In the early 1990s, the world was rocked when defectors from the Soviet Union revealed the existence of a massive civilian and military biological-weapons program that had employed more than 65,000 people from 1928 to 1992, directly contravening the 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BWC). In 2012, Raymond Zilinskas, a leading biological-weapons expert, coauthored with Milton Leitenberg a comprehensive account of the program, The Soviet Biological Weapons Program: A History, a reference source so thorough that it ran to nearly a thousand pages. Last year, Zilinskas, in collaboration with Philippe Mauger, produced Biosecurity in Putin’s Russia, a sequel of sorts in which the cautionary note that Zilinskas and Leitenberg sounded earlier—that Russia’s relationship with biological weapons remained complicated, and that the current status of its old programs could not be verified—proved to have been foreshadowing.
The book, then, is a fitting capstone for the career of Ray Zilinskas, who passed away in 2018. It is a reflection of the depth, breadth, and tenacity of his research, and his strong commitment to ending the scourge of biological weapons. READ MORE>>>