Useful Fools

(Keywords: smallpox, Henderson, USSR, biological warfare, Iraq, North Korea)
Smallpox was eradicated to make soviet weapons more deadly!

This is a reasonable conclusion to be drawn from recent evidence about the smallpox eradication effort. More precisely, the Soviet contribution to smallpox eradication, which was crucial to the effort, was motivated by their biological weapons goals.

Read on…

Long before any other nation, the USSR pushed for an international smallpox eradication effort. It eventually succeeded.

The resulting program was run by the World Health Organization - lead by a crusading American doctor named Donald Henderson (who is now an advisor to the US Government at the Johns Hopkins Centter for Civilian Biodefense Studies). Much of the vaccine and many of the workers helping Henderson came from the USSR - not typically a charitable nation!

Henderson and most of his people were motivated by the noble goal of reducing human suffering through controlling (and eventually eradicating) smallpox. They performed a heroic job, working long hours for years in terrible and dangerous conditions. Unfortunately, some of their fellow workers, provided by the USSR, helped with a more sinister goal.

Since the fall of the USSR, we have learned several disturbing facts:

• The Soviets had an active and very large biological weapons effort in progress from 1927 until after the fall of the USSR.
• KGB agents accompanied some smallpox eradication teams and collected samples for the biological warfare organization.
• It is likely that other Russian scientists served as unknowng agents of the KGB, collecting samples without knowing the nefarious goals (a variation of a “false flag” intelligence technique).
• The virulent strain chosen by the Soviets for their weapons was obtained from a smallpox outbreak in India.
• Once smallpox had been eliminated in the wild, the world stopped vaccinating people (except some military personnel) against smallpox. This has left the world population (including those previously vaccinated years before) extremely vulnerable to a smallpox outbreak. Interestingly, Iraqi and North Korean military defectors show evidence of more recent vaccination.
• After smallpox had been eradicated in the wild, the USSR greatly increased its production of smallpox-based weapons. Most of this effort took place while Michael Gorbachev was the Soviet leader.
• The Soviet (and later Russian) biological warfare effort continued after the fall of the USSR and may still be active.

The conclusion from these facts is inescapable: the USSR successfully pushed to make the world population vulnerable to smallpox, in order to make their own weapons more effective!

Writing for the CDC, Henderson himself draws a slightly more politically correct conclusion:

However, as reported by the former deputy director of the Russian Bioweapons Program, officials of the former Soviet Union took notice of the world’s decision in 1980 to cease smallpox vaccination, and in the atmosphere of the cold war, they embarked on an ambitious plan to produce smallpox virus in large quantities and use it as a weapon. At least two other laboratories in the former Soviet Union are now reported to maintain smallpox virus, and one may have the capacity to produce the virus in tons at least monthly. Moreover, Russian biologists, like physicists and chemists, may have left Russia to sell their services to rogue governments.

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Note: much of this information comes from two defectors who left the weapons programs in the late ’80s and early 90’s. These defectors and their revelations were keep highly secret (even from US health officials) for years after they left.

One, now known as Ken Alibek, has written a book on the subject, is an advisor or biological weapons issues, and is an occasional guest on american news television shows. Since their defections, American scientists have visited some of the (now Russian) facilities and verified their assertions. Other facilities are still off limits to foreigners.

Note: I will post a couple of reading references here shortly.