Weapons of Mass Destruction

At Stepnogorsk about 20 years ago, the Soviet military flung up a huge bio-weapons factory on the Kazakh steppe in violation of the Biological Weapons Convention, which the Soviet Union had signed in 1972, joining the United States and more than a hundred other nations. On the site today, Yuriy Rufov is the director of an enterprise called Biomedpreparat, which is a big name for a little company. Except for Rufov and a few aides, huddling in …

…exaggerating information in an attempt to enhance his value. Yet when I asked him about former Soviet bioweaponeers now working abroad, his reply was matter-of-fact. "Most are in Russia," he said in heavily accented English. "Some are here in the U.S.; a few are in Europe and Asia. There may be a couple in Iran, but if so, we're not talking big numbers. Very few." But, he added, "A few is all it takes."