown
from 77 square miles to 770 square miles.
Uzbek and Kazak experts fear the spores could escape, stirred up by
carriers like rodents, lizards and birds. And in 1992, although Russian
President Boris Yeltsin issued an edict closing the island burial site and
vowing that the laboratory would be dismantled and decontaminated within
three years, his financially strapped government never followed through.
Nor has Russia ever even acknowledged responsibility for the anthrax cemetery.
Much of this information was brought to light when Kanatjan Alibekov (Ken
Alibek, as he is now known) defected. Alibek had been the director of the
huge Soviet anthrax production plant at Stepnogorsk, which is now in
Kazakhstan. In his book, Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest
Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World--Told from Inside by the Man
Who Ran It (Random House, 1999), Alibek does not reveal that anthrax was
buried on the island, but he states that besides the aforementioned
diseases, the Soviets also tested typhus, botulinum toxin, Venezuelan
equine encephalitis, smallpox and microbial strains with characteristics
useful in warfare.
Evidence of an active research facility still abounds. Clearly visible is
the vast laboratory complex. One can also see the telephone poles on which
detectors to measure germ agents were mounted and to which animals were
tied during open-air testing. The enclosed areas that once housed thousands
of animals killed in the testing -- guinea pigs, white mice, hamsters,
rabbits, horses, donkeys, sheep, monkeys and baboons -- are empty, their
windows gone, their roofs collapsed. Hundreds of small cages are piled in a
decrepit storage room. Another room contains a human-size cage, apparently
for what scientists call nonhuman primates, or man-size monkeys. Hundreds
of them died gruesome deaths, sometimes in a single experiment, say Russian
and American scientists.
It wasn´t until their country became independent in 1992 did Uzbek
officials understand the implications of their biological inheritance. "We
were shocked when we first learned the real picture," said Isan Mustafoev,
the deputy foreign minister. And although Uzbekistan is extremely concerned
about the potential danger, decontaminating the island would be
prohibitively expensive, Mustafoev and American officials agreed. In the
meantime, both countries, as well as Kazakhstan, have been quietly pressing
Moscow to provide more information about what happened on the island.
Regardless of whether or not Moscow is forthcoming, something must be done
about Vozrozhdeniye Island. 'Prohibitively expensive´ is no longer an
excuse. With the recent anthrax attacks, and evidence that various
terrorist groups are actively seeking bioweapons materials, cost should no
longer be a factor. What price can one put on life? For as sure as the sun
rises every morning, if we don´t do something about Vozrozhdeniye Island,
some terrorist organization is going to harvest its secrets and the price
of that will not be merely prohibitive. In the wrong hands, it could spell
the end of civilization as we know it. |
