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A review by physicsphilip
Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World--Told from the Inside by the Man by Stephen Handelman, Ken Alibek
3.0
This is best appreciated as an autobiographical account of Alibek's career in the USSR, particularly his experience of Soviet bureaucracy. It is light on science (and ethics - something I expect many in this line of work simply don't dwell upon), but what he says about the work of Biopreparat seems entirely believable. It is a very well-written piece of work. On that level, I enjoyed it. One highlight was Alibek's experience of the 1991 August coup attempt in Moscow.
However, there was also a lot of sensationalism, mostly towards the end. The book markets Alibek as "THE" man who ran the USSR's biological weapons programme, a clear exaggeration. (He was one of two deputy directors and was clearly kept in the dark about some areas of the programme.) His "defection" is also over-hyped: many ex-Soviet scientists emigrated to the West in the mid-1990s (my PhD supervisor among them), for all kinds of reasons (better job prospects, more money, stability, less politics, better healthcare, etc.). If Alibek really was a high-level target for the KGB/FSB, and he was so valuable to the USA, then he would surely have been assigned some kind of security (as in the case of e.g. Oleg Gordievsky).
In the final chapters Alibek clearly wants the reader to be terrified by the prospect of biological warfare, but he has no real smoking gun to ground his hysteria. The USSR's biological weapons research programme was the largest in the world but certainly not unique. There are a handful of cases where people have speculated that biological weapons have been used, but with the exception of espionage-related assassination attempts (e.g. the Skripals and Kim Jong-nam) it has remained very niche. The final chapter discusses the potential of bioterrorism, something which to my knowledge thankfully hasn't really happened in the last 20 years.
However, there was also a lot of sensationalism, mostly towards the end. The book markets Alibek as "THE" man who ran the USSR's biological weapons programme, a clear exaggeration. (He was one of two deputy directors and was clearly kept in the dark about some areas of the programme.) His "defection" is also over-hyped: many ex-Soviet scientists emigrated to the West in the mid-1990s (my PhD supervisor among them), for all kinds of reasons (better job prospects, more money, stability, less politics, better healthcare, etc.). If Alibek really was a high-level target for the KGB/FSB, and he was so valuable to the USA, then he would surely have been assigned some kind of security (as in the case of e.g. Oleg Gordievsky).
In the final chapters Alibek clearly wants the reader to be terrified by the prospect of biological warfare, but he has no real smoking gun to ground his hysteria. The USSR's biological weapons research programme was the largest in the world but certainly not unique. There are a handful of cases where people have speculated that biological weapons have been used, but with the exception of espionage-related assassination attempts (e.g. the Skripals and Kim Jong-nam) it has remained very niche. The final chapter discusses the potential of bioterrorism, something which to my knowledge thankfully hasn't really happened in the last 20 years.