From Annie Jacobsen, the author of the bestselling Nuclear War: A Scenario, a book on a subject that has long orbited her reporting: biological warfare.
Chapter One
Recombinant DNA
One day in 1971, inside a laboratory at Stanford University in California, an American biochemist named Paul Berg conducted an experiment that would forever change the biological sciences. He successfully spliced DNA from a monkey virus into the DNA of a second virus, known as lambda phage.
Although humans have long blended the traits of plants and animals through grafting or breeding, Berg was the first scientist to create a recombinant DNA molecule by joining the DNA from two entirely different viral species.
He had created a chimera. Two living things at once.
Like a mythical monster of Greek lore.
Berg’s seminal biotechnology was not meant to be a weapon. It was a technique: recombinant DNA. Today it is more commonly known as genetic engineering-the deliberate modification of an organism’s genes, including humans. But in 1971, Berg’s gene-splicing experiment kicked down the door of scientific possibilities. Like the splitting of the atom, the discovery of recombinant DNA technology meant the world would never be the same.
On the one hand, scientists could enhance public health with the development of medical countermeasures and previously unimaginable cures. On the other hand, recombinant DNA could create novel, or new, germs that could kill untold numbers of people, wreak environmental havoc, and even alter evolution.
This is the paradox of dual-use technology. Man-made technologies can be used to help, or to harm. To heal, or to kill.
Initially, Berg’s gene-splicing breakthrough remained private. No one outside the small Stanford lab knew anything about the experiment until the following summer. That’s when one of Berg’s graduate students, a young biochemist named Janet Metz, attended a workshop at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York and told her teacher, a virologist named Robert Pollack, that Berg had succeeded in splicing together DNA from two different viral species.
Pollack was stunned. “Pollack told [Janet] he thought that [my experiment] was the most dangerous and outrageous experiment that anybody could possibly do,” Berg later recalled. He remembered Pollack asking him, “had I realized how dangerous an experiment this would be?”
Berg’s experiment involved inserting a monkey-virus gene, called Simian Virus 40 (SV40)-known to cause cancerous tumors in laboratory animals-into a bacterial virus (lambda phage), with the plan of eventually introducing it into Escherichia coli (E. coli), a common bacterium that lives in the intestines of humans. Pollack’s outrage, Berg learned, stemmed from the opinion “that the bacteria carrying SV40 DNA might escape, and cause cancer in [everyone it] infected.”
“My first reaction,” said Berg, “was that this was absurd. I didn’t see any risk to it.”
But Pollack’s indignation stayed with him. He consulted Joshua Lederberg, a Nobel Prize-winning microbiologist, who ended up changing Berg’s mind. “I came to the conclusion that I could not say with 100 percent assurance that this experiment would pose zero risk,” Berg said. In an act of scientific restraint unprecedented in the modern era, Berg and ten other scientists published a letter in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in which they called for a temporary moratorium on recombinant DNA techniques.
This public disclosure of the world’s first gene-splicing experiment set off a firestorm of debate. Journalists accused scientists of hubris and negligence, framing DNA experiments as morally questionable, if not downright science fictional. Scientists accused the public of ignorance and naïveté. But the anti-experiment consensus was overwhelming. Even Paul Berg developed doubts, confiding in the virologist Andrew Lewis that there was a line in the process of “manipulating the genome that should not be crossed until more was known.”
To address the growing concerns, Berg formed a committee. The result was the 1975 Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA. On a stretch of California coastline, in Pacific Grove, some 150 microbiologists, physicians, lawyers, and a few journalists gathered to debate the ethics and safety of gene-splicing research.
Three and a half days of discussion followed. “It was agreed that the research should continue, but under stringent guidelines,” said Berg. Guidelines for lab safety protocols were set up, according to degree of risk. The biocontainment facilities where recombinant DNA work would take place needed airflow hoods, air locks, and security systems to ensure that deadly pathogens would not escape. But the research should continue, the scientists ultimately agreed. Science marches on. Always has, always will.
Years later, after Paul Berg won a Nobel Prize for his research, he reflected on the central question at issue. “Do I want to go ahead with experiments that could have catastrophic consequences?” he asked. “Out of that Asilomar conference came a strong consensus,” he recalled, “the government [needed] to establish guidelines or regulations.” As with any new technology, key questions need always be asked, starting with “which kinds of experiments are the most dangerous?”
But there was an elephant in the room. An obvious problem the scientists were aware of but did not want to discuss. In a later-in-life interview, Berg finally spoke publicly of the dark-hearted reality at the nexus of his groundbreaking experiment, as well as this story.
At Asilomar, Berg said, “We focused on the science. . . . We didn’t discuss biological warfare.”
They should have.
Upon reflection, Berg’s colleague and fellow Nobel laureate David Baltimore, who was also at the Asilomar conference, came to agree with this horrific, unspoken truth. “We believed, somewhat naively, that there was a treaty that everyone held to, prohibiting the use of [recombinant DNA] technology to make biological weapons.”
It was wishful thinking of the highest order.
Almost immediately after signing the Biological Weapons Convention treaty, the Russians began pursuing exotic biological weapons using techniques made possible by recombinant DNA.
The program’s deputy chief, Ken Alibek, explains. “We were among the 140 signatories of the convention pledging not to develop, produce, stockpile or otherwise acquire or retain biological agents for offensive military purposes [and yet] at the same time,” he clarifies, “through our covert program, we [developed and] stockpiled hundreds of tons of anthrax and dozens of tons of plague and smallpox . . . for use against the United States and its Western allies.”
It was a sprawling, illicit, classified biological weapons program with a singular mission. To kill hundreds of millions of people on the other side of the world.
Chapter Two
The Top Secret Plan to Create Genetically Modified Biological Weapons
Obolensk, Russia
November 1989
Russia’s RKhBZ defense troops perform nuclear, biological, and chemical
defense training. (Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation)
Seventeen years after vowing to renounce any and all biological weapons work, a secret meeting took place in a Russian village called Obolensk, fifty miles southwest of Moscow. It was the fall of 1989, and this group of Soviet scientists and military men had gathered to discuss their plan designed to kill millions of Americans and NATO-friendly Europeans with genetically modified biological weapons. And to witness their newest, proof-of-concept experiment.
“The plan was to kill all the people and leave the infrastructure intact,” Dr. Christopher Davis tells us. Davis, a former senior British defence intelligence officer, was the first Western intelligence officer to learn about this insidious effort.
Because the Russians’ biological weapons program was a clear violation of the BWC treaty, the Soviets went to great lengths to disguise it. Igor Domaradskij was the first scientific director at Obolensk, and the first chief of the plague genetics program here. In his hand-typed writings (shared with us by Milton Leitenberg), Domaradskij reveals one such facade.
“Everything [was designed] to mislead any foreign intelligence,” Domaradskij writes, and that the Obolensk weapons facility was built to resemble an insane asylum, including actors dressed as mentally ill patients roaming the grounds. “[F]rom space, it looked like some kind of sanatorium, with the convalescents walking about in pyjamas [sic] or playing volleyball!”
A civilian front organization was created to appear as if it produced vaccines and other medical countermeasures. The program was so highly classified that its name-Biopreparat, meaning “biological preparations” in English-was personally chosen by Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, back in 1973.
“Biopreparat was the darkest conspiracy of the Cold War,” writes Alibek. “The most ambitious Soviet arms program since the development of the hydrogen [or thermonuclear] bomb.”
The men in attendance at Obolensk that day in 1989 included:
Soviet general Nikolai Urakov, director of the Obolensk research complex, and a general with the 15th Main Directorate of the General Staff
Kanatzhan Alibekov (later known as Ken Alibek), deputy chief of Biopreparat, the top secret research and development branch of the Soviet biological weapons program
Sergei Popov, a young research scientist specializing in DNA synthesis
More than fifty other senior scientists from Biopreparat, as well as senior military officials with the 15th Main Directorate of the Soviet army.
The main building at Obolensk was an eight-story structure, its exterior dominated by glass. The floors were organized by the deadly pathogen being researched: anthrax, tularemia, glanders, plague. Top secret meetings like the one in 1989 took place in a large auditorium near the center of the building, austere and without windows. “We were not allowed to bring briefcases or bags inside the room,” Alibek recalled. Any notes written down during briefings were confiscated by security guards. If a scientist wanted to see their own notes later, they had to get special permission.
One after the next, the Russian scientists delivered their classified briefings. Finally, the DNA synthesizer Sergei Popov took to the lectern. Not yet forty years old, by 1989 Popov had been part of the Soviet biological warfare efforts for more than ten years. Mild-mannered and deceptively shy, in 1980 he’d been singled out for scientific espionage by his boss, a molecular biologist named Lev Sandakhchiev, and sent on a six-month sabbatical to study at the prestigious Laboratory of Molecular Biology at the University of Cambridge, in England. Welcoming him in good faith, the university had no idea of the real purpose for Popov’s being there, which was to master the techniques involved in Paul Berg’s discovery of recombinant DNA.
Under the tutelage of the microbiologist Michael Gait, Popov learned all he could about DNA synthesis and then returned to the Soviet Union. There, he used the knowledge he’d acquired to help create a biological superweapon, the proof-of-concept of which was now on display at Obolensk.
The purpose of the new weapon designed by Popov and his team was twofold. On the one hand, it was created to exterminate vast swaths of people. But there was a second goal, Popov later told Milton Leitenberg, a deeply psychological one. The Russians wanted to create a bioweapon that would decimate the morale of America’s military planners, its doctors, and its citizens alike. This weapon would be immune to all known American medical countermeasures, including vaccines and antibiotics previously understood to provide a cure. It was a plan whose logic was as calculated as it was cruel.
“Think of the problems facing an enemy fighting the Soviet Union,” Popov explained, “who suddenly found that its vaccine did not protect its soldiers and population against such a horrible disease as smallpox and whose antibiotics were useless to treat . . . plague, and other bacterial diseases!”
A dual-impact weapon: one that kills physically and also utterly collapses public trust. This was the psychological horror the Soviet biological weapons program sought to inflict upon the West.
The scientists gloated at the thought. “This would mean [America’s] medical prowess had largely disappeared,” Popov told Leitenberg, that “in effect,” it would be as if America “had retreated to the pre-antibiotic age when disease killed far more soldiers than did bullets and shells.” Russia’s ultimate goal, said Popov, was “to [inflict] catastrophic distrust of the government and the military” upon American citizens. To gut the United States, from the inside out.
It was at the 1989 meeting in Obolensk that the results of Popov’s intellectual appropriation from the Cambridge lab were put on display for the first time. Speaking from the lectern, he described how a recent test on small animals had finally delivered these long-sought-after results. Ken Alibek recalls the experiment.
“Inside a glass-walled laboratory, half a dozen rabbits were strapped to wooden boards to keep them from squirming free. Each rabbit was fitted with a mask-like mechanical device connected to a ventilation system. This was one of several standard methods of testing aerosols on small animals,” Alibek clarified, and that at first he wondered, what was this experiment all about? “Watching from the other side of the glass, a technician pressed a button, delivering small bursts of genetically altered pathogen to each animal,” Alibek writes. “When the experiment was over, the animals were returned to their cages for observation.”
Initially, all the animals became ill, as they should have. They’d been poisoned by aerosolized germs, infected with a pathogen known to produce tuberculosis-like symptoms. But then, Alibek recollected, something unexpected happened.
Something shocking.
“[S]everal rabbits also displayed signs of another illness. They twitched and then lay still. Their hindquarters had been paralyzed.”
Paralysis? It made no sense. Tuberculosis does not cause paralysis.
“The room was absolutely silent,” Alibek remembered.
For years, Popov and a team of fifty Russian biochemists had been trying to synthesize a strip of DNA to express a second, new, and unexpected disease after the appearance of the first. And now they had. The work had been arduous and time-consuming. In the 1980s, computers were still in their infancy. Tasks were laborious, painstakingly performed in the laboratory, by hand, and extremely dangerous. Researchers handling these lethal pathogens had made mistakes and died.
The bioengineering tools that Popov learned while at Cambridge University had finally allowed him and his team to push science in a radical new direction: to insert a microparasite into an artificially augmented strip of DNA.
The goal of the experiment was to deliver an unexpected, secondary effect. To gene-splice together a combination of two lethal pathogens that, when combined, would carry the deadliest characteristics of each.
“A single genetically engineered agent had produced symptoms of two different diseases, one of which could not be traced,” Alibek explains.
The two-stage killer. A double agent. A two-headed monster. The dream of the chimera weapon come to life.
Watching the small animals die, Alibek knew at once, “The test was a success.”
A chill filled the room.
“We all recognized the implications of what the scientist had achieved,” says Alibek. “A new class of weapons had been found.”
This was the sought-after superweapon. A microscopic demon germ. Cunning and deceptive. Invisible and alive. Airborne.
How did civilized people get here?
In his own defense, Popov later said, “I always believed [these weapons] would never be used.”
Alibek’s perspective is different. “[D]uring the Cold War,” he says, “we were told all the time, ‘the United States is evil, they want to destroy our country. We need to do everything in our power to create very sophisticated and powerful weapons to protect our country.’”
And so they did.
Copyright © 2026 by Annie Jacobsen. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
© Hilary Jones
