Beginning in the 1970s, the Soviet Union ran a clandestine biological weapons program codenamed Biopreparat. In direct violation of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, this state-sponsored program employed tens of thousands of scientists across a network of secret facilities disguised as civilian research institutes. One of its principal purposes was to develop and stockpile weaponized pathogens, including anthrax, smallpox, and plague. The program’s existence was a closely guarded secret until the 1989 defection of a high-ranking scientist, Vladimir Pasechnik, who revealed its immense scale and offensive ambitions to Western intelligence. A catastrophic real-world accident revealed the dangers of the broader Soviet biological weapons program in 1979, when anthrax spores escaped from a military facility at Sverdlovsk. At least 66 people died, while Soviet authorities attributed the outbreak to contaminated meat.

Biological War grounds its scenario directly in this history, portraying Biopreparat as “the darkest conspiracy of the Cold War” (18). The book’s central threat, a genetically engineered plague weapon, draws on documented Soviet efforts to develop genetically modified pathogens, including work associated with scientists such as Ken Alibek and Sergei Popov. Biopreparat also exposed a significant weakness in international biological arms control. Although the Biological Weapons Convention prohibits the development, production, acquisition, transfer, and stockpiling of biological weapons, it lacks a formal verification regime for routinely determining whether states are complying with these obligations. Despite these obligations, the Soviet Union remained a party to the convention while secretly maintaining an extensive offensive biological weapons program. This history provides context for the uncertainty surrounding biological research facilities in Biological War, particularly the difficulty of determining whether ostensibly peaceful research conceals prohibited biological weapons activity.