A MYSTERIOUS outbreak of anthrax in the Soviet Union in 1979 was caused by an accident at a military plantsomething Russia has never admittedsay American and Russian scientists. The finding, and the analytical technique that made it possible, will reinforce last week's decision by US President Bill Clinton to work towards an international agreement on the inspection of suspected germ warfare facilities.
In April 1979, 68 people and hundreds of animals died of anthrax in and around Sverdlovsk, now known as Ekaterinburg, an industrial city in the Urals. The US claimed that anthrax spores had escaped from a nearby covert germ warfare laboratory, but Soviet authorities insisted that it was a natural infection carried by animals.
Now researchers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, working with doctors in Ekaterinburg, have proved that the outbreak was not natural. The Russians unearthed tissue samples from the victims preserved in ...
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