• Military

• WMD Menu                           

• Introduction
• Systems
• Facilities
• Agencies
• Operations
• Countries
• Hot Documents
• News
• Reports
• Policy
• Budget
• Congress
• Links

• Intelligence
• Homeland Security
• Space

Obolensk
NPO Biosintez
State Research Center for Applied Microbiology

142279, Obolensk
Serpukhov district, Moscow region

NPO Biosintez State Research Center for Applied Microbiology at Obolensk, 80 km to the South of Moscow was the premier biological weapons research and development institute for the bacterial pathogens Plague, Anthrax, Tularemia, and Glanders. The facility was built in the 1970's and reached a peak level of activity in the mid-1980's. Facilities at this complex included at least forty two-story tall fermentation tanks, maintained at Biosafety Level 4 inside huge ring-shaped biocontainment zones in a building called Corpus One. The facility included work on a variety of bacterial microbes, especially Yersinia pestis.

In 1990, President George Bush and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher convinced Mikhail Gorbachev to open some Soviet biowar facilities to outside inspectors. The joint British-American weapons-inspection team toured four Biopreparat facilities in January, 1991, including the high-security Obolensk facility. The Level 4 production tanks were capable of making enormous quantities of agent, the inspectors reported the tanks were clean.

The Nunn-Lugar program is upgrading the physical security and biosafety of Obolensk, and sponsoring joint cooperative efforts in vaccine research with the United States Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Disease. Similar efforts are planned with Los Alamos National Laboratory and Northern Arizona State University. This initiave is an attempt to offer alternatives for former biological weapons scientists to collaboration with or emigration to rogue states.

In December 1997, Andrey Pomerantsev of Obolensk published details of an anthrax strain that he had genetically engineered to produce bacterial toxins called cereolysins. Pomerantsev's strains were probably developed before 1991, when funding for the Obolensk laboratory dried up.

Sources and Methods

• Laboratory Complex of P-3 Level of Physical Protection for Studies on the Agents of Severe Infections
• Central Collection of Microorganisms of State Research Center for Applied Microbiology
• Laboratory of Advanced Biotechnology
• Anthrax THE BIOWEAPONEERS ANNALS OF WARFARE BY RICHARD PRESTON New Yorker 09 March 1998
• Science-based Cities of Moscow Region