World's End Is ONE MAD RUSSIAN AWAY! Germs Stored Since Cold War Are Ripe For Theft & Dispersal!

[Rush Limbaugh]

YOU PREPARED TO DIE? HORRIBLY?

U.S. intelligence operatives may have inadvertently fueled the
Soviets’ experimentation with germ warfare, in part by spreading false
stories that convinced communist leaders that the United States was
also secretly making such weapons after the U.S. program was
officially halted in 1969.


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"Book details Soviet plans to wage germ warfare with lethal ‘designer’
strains"

By Joby Warrick
August 8, 2012

In the Soviet playbook for all-out war with the United States, the
wasting of U.S. cities by nuclear bombs was to be followed by
something equally horrifying: waves of plagues to kill any survivors.
Soviet scientists spent decades preparing for the second attack,
concocting new kinds of biological weapons more lethal than any ever
invented.

None of these weapons were used during the Cold War, but a new book
suggests that the dangers posed by the program never completely
abated. The authors reveal new details about the deadly achievements
of Soviet weapons scientists — from multiple-drug-resistant anthrax to
“stealth” bugs that elude detection — and they say the strains
probably still exist inside the freezers of military laboratories
inside Russia.

The book also suggests that U.S. intelligence operatives may have
inadvertently fueled the Soviets’ experimentation with germ warfare,
in part by spreading false stories that convinced communist leaders
that the United States was also secretly making such weapons after the
U.S. program was officially halted in 1969.

At minimum, Soviet officials appear to have increased production of an
anthrax weapon because they falsely believed that the United States
was doing the same, contend the authors of “The Soviet Biological
Weapons Program,” an exhaustively researched, 890-page history of the
Soviet Union’s 65-year effort to develop the tools for germ warfare.

“It may have led to the massive expansion of the Soviet b. anthracis
program,” write Milton Leitenberg and Raymond Zilinskas, scientists
and biological weapons experts who interviewed some of the Soviet
Union’s former top bioweaponeers during more than a decade of research
for the book.

Russia maintains a policy of official denial with regard to Soviet-era
production of bioweapons, which were banned by an international treaty
signed by the Soviet Union in 1972. But former Russian president Boris
Yeltsin confirmed the existence of a secret Soviet program to top U.S.
officials in the early 1990s, and since then, defectors, former Soviet
scientists, U.S. officials and journalists have published extensive
accounts.

Such reports revealed the outlines of a vast program that employed
tens of thousands of people at its peak, and they also shed light on
the 1979 industrial accident in a bioweapons plant in the Soviet city
of Sverdlovsk, in which anthrax spores spread through a residential
area, killing at least 68 people.

Leitenberg and Zilinskas draw from hundreds of interviews, documents
and intelligence files to generate a catalogue of the Soviet
bioweapons arsenal and its intended use. Among their book’s
revelations is an account of a largely successful Soviet effort to
engineer deadly new strains, such as drug-resistant forms of the
bacteria that cause anthrax and tularemia.

In one of their more chilling accomplishments, Soviet scientists
learned to alter microbes to give them stealthy characteristics, the
authors say. The bacteria that cause plague, for instance — Yersina
pestis — were modified so that standard medical tests could not detect
an infection until the disease had progressed to an advanced stage,
the authors say.

Similar changes were made to a strain of the bacteria that cause
Legionnaire’s disease. In the altered state, the bacteria would
stimulate the body’s immune response to conceal symptoms of the
disease, while simultaneously secreting a toxin that attacks a
critical component of the nervous system known as myelin.

“The destruction of myelin . . . induces an illness similar to
multiple sclerosis, but with a quick death,” the authors state.

Despite such achievements, the Soviet program suffered from
deficiencies and gaps, including a failure to perfect delivery
vehicles such as missile warheads.

The gaps suggest that Soviet leaders were conflicted over how and when
to use such weapons. One theory, explored by the authors, is that
biological weapons were “developed not for military purposes, but for
sabotage or terrorism.”

Details about the dismantling of the bioweapons program after the
Soviet Union’s collapse have been kept secret for two decades. Despite
repeated requests, Russian officials also have refused to allow
outside access to three biological laboratories operated by the
Defense Ministry.

The labs were part of the Soviet-era program, and it is “reasonable to
conclude” that collections of microbes from the weapons program are
warehoused there, in the same way that disease strains are kept in
heavily guarded military and civilian laboratories in the United
States, the authors say. They add that the lack of any transparency
raises concerns about the security of the collections and the
possibility of continuing research.

“One must assume that whatever genetically engineered bacterial and
viral forms were created . . . remain stored in the culture
collections of the Russian Federation Ministry of Defense,” the
authors write.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/book-details-soviet-plans-to-wage-germ-warfare-with-lethal-designer-strains/2012/08/08/7d69b8b8-e0b1-11e1-a421-8bf0f0e5aa11_story.html