© Ben DaltonThe Central Reference Laboratory, in Almaty, Kazakhstan, is due for completion in 2015
In 1992, Dr. Kanatjan Alibekov, a biologist from the Soviet Union, boarded a flight in Almaty, then Kazakhstan's capital, for New York. When Dr. Alibekov - now known as Ken Alibek - sat down with the CIA, he had a terrifying secret to reveal: that bio weapons program the Soviet Union stopped in the 1980's hadn't actually stopped at all. He knew this because he had led Moscow's efforts to develop weapons-grade anthrax. In fact, he said, by 1989 - around the time that Western leaders were urging the USSR to halt its secret bioweapons program, known as Biopreparat - the Soviet program had dwarfed the US's by many orders of magnitude. (This is disregarding the possibility that the US was also developing some of these weapons in secret, and, like Russia, still is.)
One big problem, he added, was that, like the stockpiles of nuclear weapons left in the dust of the Soviet Union, the materials and the expertise needed to make a bioweapon - anthrax, smallpox, cholera, plague, hemorrhagic fevers, and so on - could still be lying about, for sale to the highest bidder. Of those scientists, Alibek told the Times in 1998, ''We have lost control of them."
