The Ukrainian biolabs are nothing new. J Michael Waller Mar 10
The Ukrainian biolabs are nothing new. They were built during Soviet times and targeted for US "defense conversion" & "nonproliferation security" money through Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR/Nunn-Lugar) program. The scandal is that they have not been secured after 25+ years.
2) CTR/Nunn-Lugar program allowed Soviet-era weapons of mass destruction programs to continue under certain circumstances, even when US officials were denied the right to inspect what they were funding.
CTR funding was to dismantle nuclear, chemical & bio weapons facilities.
3) I wrote about this in a 1997 exchange with Assistant Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter and other Clinton Administration officials. It included "germ warfare weapons."
Author's Rebuttal to the Department of Defense (1997)
The author critiqued the Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR or Nunn-Lugar) aid to dismantle Soviet weapons of mass destruction and delivery systems, and the Department of Defense responded. This articl…
https://www.academia.edu/11034977/Autho ... ense_1997_
4) As early as 1993, I criticized the Clinton Admin's willful ignorance of former Soviet chemical weapons scientists, and the concerns they raised about how US aid was allowing those programs to continue. I interviewed two of the developers of Novichok.
Post-Soviet Sakharovs: Renewed Persecution of Dissident Scientists and the American Response (1993)
Scientists from the old Soviet weapons of mass destruction programs are the new persecuted dissidents in 'democratic' Russia of 1993.
https://www.academia.edu/11034118/Post_ ... onse_1993_
5) There are many political equities here. Some Clinton administration officials involved in the gross failures of the CTR/Nunn-Lugar program that allowed Russia and others to continue to develop nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons remain active in politics & policy.
6) As US senators, Joe Biden and John Kerry supported CTR/Nunn-Lugar funding & opposed any amendments to the law and regulations that would prevent abuses in the former USSR.
It is because of their opposition to stopping these programs that we face some of the messes of today.
7) I interviewed 3 Soviet scientists who developed the Novichok binary chemical weapon: Vil Mirzayanov, Lev Fedorov & Vladimir Uglev. All agreed with my criticisms of CTR/Nunn-Lugar. It should have shut down Novichok by 1994 or 1995.
8) Instead, despite US aid through CTR/Nunn-Lugar, the secret Novichok program continued and advanced.
Putin's agents used a more modern version of Novichok in 2018 to attempt to assassinate former Russian officer Sergei Skripal in the UK.
A group of us got Novichok scientist Vil Mirzayanov exfiltrated out of Russia to the United States before he could be arrested for his revelations. It's a fascinating story with unlikely allies. I am told that he helped US and/or British scientists develop antidotes to Novichok.
Believe it or not, the real credit for exfiltrating Novichok scientist Vil Mirzayanov goes to Greenpeace. Greenpeace did all the heavy lifting. It helped me navigate the Soviet chemical warfare network. One of the many weird stories of the aftermath of the Soviet collapse.
I don’t have any firsthand knowledge of what became of those Soviet labs in Ukraine, but they remained in Russia to produce WMD. I’d be skeptical of whatever Putin’s regime has to say, because its 2018 Novichok attack proves Moscow was still in the chemical weapons business.
Russian Novichok scientist Vil Mirzayanov described in 1994 how the Russian government deceived the US about its chemical weapons destruction and secret replacement with new generations of binary weapons, including Novichok. The same might be said for Russian biological weapons.