Soviet biological weapons program
| Weapons of mass destruction |
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| Non-state |
| Biological weapons by country |
| Chemical weapons by country |
| Nuclear weapons by country |
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The Soviet Union covertly operated the world's largest, longest, and most sophisticated biological weapons program, thereby violating its obligations as a party to the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972. The Soviet program began in the 1920s and lasted until at least September 1992 but has possibly been continued by the Russian Federation after that. Under a civilian cover organization named Biopreparat, 40 to 50 military-purposed biological research facilities existed throughout the Soviet Union. An anti-agriculture program, Ekologiya, also targeted crops and livestock.
Soviet military doctrine use-cases for biological weapons included strategic, operational, and anti-agriculture. Strategic agents targeted cities with lethal and contagious human pathogens. The causative agents of plague, smallpox, and Q fever were weaponized and stockpiled. They could be delivered via ballistic missile or cruise missile, and complemented Soviet strategic nuclear weapons. It was believed a single R-36 intercontinental ballistic missile could release enough biological bomblets to kill half the population of a city of millions such as New York City.
Operational agents were more incapacitating, for targeting military reinforcements and services in the rear of the battlefield. The pathogens for glanders, tularemia, Venezuelan equine encephalitis, and brucellosis could be air-delivered by cluster munitions or spray tank. Toxins including botulinum, and enterotoxin type B, which cause botulism and food poisoning respectively, were also investigated as operational weapons until the mid-1970s.
For serving in both strategic and operational roles, the causative agents of anthrax and Marburg virus disease were also stockpiled. Ekologiya studied anti-livestock pathogens such as for rinderpest and anthrax, and anti-crop such as rice blast and stem rust.
These programs became immense and were conducted at dozens of secret sites employing up to 65,000 people. Annualized production capacity for weaponized smallpox, for example, was 90 to 100 tons. In the 1980s and 1990s, many of these agents were genetically altered to resist heat, cold, and antibiotics.
In the 1990s, Boris Yeltsin admitted to an offensive biological weapons program as well as to the true nature of the Sverdlovsk anthrax leak of 1979, which had resulted in the deaths of at least 64 people. Defecting Soviet bioweaponeers such as Vladimir Pasechnik and Colonel Ken Alibek confirmed that the program had been massive and still existed. In 1992, a Trilateral Agreement was signed with the United States and the United Kingdom promising to end biological weapons programs and convert facilities to benevolent purposes, but compliance with the agreement—and the fate of the former Soviet bio-agents and facilities—is still mostly undocumented.