Wendy Orent

The Soviet Union maintained a large biological weapons research program throughout the 1970s and 1980s, in violation of the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) its leaders had signed in 1972. In 1992, one year after the Soviet Union had collapsed and dissolved into Russia and other former Soviet states, Russian president Boris Yeltsin ordered the shutting down of Russia’s biowarfare program. However, many observers remain concerned about continuing research in Russia and the possibility that Russian scientists are making biological weapons and selling them to other countries. In the following viewpoint, journalist Wendy Orent describes an ongoing program (begun in 1991) in which American and Russian scientists cooperate in biological research and in dismantling the Soviet bioweapons program. Despite such progress, Orent claims there are indications that Russia...