From: Michael M. Butler (butler@comp-lib.org)
Date: Sun Apr 07 2002 - 17:35:43 MDT
More on this, or "billions for defense, but not a penny for prevention!"
April 7, 2002
Russian Lab Storing Germs Faces Cutoff of Electricity
By PATRICK E. TYLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/07/international/europe/07RUSS.html
MOSCOW — A large repository of anthrax, plague and other deadly bacteria
stored in a high-security laboratory complex 100 miles south of here is facing
a threat never imagined in the Soviet era — the meter man.
An official from the Moscow region's Mosenergo electric utility arrived
recently and threatened to turn off the electricity for lack of payment at the
90-building campus, which served as the secret biological weapons program of
the Soviet era.
A headline in the newspaper Izvestia warned, "Deadly Viruses From a Moscow
Regional Depository Threaten Moscow."
Actually, there are no viruses at the State Scientific Center of Applied
Microbiology in Obolensk, just every kind of deadly bacteria that was studied
for use in the secret biological weapons program of the Soviet Union. (A large
virus repository is in Siberia.)
Russian and Western officials say that while it is unlikely that any public
health threat would result from a power cutoff, there is enough uncertainty
that none were willing to say that categorically.
"We have quite reliable systems of protection in case of emergency," Gen.
Nikolai N. Urakov said by telephone. He is the longtime director of the
center, which has been working with Western scientists to convert the complex
into a biomedical manufacturing site.
"But we are scared by this threat of a sudden shutdown of electricity," he
added, "because it is a kind of psychological pressure on us." In the event of
a shutdown, he said, scientists must destroy all bacteriological experiments
under way.
About 3,000 strains of bacteria are stored at the center, many of them in
cryogenic casks cooled with liquid nitrogen and isolated from the environment
by layered enclosures and oversize air-handling systems, and all dependent on
electricity.
The greatest danger from a shutdown of electric power would be the defrosting
of live germs now preserved in a frozen state.
"The main threat is to the organisms themselves rather than that they might
escape," said Raymond Zilinskas, a biological warfare expert at the Monterey
Institute of International Studies. "Under the worst case, these things would
be defrosted from minus 70 degrees, and it would be a real mess to clean it up
afterward because you wouldn't know for sure whether everything was dead."
General Urakov would like the United States and Western countries that have
contributed about $6 million to the transformation of the bioweapons complex
to throw in another $500,000 a year to pay the center's electric bills and
arrears. An American scientist who works closely with the center said the
Russian government was responsible for keeping the lights on.
The confrontation at Obolensk is another example of how the basic capitalist
imperative for enterprises to be self-sustaining can clash, often alarmingly,
with the old remnants of Soviet weapons science.
Two years ago, because of an overdue power bill, the Russian national power
company cut electricity to a strategic base where nuclear missiles stood on
high alert, though the silos themselves did not lose power. Armed troops
marched to the substations and turned the power back on.
Last January and February, the national utility, United Energy Systems, cut
power to a number of military installations around the country, including the
Russian Space Forces monitoring center on the Kamchatka Peninsula.
In most cases, power has been quickly restored. Often investigations show that
the tug of war with the utility forces the military to spend budgeted funds
for electrical power instead of diverting money to to other uses, which at
times have included building country residences for generals.
Western aid for conversion of General Urakov's bioweapons laboratory spiked in
1997, when it was learned that Iran had made overtures to the institute to
purchase its expertise.
Russian scientists and military leaders who now depend on Western financing to
destroy nuclear, chemical and biological weapons have been known to
orchestrate a sense of crisis to increase financing.
But Randall Lee Beatty, an American scientist working on the conversion of the
Obolensk facility, said, "This is a crisis."
Mr. Beatty is a director of the International Science and Technology Center,
which finances about half of General Urakov's budget to support about 350
Russian biowarfare scientists and technicians. "We know they have not paid
their electricity bill for 14 months," he said. "But this is one of the
important archives for dangerous pathogens in the world, and it would be a
shame if it were destroyed for not paying the light bill."
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