Oleg Zabluda's blog
Tuesday, August 14, 2012
 
Ken Alibek was First Deputy Director (#2 person) in Biopreparat, the secret Soviet biological weapons (BW) program.
Ken Alibek was First Deputy Director (#2 person) in Biopreparat, the secret Soviet biological weapons (BW) program. It was secret because in 1972 USSR and USA signed a treaty banning such programs. USA dutifully destroyed its program, while the Soviets massively accelerated theirs.

KGB lied to Ken Alibek that US had also continued theirs. He found out the truth in 1991, while inspecting American "BW facilities" singled out by KGB. He unsuccessfully tried to stop Soviet BW program, defected to USA in 1992, and spilled the beans.

He was consulting US government on BW, becoming especially known after Sep 11, 2001. In one of his testimonies before Congress he described how the Soviets, after a massive thermonuclear attack, planned to launch a massive BW attack [1]. When asked why such an overkill, he answered with a heavy Russian accent:

- Because USSR does not have a bio-terrorism program. It has a bio-warfare program.

I saw it on TV myself. I'll try finding it in C-span archives later.
http://www.c-spanvideo.org/kennethalibek

His book is excellent. Highly recommended.

[1] Has to be after or the germs will be cooked.

Update: Found it at 1:05 mark of "Threat of Biological Weapons" Oct 16, 2001 at the Congressional Nonproliferation Task Force
http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/ThreatofB
Actual quote:
- Less then 300g of dry anthrax can kill thousands. You said that hundreds of tons of anthrax and few dozen tons of plague and smallpox were stored around USSR for bombs and missiles. Why were these huge amounts needed?
- The Soviet Union didn't have any bio-terrorism program. The idea was to use biologic weapons as means to conduct total war. In this case, nuclear weapons, biological weapons and chemical weapons would be used in massive amounts in case of a total war for mutual elimination. The Soviet Union did not have desire to use biological weapons as means of terror.  It's a long story, but the general idea was a so-called blanket application of biological weapons. Biological weapons are used to attack large megapolises and military bases, and to deploy as much as possible.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Alibek
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_Weapons_Convention
http://books.google.com/books?id=HACFzeD1ad0C
http://books.google.com/books?id=HACFzeD1ad0C

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- posted by Oleg Zabluda @ 11:46 PM | permalink | | | technorati | bloglines | feedster
 
Viktor Belenko (1947 - present) defected to US on Sep 6, 1976, by flying his MiG-25 "Foxbat" jet to Japan.
Viktor Belenko (1947 - present) defected to US on Sep 6, 1976, by flying his MiG-25 "Foxbat" jet to Japan.

In 1970's the Americans scared themselves by merging 3 different real Soviet airplanes into an imaginary super-fighter with the speed of Mig-25 (Mach 2.5), maneuverability of Mig-23 (8 g, Thrust/weight = 0.9) and the numbers of Mig-21 (11,000 built). Americans are prone to such self-scares, and had a number of them during cold war (imaginary missile gap, etc). As always, American response was to build an airplane, better in all those categories. That was F-15 "Eagle", Mach 2.7, Thrust/weight=1.12, 9g (pilot limited) [1]

That was way beyond what the Soviets could actually do, and when Belenko learned about it, he started thinking of defecting:

"if socialism is so much better then capitalism, why their technology is so much better then ours" and "bad people can't be making such aircraft" (page 73). He was also thinking of  F-14 "Tomcat" and B-1 "Bone".

After Belenko, that's how we judge people as well. By their technology

[1] Ironically, Mig-25 was utterly useless, created only in response to the cancelled American B-70 "Valkyrie", so it was a double-self-scare.

http://books.google.com/books/about/MiG_pilot.html?id=qpIsAAAAYAAJ
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Belenko
http://www.amazon.com/Mig-Pilot-Escape-Lieutenant-Belenko/dp/0070038503/

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- posted by Oleg Zabluda @ 11:15 PM | permalink | | | technorati | bloglines | feedster

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