Dr. Ken Alibek, who defected to the United States in 1992 after leaving his job as a top scientist in the Soviet Union’s biological weapons program, recently sat down with WND’s talk-radio host Geoff Metcalf to discuss the threat of biological warfare.
In his book, “Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World – Told from the Inside by the Man Who Ran It,” Alibek describes putting anthrax on a warhead and targeting a city on the other side of the world.
In his interview, Alibek discussed the history of the Soviet biowarfare program.
“The Soviet Union had a very huge, a very sophisticated, very powerful biological weapons program,” he said. “It was established many years ago – in my opinion, in the late ’20s. It continued to the beginning of the ’90s, and nobody knows whether or not it continues.”
Alibek believes smallpox is an ominous biological threat and that it is unclear who currently has access to the virus.
“In my opinion, it is a very significant mistake when we believe that just Russia and the United States have [smallpox],” he said. “A decision was made in the early ’80s that smallpox was eradicated. Then the decision was made just to have two repositories – one in the United States and one in the Soviet Union, now Russia. But at the same time, there was not any kind of obligatory requirement to destroy all national stocks. It was a recommendation. But there was no identification or notification process; nobody knows actually what countries or who else has a strain of the smallpox virus. In my opinion, there are some countries that have not destroyed this virus; in my opinion, we are quite na?ve believing nobody else but the United States and Russia has the virus.”
One problem with a possible smallpox attack, says Alibek, is the challenge of diagnosing the disease in a timely fashion.
“We see no signs of smallpox. We call them flu-like symptoms. Anthrax, smallpox, some other infectious disease could be misdiagnosed, and we can miss the real picture. And when we get to what is really going on, it could be quite late.”
And the targets of such attacks? Big cities, says Alibek.
“It could be New York, it could be Los Angeles, or Chicago or Washington, D.C.,” explained Alibek, because a major idea of terrorism – terrorism could be translated as “horror” – is just to scare people, to terrify people. That’s why they would try to use it at some locations where you can cause the highest damage, the highest disruption of vital activity.”
Alibek is dismayed that the U.S. has no effective system in place to deal with biological warfare: “Unfortunately, as a country we still have no well-defined national scientific concept of biological-weapons defense. We still need to rectify our understanding of biological weapons.”
Read Metcalf’s insightful interview with Alibek this Sunday in WorldNetDaily.com.
