No nation would be so stupid as to locate a biological warfare facility within an approachable distance from a major population center.   -Raymond Zilinskas, U.S. clinical microbiologist, in a 1980 report on the Sverdlovsk accident[i] Siberian Disease, the Russian translation for anthrax. In November 1979 a Russian language in West Germany run by emigres reported that an explosion in a military facility had released a cloud of deadly bacteria and over a thousand people had di

So, what were the Soviets doing during the Cold War? Had they developed mind control like the CIA alleged? The Soviet Union’s chemical and biological laboratory dates back to the earliest years in 1918. According to historian Boris Volodarsky the laboratory originated after the failed assassination of Vladimir Lenin by Fanya Kaplan who fired three shots at him with bullets allegedly coated in curare, a South American poison that is used by indigenous to coat the tip of their

Swirling around the discussion of Frank Olson’s death is the claim that he was murdered in part because of his knowledge of the use of BW during the Korean War. Given the covert nature of BW over the history of the Cold War there have been many allegations of their use. I have personal experience, when I visited Russia I was told about the Colorado beetle that ate the potato plants of my host’s garden and how some claim this is a BW from the U.S. Chinese propaganda poster f

“The infusion of money, combined with the advances in medicine and science during World War II, spawned an orgy of human experimentation in almost every medical field in the postwar years." -Eileene Welsome, The Plutonium Files Paranoia and threat of war As John Marks writes: 'The apprehensions of the Cold War do not provide a moral or legal shield for such acts, but they do help explain them.'[i] Throughout the 50s and 60s the threat of a Third World War hung as an ever-pres

A photo from the magazine Point de Vue which shows a victim of the Pont-Saint-Esprit episode. For more than a week in late August 1951 an entire French town went mad. Postman Leon Armunier was one of the first to suffer bizarre symptoms, he was doing his rounds on August 16 when he began to become overwhelmed with hallucinations and nausea. He recounted in 2010: "It was terrible. I had the sensation of shrinking and shrinking, and the fire and the serpents coiling around my a

Timeline of Cold War Human Experimentation by the US and USSR

Traces some of the worst of the worst- those who conducted horrific human experiments involving LSD, chemical weapons, biological weapons and poisons.

You might have heard of Operation Sea-spray but have you heard of DICE tests or LAC tests? And you probably have not heard of Big Buzz or Drop Kick- all of these tests were conducted on civilians during the Cold War.

Hitler once proclaimed to Europe he would unleash ‘hitherto unknown, unique weapons’ .[i] These came to be known as the Nazi Wonder Weapons or Wunderwaffe in German and were both an object of fear to the European populace and a tool of propaganda for the Nazi who emphasised their value in turning the tide of war. In 1944 following the invasion of Normandy and the beginning of the end of the Nazi Reich, Allied taskforces were set up to tail the frontline and do two things: det

“But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.” -Winston Churchill, 1940: The Finest Hour Singleton, Australia. 1943-01. experimental shoot of gas-shells by 2/2nd field regiment, royal Australian artillery. An observer who has moved into the gas-affected target area to record result