The Virus (36 page)
Authors: Stanley Johnson
Stephanie nodded. “We just heard from Ngenzi this morning. I told you about the national park we’re going to set up. He says he’s going to name it after my sister: The Diane Verusio National Park!”
She seemed to savour the phrase as she spoke it.
“That’s wonderful,” said Isaac Reuben, “just wonderful.”
On March 18, 1980, a United States State Department spokesman said the administration had received “disturbing indications” that a large number of people in Sverdlovsk in the U.S.S.R. might have been contaminated in April 1979 by a “lethal biological agent.” The spokesman said that U.S. officials had raised the matter at sessions called to discuss international compliance with the 1975 convention banning the development, production or stockpiling of biological agents or toxins.
Moscow quickly informed Washington that an outbreak of
anthrax
had occurred in Sverdlovsk, a city of 1.2 million people, but that the disease had been caused by improper handling of meat.
The State Department said the possibility of a natural outbreak of the disease had been ruled out. On March 20, 1980, a high-ranking intelligence aide said the new information left “no doubt that the Soviets aren’t telling the truth.” In particular, the official said intelligence reports showed that many residents of Sverdlovsk had contracted pulmonary anthrax, a form of the disease that affects the lungs after the anthrax organisms are inhaled. The official maintained that if the outbreak had been caused by bad meat, the residents would have contracted gastric anthrax which attacks the digestive system.
Other officials said that when the outbreak was discovered, Soviet authorities sealed off a large tract of land around a military installation outside Sverdlovsk. According to the officials, the first casualties from the disease were soldiers camped nearby.
However, the majority of casualties, according to the reports received by the administration, occurred at a ceramics factory downwind from the military site, and at residential areas near the installation.
Officials said the form of anthrax spread by the accident apparently was highly virulent, and that medical personnel and laboratory technicians had been brought in from Moscow to monitor the outbreak. Enormous amounts of antibiotics were distributed among the residents and an anthrax vaccine was said to have been widely administered.
U.S. officials said that Soviet authorities evidently had launched a major effort to cover up the incident and that as a result it was difficult to estimate how many people had died from the disease. “It’s pretty certain, however, that at least hundreds of people died,” one official asserted.
In the Fall of 1983, after the so-called “Marburg affair,” the U.S. intelligence community, on the President’s specific instructions, reviewed the whole question of Soviet use of chemical and bacteriological agents. In the course of this review a startling new evaluation emerged of the Sverdlovsk incident. The report suggested that the biological agent in question was
not
anthrax but
the Marburg virus.
Furthermore it seemed possible, and even likely, that the deaths which had occurred had been caused not accidentally, but
deliberately.
The theory propounded in that very restricted section of the U.S. intelligence community which had access to the relevant information was that the Soviets had been engaged in a trial-run, a “mock-epidemic” designed to test the ability of their own serum-based control systems. The report went on to suggest that the Soviets were on the whole quite satisfied with their ability to deal with an outbreak of Marburg virus should this occur in the Soviet Union, and that “several hundred deaths” was regarded as being quite an acceptable price to pay for the possession of what the report called “the ultimate biological weapon.”
As a result of Sverdlovsk, so the theory ran, the Soviets knew they had a weapon which worked. They also knew that they could control any “backfire” effects, in the event that the virus, through some mischance, impacted the releasing as well as the target country.
The report came to the conclusion that the Soviet Union was, as a result of these tests, ready to contemplate the use of the ultimate biological weapon, namely the Marburg virus, within a relatively short time horizon and that their plans had probably been forestalled by the early accidental outbreak of disease in the United States and the consequential events.
STANLEY JOHNSON is a British politician and author, and a noted expert on environmental and population issues.
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This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE VIRUS
. Copyright © 1982 by Stanley Johnson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition MAY 2015 ISBN: 9780062414892
Print Edition ISBN: 9780062414922
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