Stalin's secret weapon : the origins of Soviet biological warfare /

Putin's thugs' 2018 attempt to murder Sergei Skripal with the deadly nerve agent Novichok has refocused the world's attention on Russia's biological weapons program. This topic had already attracted interest from scholars, evidence Milton Leitenberg and Raymond Zilinskas's The Soviet Biological Weapons Program: A History (CH, Feb'13, 50-3512). Though that work was definitive, the antecedents of this program under Stalin still needed to be explored. Using recently declassified intelligence reports, Rimmington reveals just how important Stalin's role was in the decision to pursue biological weapons research. Rimmington ably synthesizes these assessments with previously unavailable Russian sources to sketch the origins and rapid growth of myriad research programs that obviously involved an enormous expenditure of hard currency, underscoring Stalin's keen interest in pursuing this national project. Rimmington's fascinating account of Western intelligence services' efforts to divine the scope and scale of these scientific projects is especially useful. This book makes a major contribution to understanding the emphasis the Russian state has, and undoubtedly still does, put on the development of these awful weapons. Though the subject of this treatise is fairly arcane and will be of interest primarily to scholars and a few general readers, that does not detract from the importance of this very well-researched and readable book. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty, general readers. --Thomas Earl Porter, North Carolina A&T State University