Editor’s Note: Recent false, misleading claims by Russia about Ukraine being the location of biological warfare labs, parroted by Fox News, have been strongly denied by the U.S. The false claim by Russia seems to be a projection of its own intent to consider committing war crimes against the Ukrainians.

It seems apt to revisit an investigative story I reported on in 1984, about previous efforts by the Soviet Union to develop such bioweapons, and the attempt by a Russian scientist, Leonid Rvachev, who was chief of the Laboratory of Epidemological Cybernetics a the Gamaleya Research Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology, to alert the world community of scientists about what was happening.

The work by Rvachev had been centered on developing mathematical modeling that could predict the spread of influenza on a worldwide basis, something very relevant to the situation we find ourselves in today with the spread of the novel coronavirus and its numerous variants.

It is, in retrospect, a story that became lost in the demise of the Soviet Union, but has some striking relevance today. Parts of the reporting seem out-of-date, while others seem as if they could be ripped from today’s headlines.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – A leading Soviet scientist, who has apparently developed a global mathematical model for projecting the spread of influenza, has shared that document with key scientists in the West in an attempt to head off what he fears may become the next arms race – genetically engineered biological weapons.

Leonid A. Rvachev, chief of the Laboratory of Epidemiological Cybernetics at the prestigious Gamaleya Research Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology in Moscow, has developed a series of three sophisticated groups of algorithms that he argues can accurately predict the incidence of a worldwide pandemic of influenza. Such a mathematical model, if it works, may have implications as profound as the original equation for splitting the atom.

Rvachcv, who developed his model for peaceful purposes, is now fearful that this modeling could be used to target the dispersal of genetically engineered biological weapons. He has called for the creation or an international body – what he calls a “Mondial Epidemiological Security System” – to monitor the development of such models, either under the auspices of the World Health Organization or the United Nations.

The revelation comes at a time when both the Soviet Union and the United States have been conducting major research efforts to develop genetically engineered “defensive” vaccines to combat “germ warfare.”

The U.S. Department of Defense is spending $130 million a year to develop these “medical defenses.” The program includes recombinant DNA research projects to clone antigen genes – the protein that stimulates the production of antibodies to an infection – for such virulent diseases as anthrax, dengue fever and typhus, along with attempts to wed genes from diptheria and shigella dysentery toxins with the common human intestinal bacteria, E. coli.

The Soviet Union, according to a recent series in The Wall Street Journal, has embarked on similar research efforts, allegedly including attempts to clone deadly cobra venom. The Journal claimed that the Soviet Union, under the direction of Yuri A. Ovchinnikov, vice-president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, has established three specialized laboratories during the last decade that are studying the military application of genetic research – one in Moscow, one In Leningrad, and another at the Institute of Molecular Biology near Novosibirsk.

Only a thin line of intent separates alleged “defensive” research efforts from “offensive” weapons application. “It all comes down to intent,” Dr, William Beisel, head of the U.S. Defense Department’s biological research at Fort Detrick, Md., told John Huber of the San Jose Mercury News’ “West” magazine. “With the same technology,” he continued, “you can do great good or great harm.”

Although both the Soviet Union and the United States are signatories of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, which outlaws the production of “microbial or other biological agents, or toxins, whatever their method of production” – except for prophylactic, protective or peaceful purposes, the major deterrent has always been the inability to predict how, once unleashed, the deadly agent might spread.

Now, Rvachev’s modeling threatens to change all that. Such a model, says Jeremy Rifkin, director of the Foundation on Economic Trends and a leading critic of biogenetic engineering, provides the guidance system for the “rocket” to launch biological warfare.

Before, he continues, there was no way to control the rocket. “It would be like Werner von Braun, the former German scientist who helped develop the V-2 rocket and worked on NASA’s rocket research program saying, ‘I’ve got a rocket. I know how to get it off the ground, but I don’t know what direction its going to go, how fast it’s going to get there, or where it’s going to land,’” he explains.

Every weapons system, he continues, has to have a delivery system built into it. Rvachev’s mathematical model, Rifkin says, could possibly allow you to track your biological weapon while at the same time inoculating your own population,

Rvachev, clearly worried by the potential military applications of his research, originally sent his 96-page document entitled “Experiment on Pandemic Process Modeling (Part One – Influenza” – apparently at some personal risk – to at least four Western scientists, (Rvachev listed them as coauthors. although they did not participate directly in developing the model.)

They included: Dr. Michael Gregg, M.D., Deputy Director of the Epidemiological Program Office at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia; Dr. Paul E. M. Fine, Senior Lecturer at the Ross Institute at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in England; Dr. Philip Selby, head of Community Medicine and Epidemiology for the Sandoz Institute in Geneva, Switzerland; and Dr. J. Donovan, Senior Advisor in Epidemiology for the Department of Health in Canberra. Australia,

In a three-page cover letter written in stilted English and dated April 4, 1983, Rvachev urged them to support the creation of an international body to monitor the development of such models: “… The only way, in fact, the peoples to survive and restore their way of life if a desolating outbreak [of a genetically engineered agent] happens to be not localized within an initially-stricken city is to erect timely the world computer center capable to model all potential variants of the imminent pandemic, and to work out an optimum strategy to balance contradictory demands of epidemiology and economy. In other words, lest anybody get into a real mess, time presses to deploy another MESS – Mondial Epidemiological Security System, able and ready for both computer forecast and urgent control actions all over the space involved.”

In more recent correspondence, Rvachev reiterated his position, citing Canadian Dr. S. Narang’s 1981 United Nations paper on the potential dangers of genetic engineering. “No one can guarantee.” he wrote, quoting Narang, “that irresponsible people with adequate training will not use recombinant DNA technology to develop instruments of destruction, [so that] virulent organisms of frightening potency might be developed and used.”

Rvachev continued in an urgent tone of voice: “We shall have no human or divine justification if we play with baby trifles [inf1uenza] when expecting a world fire [biogenetic warfare].”

What to make of Rvachev’s letters
Under the informal liaison of Dr. Paul Fine at the Ross Institute in London, who has taken on the responsibilities of serving as a kind or clearinghouse for correspondence, a small community of international experts in mathematical modeling and epidemiology have been puzzling over what to make of the very troubling Rvachev letters and document.

“It’s a formidable document,” says Dr. Fine, who wrote a background paper for a conference on mathematical modeling of epidemics that was held in England in 1981, critiquing a number of different efforts, including some of Rvachev’s earlier work. “What is needed now is someone with the appropriate credential to go through it, make it readable, and publish it.” It is important, Fine believes, that the documents be discussed by qualified scientists.

Ironically, Rvachev’s document and urgent letters have apparently fallen into a black hole of a scientific dispute concerning the value of mathematical modeling.

Dr. Michael Gregg of the Epidemiological Program Office at the CDC, who has personally met with Rvachev and carried on a dialogue over the past 10 years, is skeptical of its effectiveness. “He’s got an extraordinarily complicated model,” Dr. Gregg declared, “and I think he’s the only one who understands it. And I don’t know anybody here at CDC who understands it.”

According to Dr. Gregg, the problems he has with the model are epidemiological – how Rvachev defines what is a susceptible person and the model’s dependence on transportation systems as a major factor in transmission. For whatever reason, Dr. Gregg says he hasn’t written to Rvachev in more than a year.

On the other hand, one of the leading experts in mathematical modeling of epidemics in the United States is worried.

“The document by itself is not worrisome,” says Ira Longini, Research Scientist and Lecturer at the School of Public Health in the Department of Biostatistics at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “What is worrisome,” he continues, “is Rvachev’s letter.” Longlni who has devoted his career to trying to prevent epidemics, finds it hard to imagine anyone using that knowledge for such a pernicious purpose. “When someone begins alluding to, as Rvachev does, that his work may be twisted into a way to carry out biogenetic warfare, I find that extremely alarming.”

Clearly, Longini says, Rvachev is very worried. Longini would like to believe that Rvachev was working on it for peaceful purposes but has become aware of, or knows about, or sat in on conversations where his model would be used to perpetuate biological warfare.

And, Longini continues, “He wishes to help establish a surveillance system such that neither side will be able to exploit the methodology towards weapons use.”

“I had a little bird
and its name was Enza
I opened the windows
and in-flew-Enza”
– a song schoolchildren made up to jump rope during the influenza pandemic of 1917

In the summer of 1917, in the midst or World War One, a pandemic of influenza swept the globe. In less than two years, 30 million died; over 600,000 succumbed in the United States alone. In Philadelphia, people were dying so quickly that the bodies were stacked by the hundreds in temporary morgues, awaiting burial. More people were killed by the flu worldwide than by the bloody carnage of the war, originally called the Spanish flu.

In the summer of 1976, the government feared a similar outbreak of swine flu. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) had isolated what they believed was a new strain of swine flu in an outbreak of the disease at the Ft. Dix, N.J., army barracks. Frightened about the potential for another deadly pandemic, the public health officials called for a massive program to produce enough vaccine to inoculate a large portion of the American people. Although Congress initially balked at funding it, President Gerald Ford personally endorsed the idea and pushed necessary funding through Congress.

Luckily, the expected pandemic of swine flu did not materialize. A number of people died because of the vaccine itself; others were paralyzed by it. In the resulting backlash, the head of CDC lost his job.

“It was a judgment call,” explains Dr. Mlchael Gregg, deputy director of the epidemiological program office at CDC. Faced with the possibility of a deadly outbreak of a new strain or influenza, it was difficult to determine when to give the vaccine. “What is the sine qua non,” he asks, “of saying, “Okay, America, roll up your sleeves.’” In retrospect, he added, “we should have waited.”

The problem, according to one prominent health professional that asked that his name not be used, was that the CDC didn’t know whether they were trying to stop the epidemic, or modify it. They didn’t know whom to immunize and when to do it.

“They did manage to actually immunize 40 million people,” the health professional continued, “but probably the wrong people. Nobody under a certain age got the vaccine at all. If it had been an agent like the kind that circulated in 1917, there would have been a massive epidemic in the younger age groups that would have spread to the entire un-immunized population.” In defense of the CDC’s program, though, the health professional added, it could be said that they were trying to protect that part of the population most vulnerable – the elderly and others with chronic diseases – to the f1u and its complications.

At that time – and to this day – the only method the CDC has to determine the spread of influenza was through its weekly analysis of morbidity and mortality statistics from 121 cities. Deaths that are attributable to pneumonia and influenza arc plotted, explains Dr. Alan Kendal, chief of the influenza branch of the CDC’s virology laboratory, "measuring whether mortality indices rise above the expected number of deaths.” When influenza strikes, there is a significant increase in deaths – what epidemiologists call “a spike” in the charts.

The kinds or questions that the CDC needed to know in order to cope with a potential swine flu epidemic – how quickly the disease would spread from city to city, where it was likely to strike, and which group of citizens should be inoculated – might have been better answered by both geographic or spatial modeling of the spread of Influenza as well as “optimization” models, that is, where limited resources, i.e., vaccines, should be employed.

The United States still relies on charting the incidence of influenza through mortality statistics – despite the fact that so much more is known about influenza today. The genes of viruses can be isolated and photographed. An extensive surveillance system exists that enables medical centers located around the world, working under the auspices of the World Health Organization (WHO), to quickly identify different strains of influenza viruses as they appear. The antigens of the flu genes can be isolated to create a virus vaccine, There has even been one antiviral drug licensed in the last year that, according to Dr. Kendal, can help reduce secondary complications from the flu.

But the mystery of influenza still remains. Every year, usually in winter, the infectious disease sweeps the globe, changing and mutating as it goes, “The one thing you can say about influenza,” declares Dr. Kendal, “is that it is unpredictable.” Everyone, he continued, would like to be able to predict the spread of influenza. “But we don’t understand enough yet about the biological and environmental factors of influenza.”

In the Soviet Union, where study of medicine and mathematics are much more integrated than here in the United States, the use of geographic and spatial mathematical models to curtail influenza is well advanced. One such model, developed by O.V. Baroyan, considered the “father of mathematical modeling of epidemics” in the Soviet Union and with whom Rvachev worked as a prize pupil, appears to have been successful in predicting the geographical spread of influenza there.

Dr, Ira Longini went to the All-Union Research Institute of Influenza in Leningrad in 1981 on behalf or the CDC to observe the model and how it worked. “I saw how the Russians had successfully monitored an epidemic with it,” he reports. From past dealings, however, he has healthy skepticism. “We often have the impression that the Soviets have thrown us tidbits, that they’re holding back major components of this methodology,” he says.

Dr. Gregg, who has spent over 20 years dealing with Soviet scientists, also voiced frustration with parts of the modeling process. “I don’t want to sound like a cynic,” says Dr. Gregg, “but these models have great potential on a theoretical basis.” They have helped us, he continued, to understand various factors of communicability. “But I have yet to see one put into the field that has been very useful.”

The potential is there, says Longini, explaining the value of such mathematical modeling, to understand the path of epidemics such as influenza. It would allow a country to mobilize its health resources in order to have the potential of intervening in the course of an epidemic and effectively use its resources to combat the disease.

The value, then, of Rvachev’s “Experiment on Pandemic Process Modeling” as a positive tool, if it works, is enormous, according to one preeminent epidemiologist who requested that his name not be used. As the epidemiologist explains it, Rvachev’s document is really a “recipe” for modeling the spread of infectious diseases throughout the globe, “The only information you need to know,” the epidemiologist says, “is where the agent first appears, how to estimate a few parameters about its spreading ability, and the global transportation network in one form or another.”

Rvachev’s document, or “recipe,” begins with a description of his methodology, followed by a large set of partial differential equations, and then a group of algorithms are given for estimating the parameters that are needed to set up the model. Then an example is given of forecasting the 1968-1969 inf1uenza pandemic, which was known as the Hong Kong flu, providing a fairly convincing demonstration, at least on a cursory level, that the methodology works.

How well the model works and how reliable it is are still unanswered questions, Although Rvachev says that he was only able to send out Part One of the document, the equations and methodology are there. What is needed now, scientists agree, is to have someone who is qualified go through the document and then run some computer simulations. But there is little question to its potential value.

“Suppose an accident occurred, say in biogenetic engineering, and a deadly bug got outside the laboratory,” the epidemiologist suggested hypothetically. “There might be vaccines, or even some prophylactic measures [defensive drugs or antibiotics] available, but they’d probably be in limited supply. So if you could place them in an optimal fashion to stop the spread of the bug quickly, yes, such a model might be useful in directing resources.

But, at the same time, Rvachev’s “recipe” for modeling the spread of influenza worldwide has much darker implications when applied to chemical and biological warfare.

“Generals say, ‘Oh, a CBW [chemical and biological warfare] attack would wipe out the forces in the first 20 minutes. We couldn’t have our war games’ … Their attitude has always been, it’s too horrible to consider. Don’t even remind us that it exists.”
– Dr. William Beisel, deputy director for science at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases in Fort Detrick, Md., as quoted by John Hubner in “The Hidden Arms Race,” West Magazine, April 15, 1984.

The world is on the verge, it seems, of a deadly new arms race – both the United States and the Soviet Union are apparently using the tools of recombinant DNA to develop insidious new weapons. What’s worse is that some of the strategists seem to possess the illusion that, unlike nuclear warfare, genetically engineered chemical and biological warfare can be won.

The war of words is already raging. The United States has accused the Soviet Union of unleashing a chemical “yellow rain” – deadly fungal agents known as mycotoxins – against the Hmong tribesmen in Southeast Asia and the mujahidin rebels in Afghanistan.

The Soviet Union has denied this and although the State Department claims that it has incontrovertible evidence backing up its claims. Harvard University molecular biologist Matthew Meselson has dismissed the so-called “yellow rain” as nothing more than bee excrement. The standard of evidence for the U.S. government'’ case, Meselson asserts, would not be acceptable to any scientific journal.

In addition, the Reagan administration has also cited an alleged outbreak of anthrax – an infectious disease of farm animals that is very deadly in humans – near the Russian city of Sverdlovsk as further proof of the Soviet’s all-out attempt to manufacture biological weapons. According the State Department accounts, an explosion in the spring of 1979 at Military Compound 19 on the outskirts of the city – where the Soviets were allegedly engaged in manufacturing biological weapons in clear violation of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention – caused an epidemic of anthrax that supposedly killed 1,000 people.

Once again, the Soviets denied this, saying this the outbreak was caused by infected meat sold illegally on the black market. The United States dismisses the Soviets’ explanation, saying that the spread of the disease was so quick it had to be caused by airborne rather than ingested particles.

In turn, Harvard’s Meselson points to the fact that Northwestern University professor Don Ellis moved into an apartment in the center of Sverdlovsk a week after the alleged incident was supposed to have occurred. Ellis, who speaks Russian, did not see any evidence of an epidemic nor did he hear anything being said about anthrax. If the Soviets were trying to cover it up, Meselson asks, why did they let Ellis in? The evidence, he asserts, is inconclusive.

In the meantime, the Reagan administration, convinced that the Soviet Union is pursuing chemical and biological weapons, has responded by asking Congress for money to produce new stockpiles of binary chemical weapons. Twice the Senate has passed the proposal on tie votes; three times the House has defeated it. (Chemical refers to manufactured poisons and nerve gases; biological refers to toxins, diseases and microbiological agents.)

It has been reported by at least one scientist that the CIA has been contacting molecular biologists around the United States and allegedly asking them to think-tank various biological warfare scenarios using recombinant DNA technology. Beyond contacting medical researchers, one wonders whether the CIA Is also pursuing arrangements with private and investor-owned genetic engineering firms to produce these weapons, in the manner that Dow Chemical manufactured napalm for the American government during the Vietnam war or I.G. Farben manufactured zylcone B for Germany for use in the gas chambers during World War Two.

“The truly frightening aspect to all this,” writes John Hubner in his article, “The Hidden Arms Race,” in West magazine, “ is that it may not matter whether or not the Russians are working on new chemical and biological weapons. Even if they aren’t, a ‘they’ve got them, we’ve got to get them, too” attitude could turn U.S. accusations into self-fulfilling prophecies.”

Indeed, as it escalates, the new arms race threatens to repeat many of the same mistakes that were made with nuclear weapons. At each stage of the nuclear arms race, the Pentagon has launched a major campaign to convince the American public that the Russians have mounted a new threat to American security. In the 1960s, it was the ICBM missile gap. In the 1970s, it was ABMS and MIRVing warheads. Instead of providing the United States with any strategic superiority, it merely upped the ante as the Soviet Union matched each new technological advance. In the 1980s, the Pentagon is talking about anti-satellite (ASATs) and space weapons.

Now, says Jeremy Rifkin, it’s "the gene gap.” The eight-part series of editorial essays that ran in late April and early May in The Wall Street Journal (“Beyond Yellow Rain: The Threat of Soviet Genetic Engineering”), he fears, is the beginning of a concerted effort to push the United States into manufacturing and deploying genetically engineered biological weapons.

These articles, writes Michael Heylin, editor of Chemical and Engineering News, referring to The Journal series, “rely on the same mixture of garbled science, innuendo, hearsay, half-truths, and irrelevancies that the publication perfected earlier in discussing the charge that the Soviet Union is involved in the use of illegal mycotoxin weapons. Such toy journalism,” Heylin concludes, “serves not useful purpose.” Except, he might add, to stir people’s fears.

The problem is that there is a lot to be fearful about – and not just what the Soviets may or may not be doing, but what the United Stales has already done. Much of the research on the production of “defensive” vaccines for genetically engineered biological and chemical weapons is classified, The following is, as best as can be ascertained, based on published articles, what the United States has clone:

• The Defense Department is developing aerosol vaccines for mass immunization against potential CBW agents – although aerosol vaccines are less effective than other methods and more likely to mutate or revert and spread disease. Its main advantage, apparently, is that it can be done clandestinely. In October 1950, the Army secretly spread the micro-organism, Serratia marcescens, throughout the San Francisco area to discover how the bug would disperse. Although the micro-organism was considered harmless by the Army, tests later implicated it in causing several illnesses and at least one death. Again, in June of 1966, the Army unleashed supposedly harmless micro-organisms against an unsuspecting population, this time by smashing light bulbs filled with Bacillus subtilis on sidewalk ventilator grills above subways in New York City.

• The Army is testing mosquitoes and sand flies as possible vectors – disease spreaders – of deadly diseases such as Lassa and Rift Valley fevers.

• Using recombinant DNA techniques and working under a Defense Department grant, Dr. John Baxter of the University of California at San Francisco is attempting to clone the human gene for acetylcholinesterase, an enzyme which controls on-off neural transmission that stimulates muscles. The gene is what the deadly agents in nerve gas attack, freezing it in an “on” position and causing the victim to die of convulsions. The stated purpose of the research is to develop an antidote for nerve gas.

• At the Naval Biosciences Laboratory in Oakland, Calif., major research efforts have been undertaken to study the genetics of bubonic plague, Additional research is taking place at various institutions around the country to combine genes from deadly diseases onto the common human intestinal bacteria, E. coli, all for the stated purpose of producing “defensive” vaccines.

• At Fort Detrick, Md., the headquarters of America’s biological warfare program from 1942 until 1969 when President Nixon issued an executive order halting all research and stockpiling of biological weapons, the laboratories were reopened in 1979 to conduct research on how to counter the threat posed by biogenetically engineered chemical and biological weapons. Under the direction of Dr. WillIam Beisel, the Defense Department conducts a $30 million a year biological research program “aimed at protecting troops against a CBW attack.”

Although Dr. Beisel claims that none of the work being done is aimed at developing an offensive biological weapons capability, doubts remain. As Dr. Robert Sinsheimer, Chancellor of the University of California at Santa Cruz and co-author of “Recombinant DNA and biological warfare,” told reporter John Huber, “I would prefer if the military stayed out of this area. The more the military learns about it, the more it may increase their temptation to use it for other than defensive purposes. If they got evidence that some other country was looking into an offensive CBW capacity, they would be compelled to do the same.”

That same attitude, Sinsheimer continued, led to the development of the atomic bomb. “You could come up with a vaccine for anthrax and then begin to worry, ‘Could they produce a modified form of anthrax that might not be susceptible to our vaccine?’ Then you’re off on an arms race.”

According to a Swedish Stockholm International Peace Research Institute study, “Some common forms of vaccine production are very close technically to production of CBW agents and so offer easy opportunities for conversion.” In its1983 yearbook, the Institute issues the grave warning: “Increased military preparedness for CBW may soon accelerate, irreversibly, into a grotesque new arms race. The prospect then may be one of CBW weapons becoming ‘conventional’; poised for use wherever and whenever military necessities may be satisfied by their special properties.”

Enter Rvachev’s mathematical model for an influenza pandemic. It could serve as a positive tool to better understand the spread of infectious disease, but perverted as a means of targeting the dispersal of CBW agents, it brings the world that much closer to a deadly confrontation between the superpowers. In some ways, it doesn't matter whether the model works – only if the military thinks it does.

We are, it seems, in the same dilemma we were after the explosion of the first atomic bombs in 1945: How do we share this information, albeit for “peaceful” purposes? How do we prevent either side from hoarding the information in an attempt to gain a first-strike advantage?

Professor Rvachev’s rather brave call for an international body will hopefully be just that and not a push for rearmament and retrenchment. But given the tenor of the Reagan administration’s response to arms control, not to mention its response to the Soviet boycott of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, the call for such an international conference will need broad bipartisan support. Perhaps the worst thing that could happen is for the Reagan administration, enamored of its Cold War rhetoric in an election year, to use Rvachev’s attempt to share such information as a further excuse for falling to enter into dialogue with the Soviets.

“The objective of some who have proposed regulation of recombinant DNA research is to use the power of the government for the suppression of ideas that may otherwise flow from such research. That would take us back to an era of dogmatism from which mankind has only recently escaped. And, it would be a feckless task. In the long run, it is impossible to stand in the way of the exploration of truth, Someone will learn, somewhere, sometime.”
– epilogue from The White Plague, by Frank Herbert, a science fiction story about how a mad scientist unleashes a deadly plague of a recombinant DNA bug that kills only women.

Science fiction has created an entire genre of ghastly “end of the world” scenarios: Being devastated by nuclear war; perishing from deadly “Andromeda” strains or “white plagues”; being vaporized by invading aliens or even frozen into crystals by ice-nine.

Most of these stories tantalize the reader by creating a face-to-face confrontation with the final ultimate terror, only to rescue them at the last moment by some human stroke of luck or genius, These cathartic stories, like our dreams and nightmares, seem to reveal to us our own worst fears.

Genetically engineered biological and chemical weapons offer us a brave new world of science fiction disasters – plagues that are targeted to kill only dark-skinned peoples that could be used by South Africa against the foes of apartheid, cloned plant viruses that can destroy all of a country’s wheat or corn crops, and deadly agents that result from one or two genes from Legionnaire’s Disease being inserted into quick-spreading viruses such as influenza. The only limit to how we invent ways to destroy the world and ourselves is our own imagination.

In confronting what to do about Rvachev’s mathematical model and his letters, it often seems that scientists and reporters are pushed to the limits of science fiction. Are they real? Does Rvachev exist? Why is he sending out the document? What are his motives? Is Rvachev merely attempting to gain recognition for his work as a result of a scientific dispute in the Soviet Union where he has somehow found himself in disfavor? Are the links to chemical and biological warfare blown out of proportion? Did the Soviets purposely allow the document out because they want to promote a new agreement on CBW warfare? Does the model work'!

The document is real, according to both Dr. Gregg of the CDC and Dr. Fine of the Ross Institute in London, and Rvachev does exist. According to Dr. Longlnl at thc University of Michigan, the model is consistent with previous work that Rvachev has done; the middle part of the document is almost identical to an earlier manuscript. Furthermore, Rvachev had been rumored to be working on such a global model.

“It’s fairly incredible,” Longini says, “to be receiving such documents from a high official in the Soviet Union. If it’s a hoax, it’s an incredibly elaborate one – given the fact that the material looks to be the same kind of work that’s he's been involved with for years,” Everything seems to check, Longini continues, the style of the letters, the style of the documents. “Putting all the evidence together, it looks like the real thing to me.”

If the document is real, what has been the response of the scientific community? How many people know about the document? Why haven’t the Centers for Disease Control responded? Does the State Department know about it? Is Rvachev at risk if his efforts are revealed? How can the document be checked out?

Incredibly, Dr. Gregg at the CDC admits that he stopped corresponding with Rvachev when the Soviet’s work seemed to be moving away from inf1uenza and into the implications of manipulating genes. “I tried to keep my dialogue with him strictly about influenza,” Dr. Gregg explains. “I just didn’t answer his letters anymore. I was trying to tell him that he’s communicating with the wrong guy by not responding.”

Dr. Gregg, who professed not to be a mathematician, did give Rvachev’s model to one of the CDC’s statisticians, Keewhon Choi, but apparently Choi never did any evaluation. Choi has since departed from CDC.

Dr. Fine, who has been in the middle of correspondence between scientific experts on mathematical modeling and epidemiology concerning the Rvachev material, reports that most of the scientists contacted have expressed interest or surprise.

Dr. Fine indicated that there was considerable scientific disagreement in the field about the practical application of mathematical modeling: he puts himself as a “sympathetic” moderating voice between the two camps of enthusiasts and skeptics. He himself did not feel fully qualified to evaluate the mathematics involved: there are only a handful of people in the world, he said, who possess both the knowledge of epidemiology and of sophisticated mathematics to fully analyze the document.

One of those Dr. Fine recommended who could do such an analysis was Longini. When asked what he thought should be done with the document, Longini responded: “Obviously, Rvachev wants to share the document. So, let’s get it out of the shadows and into the scientific community. Let’s evaluate it, understand it, and see if it works.”

At the same time, Longini wonders how long the correspondence and movement of documents could go on before it tripped a switch and the U.S. government gets involved. “At what point,” he asks, “does the State Department get alarmed and get involved – at least to know what is going on here.”

The questions keep coming, How do you bring the scientific community together to discuss Rvachev’s document? Do you convene an international conference? Do you attempt at the same time to set up what Rvachev calls a Mondial Epidemiological Security System, or MESS? Should Congress convene hearings to investigate the advances of genetically engineered biological weapons and the implications of mathematical modeling? Should there be a bipartisan call for negotiations with the Russians to renounce the use of such weapons? Where will the impetus come from to create that dialogue? Is the matter better left to the politicians and the diplomats? How can ordinary citizens be given an opportunity to voice their concerns?

“To the village square we must carry the facts of atomic energy. From there will come America’s voice.”
– Albert Einstein, 1946

Despite Albert Einstein’s urging, the facts of atomic energy were never brought to the vlllage square. The United States carefully concocted a mythology of the “peaceful atom”: together, government and industry would forge a new tomorrow, taming the fantastic power unleashed by splitting the atom.

At the same lime, the security of America and the “free world” would be guaranteed by the terror of nuclear weapons. Although there was a healthy debate both in government and within scientific circles over the uses of atomic energy, the public was never really given an opportunity to participate.

Then, as the Cold War intruded and the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb, people who questioned America’s commitment to atomic energy were deemed unpatriotic and worse. J. Robert Oppenheimer, who oversaw the production of the United States first atomic weapons, would have his security clearance withdrawn, in part because he opposed the production of the hydrogen bomb. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed for allegedly passing the “secrets” of the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union.

At that time, there was an aura that pervaded both the scientific and political world of “Trust us, we know what’s best.” Today, that same attitude exists, particularly in regard to recombinant DNA research. Certainly, that will be the way that many eminent scientists and politicians respond to questions raised by Rvachcv’s letters and documents and the mounting evidence of a new arms race in genetically engineered biological and chemical weapons. “Trust us, we know what’s best.”

There will be some who argue that only the most knowledgeable scientists should deal with these matters. There will be politicians who say that they should handle this matter themselves, Some will argue that Environmental Action is playing into the hands of the Soviet Union by releasing this story: others that we are playing into the hands of Ronald Reagan. The United States government, wishing to invoke the cloak of secrecy, may attempt to declare the material classified and halt us from publishing. The Soviet Union, angry about the release of such information, may halt further exchange between Rvachev and the West.

But the biggest risk is that the people of the world will not have an opportunity to voice their opinion on these issues. Forty years after America exploded the first atomic device, we are faced with the potential of a new arms race. Have we learned from our mistakes? Or will the story end the same way, with the two superpowers locked in an ever- escalating deadly balance of terror? Hopefully, this time, the choice will be ours.

Editor’s Note: This story ran as the cover story in the June 1984 edition of Environmental Action Magazine.

Postscript: Not much happened in the American news media in response to the story. The Washington Post, given an exclusive, did run a short piece about it in its world pages. Attached is a copy of the article.

Military uses of disease data worries Soviet scientist

WASHINGTON – The chief of a Soviet laboratory has written to half a dozen scientists in the West expressing alarm about biological warfare and the use to which his and other work on epidemics might eventually be put.

Leonid A. Rvachev, chief of an epidemiology laboratory at Gemalaya Institute in Moscow, has devised a mathematical model intended to predict how a flu epidemic would spread around the world – how fast it would reach each city, what toll it would take there and how fast it would move on, according to U.S. scientists who have seen a manuscript describing the model.

Rvachev recently sent the manuscript by ordinary mail to scientists in the United States, Britain and other countries. Accompanying the manuscript were letters expressing alarm that work such as his could be used for biological warfare.

Rvachev proposes putting the work to good use by establishing a new international health organization to develop accurate ways of predicting the spread of natural epidemics and to monitor the possible military misuse of that technology.

An article to be published this week by two activist groups, Environmental Action and the Foundation for Economic Trends, will describe the letters and the Rvachev model for tracking an epidemic.

Ira M. Longini of the University of Michigan, who specializes in mathematical models of the spread of disease and received one of the Rvachev letters, said, “If his model works, and we don’t know that yet, then it would predict the spread of biological agents from city to city on a global scale ...”

He said the possible military utility of Rvachev’s work stems from the fact that biological weapons can cause unpredictable spreading of the disease, possibly injuring their user as much as the enemy.

“The Rvachev model could be used – if anything like it works, and that still has to be checked out – to get control over epidemics,” Longini said. Predicting where and how fast they will spread would also be useful in protecting one’s own troops or population.

“Everybody in this field has thought of the possible misuse of this theory,” Longini said. “It has crossed their minds. So now to see someone in the Soviet Union of this stature, and Rvachev is of high stature, expressing alarm, is itself alarming.”

Other scientists are not convinced that the Rvachev model could work or would be useful in predicting the spread of disease.

Michael Gregg, deputy director of the Epidemiology Program Office of the Centers for Disease Control, who has met Rvachev and received his material, said the model suffers from at least two possible defects – it requires knowledge of a people’s relative susceptibility to a disease, and it calls for information about how much people travel back and forth between cities.

Richard Asinof, who wrote the article in Environmental Action magazine, said he received the materials from scientific sources who didn’t want their names revealed.

“The reason why we’re publishing these documents is that the world seems to be on the verge of a new arms race in biological weapons, repeating the same mistakes that allowed the proliferation of nuclear weapons,” Asinof said. “Our concern is that issues of gene-engineered biological war be debated openly and in public, and not be restricted to scientists, politicians or the military alone.”

The Defense Department had no comment on the Rvachev model or letters.