| View Larger Image | Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World--Told from Inside by the Man Who Ran It | Paperbackby Ken Alibek (Author), Stephen Handelman (Author)
| List Price: | $16.00 | | Price: | $10.88 | | You Save: | $5.12 (32%) | | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours |
| | Binding: | Paperback | | Publisher: | Delta | | Page Count: | 336 Pages | | Publication Date: | April 11, 2000 | | Sales Rank: | 32,274nd |
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FEATURES | - ISBN13: 9780385334969
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
Anthrax. Smallpox. Incurable and horrifying Ebola-related fevers. For two decades, while a fearful world prepared for nuclear winter, an elite team of Russian bioweaponeers began to till a new killing field: a bleak tract sown with powerful seeds of mass destruction--by doctors who had committed themselves to creating a biological Armageddon. Biohazard is the never-before-told story of Russia's darkest, deadliest, and most closely guarded Cold War secret.No one knows more about Russia's astounding experiments with biowarfare than Ken Alibek. Now the mastermind behind Russia's germ warfare effort reveals two decades of shocking breakthroughs...how Moscow's leading scientists actually reengineered hazardous microbes to make them even more virulent...the secrets behind the discovery of an invisible, untraceable new class of biological agents just right for use in political assassinations...the startling story behind Russia's attempt to turn a sample of the AIDS virus into the ultimate bioweapon. And in a chilling work of real-world intrigue, Biohazard offers us all a rare glimpse into a shadowy scientific underworld where doctors manufacture mass destruction, where witnesses to errors are silenced forever, and where ground zero is closer than we ever dared believe. |
Amazon.com Review
In this fast-paced memoir, Ken Alibek combines cutting-edge science with the narrative techniques of a thriller to describe some of the most awful weapons imaginable. The result will remind readers of The Hot Zone, Richard Preston's smart bestseller about the Ebola virus. That book focuses on the dangers of a freak accident; Biohazard shows how disease can become a deliberate tool of war. Alibek, once a top scientist in the Soviet Union's biological weapons program, describes putting anthrax on a warhead and targeting a city on the other side of the world. "A hundred kilograms of anthrax spores would, in optimal atmospheric conditions, kill up to three million people in any of the densely populated metropolitan areas of the United States," he writes. "A single SS-18 [missile] could wipe out the population of a city as large as New York." Chilling passages like these, plus discussions of proliferation and terrorism, make Biohazard a harrowing book, but it also has a human side. Alibek, who defected to the United States, describes the routine danger of his work: "A bioweapons lab leaves its mark on a person forever." An unending stream of vaccinations has destroyed his sense of smell, afflicted him with allergies, made it impossible to eat certain kinds of food, and "weakened my resistance to disease and probably shortened my life." But it didn't take away his ability to tell an astonishing story. --John J. Miller |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.5 based on 92 reviews)
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First Hand Information From The Man Who Knew by Jeff Marzano (Essex Junction, VT USA)  5 Stars
November 25, 2009
This is a very informative book about biological warfare in general and how these weapons were developed in cold war Russia.
Besides those technical details there's also some information about the political climate in Russia during that time period although this is only touched upon and is sometimes hard to follow in the book.
I had seen the author and this book on TV after the anthrax letter and 9/11 attacks in the U.S. when the interest in biological warfare was at a very high level. The anthrax letter investigation is another interesting story.
This story has a similar feeling to the writings of the great Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. There's the same atmosphere of secrecy, fear, government informants, corruption, hypocrisy, etc.. Kanatjan isn't in the same league with Solzhenitsyn as far as his writing but he's not a bad writer nonetheless.
He ties in all of the science and politics with his own personal life going back to his childhood when the kids would go exploring inside old broken down bio weapons factories. They would find mysterious containers which they were fortunately never able to pry open.
The world is perhaps fortunate that genetic research and engineering was frowned upon in Russia for decades. This slowed down the pace of these mad scientists in their quest to create super germs which could probably end all life on the planet.
Even so they created the most efficient and massive biological weapons industry of all time with factories that could produce this crap by the truckloads.
Kanatjan and his colleagues viewed themselves as high priests of a mysterious cult and a microscopic universe which only they truly understood. Even a superficial study of the behavior of viruses reveals that these organisms appear to be alive and intelligent at some level.
Ultimately Kanatjan realized that America's bio weapons program had ended in 1969 and the Russian government knew this. This lead him to the horrible realization that everything he had spent his life working on was only done to line the pockets of the Russian military industrial complex.
I guess he can join all of the Viet Nam veterans and countless others throughout history who suffered for a hypocritical cause.
The forgotten victims in all of this were the countless monkeys, guinea pigs, rabbits, etc., who were tormented in unspeakable ways for something which ultimately turned out to be completely unnecessary.
The mistrust and fear which exists between countries may end up destroying us all.
Jeff Marzano
The First Circle
The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (Volume One)
Haarp: The Ultimate Weapon of the Conspiracy (The Mind-Control Conspiracy Series)
The Hunt for Zero Point: Inside the Classified World of Antigravity Technology
The Truth About The Philadelphia Experiment
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Very Insightful and Knowledgeable by climb5462 5 Stars
October 20, 2009
Awesome book, read this over five years ago in it's original release ( bright orange cover ) and ever since, I have been looking for this.
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Non-fiction.... really??? by W. Jones (San Leandro, CA USA)  3 Stars
October 16, 2009
As I read this book, I couldn't help but feel that Ken Alibek embellished the truth just a bit...
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Someone write a wikipedia article of this please by Crystal Zheng (Stanford, CA)  4 Stars
June 12, 2009
When I first started reading Biohazard, I thought I had picked up a sci-fi novel and almost forgot that I was reading non-fiction. Easy and quick reading, the story is a narrative of Alibek's work with the secret Soviet bio-weapons program. Written for the un-technical reader, Alibek provides friendly explanations of immunology and virology suitable to the layman.
The most redeeming part of the book is the perspective it gives the reader to make more informed assessments of the current security climate and our nation's ability to respond to potential threats. For example, Vector, the bioresearch institute Alibek worked at, and which currently houses one of the two last remaining known strains of smallpox, was known to have conducted bioweapons research on smallpox secretly during the Cold War. This brings up the question of whether research on smallpox today is actually purely for defense reasons. The most chilling part is that these threats could still exist in unknown hands; whereas the enemy of Alibek's time was the single and relatively well characterized Soviet Union, today's enemies are non-traditional and numerous rogue states and terrorist groups that we know little about.
If you're looking for just the facts, prepare to read through a good deal of personal memoir material. The main complaint I have about this book is that it tends to drag on and give too many details. The author could easily have gotten his point across in a 150 pages, but instead takes over 300 pages. The main points tend to become bogged down by personal details. It's difficult to separate credibility from sensationalism. For example, the first page describes a scene of viral particles descending upon an island of African monkeys. Do not choose this book if your criteria is literary merit.
Overall, the book brings up some very interesting and little-known events. I just wish that an abridged version could come out soon. Unless you're very interested in this man's personal life, a Wikipedia article may suffice.
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10 out of 10!!!! by Kylie Edwards (North America) 5 Stars
May 08, 2009
This book is explosive! Truly a wake up call to America, and the world! Each American, nay, every person in the world needs to read this book!
Also some additional books that will wake you up to the bio-horror your Doctor will offer you:
The Poisoned Needle: Suppressed Facts about Vaccination
Vaccination Horror: An anthology of important works on vaccination pseudoscience
The Vaccination Myth: Courageous MD exposes the Vaccination Fraud!
In any event, this book is a 10!
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