Biopreparat

But we shouldn't assume that because the Soviets, despite signing the Biological Weapons Convention saying they wouldn't do anything of the sort, continued their biological weapons program.

It was called Biopreparat, and one of the things they did was make smallpox evade the vaccine, or at least that's one of the things they tried to do.

They also tried worse than that.

They also made smallpox so that it could spread efficiently via air after the detonation of a missile, and they produced tons, literally tons, of powdered smallpox virus to load into missiles, knowing full well that it would spread back and affect the Russian population, too.

That's bad.

So when Reagan said evil empire, like, you know, looking at Biopreparat, I kinda gotta be like, yeah, actually, um, that was just, that was just...

There's no word for that but evil.

You do not take the thing that has plausibly killed more humans than anything else in all of hu- history and teach it to escape the thing that we've miraculously used to control and eradicate it, and then make tons of it and load it into your missiles.

Now, if you know anything about the Soviet Union and some of their priorities as regards WMD in the era of true strategic parity, the Soviets, just like we were, they were looking for alternative means to wage war that would take nuclear weapons off the table other than as a tactical force multiplier or a last resort.

And they convened what was called Biopreparat.

Famously, there was the anthrax accident in one of the Soviet Union's closed cities where weaponized anthrax escaped and it killed a few dozen people.

And Yeltsin was the local party commissar.

Second case, the Biological Weapons Convention failed.

It was a ban with no verification regime, and the Soviet Union ran Biopreparat for two decades as a signatory.

Lab, factory, mine, or file?

Mostly file plus small facility, and that's precisely why it failed.