Product Description

Anthrax. Smallpox. Incurable and horrifying Ebola-related fevers. For two decades, while a fearful world prepared for nuclear winter, an elite team of Russian bioweaponeers began to till a new killing field: a bleak tract sown with powerful seeds of mass destruction--by doctors who had committed themselves to creating a biological Armageddon. Biohazard is the never-before-told story of Russia's darkest, deadliest, and most closely guarded Cold War secret.

No one knows more about Russia's astounding experiments with biowarfare than Ken Alibek. Now the mastermind behind Russia's germ warfare effort reveals two decades of shocking breakthroughs...how Moscow's leading scientists actually reengineered hazardous microbes to make them even more virulent...the secrets behind the discovery of an invisible, untraceable new class of biological agents just right for use in political assassinations...the startling story behind Russia's attempt to turn a sample of the AIDS virus into the ultimate bioweapon. And in a chilling work of real-world intrigue, Biohazard offers us all a rare glimpse into a shadowy scientific underworld where doctors manufacture mass destruction, where witnesses to errors are silenced forever, and where ground zero is closer than we ever dared believe.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #134378 in Books
• Published on: 2000-04-11
• Released on: 2000-04-11
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

From Amazon.com
In this fast-paced memoir, Ken Alibek combines cutting-edge science with the narrative techniques of a thriller to describe some of the most awful weapons imaginable. The result will remind readers of The Hot Zone, Richard Preston's smart bestseller about the Ebola virus. That book focuses on the dangers of a freak accident; Biohazard shows how disease can become a deliberate tool of war. Alibek, once a top scientist in the Soviet Union's biological weapons program, describes putting anthrax on a warhead and targeting a city on the other side of the world. "A hundred kilograms of anthrax spores would, in optimal atmospheric conditions, kill up to three million people in any of the densely populated metropolitan areas of the United States," he writes. "A single SS-18 [missile] could wipe out the population of a city as large as New York."

Chilling passages like these, plus discussions of proliferation and terrorism, make Biohazard a harrowing book, but it also has a human side. Alibek, who defected to the United States, describes the routine danger of his work: "A bioweapons lab leaves its mark on a person forever." An unending stream of vaccinations has destroyed his sense of smell, afflicted him with allergies, made it impossible to eat certain kinds of food, and "weakened my resistance to disease and probably shortened my life." But it didn't take away his ability to tell an astonishing story. --John J. Miller

From Library Journal
Biological weapons in the former Soviet Union; where are they now?
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Richard Preston, author of The Hot Zone
"As the top scientist in the Soviet Union's biowarfare program and the inventor of the world's most powerful anthrax, Dr. Ken Alibek has stunned the highest levels of the U.S. government with his revelations. Now, in a calm, compelling, utterly convincing voice, he tells the world what he knows. Modern biology is producing weapons that in killing power may exceed the hydrogen bomb. Ken Alibek describes them with the intimate knowledge of a top weaponeer."

Customer Reviews

Great Book!!!
I think every one in the United States should read this book. Reading this book makes Biological warefare seem suddenly not so far fetched. Another person reviewing this book claimed that he thought that the contents of this book could be a hoax. I have read most of every book on Bio-warefare out there, and every thing in this book is very credible according to the information contained in the other books on this topic. This is one of the best non-fiction books I have ever read. I would definitly recommend this book to any body who is interisted in reading it.

Everyone should know this.
When reading this book, remind yourself that things have moved on in 20 years.

Current day threat is far, far worse. Won't go into details, but the Cobra Event by Preston says why pretty well.

Informative. Believable. Not Pleasant.
While the prose and presentation of the book's style is a bit clunky, the information contained within is crucial to understanding what may face us in the future.

An important expose of 'normal military operations' and the infrastructure of the bioweapons program within the former Soviet Union - operations that now have been or may be compromised.

This information is dated, but the technology, people who worked with the technology and the weapons themselves as described in this book may still be viable. 15 year old technology to make hundreds of kilos of anthrax a day is still very dangerous technology.