Word: sverdlovsk
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...fact, says Harvard's Matthew Meselson, a Nobel-prizewinning biologist who did an in-depth study of an anthrax accident at a Soviet bioweapons plant in Sverdlovsk in 1979, "there is no theoretical or experimental basis to believe in any sort of minimum threshold." A dozen or even fewer spores could be sufficient to kill, he suspects, under the right circumstances...
Until last week, however, nobody had successfully used anthrax spores as weapons. Scientists' best idea of what such an attack might look like comes from a 1979 Soviet accident in Sverdlovsk. Dr. David Walker, chairman of the department of pathology at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, was part of a U.S. team that visited Russia in 1992, just before Boris Yeltsin finally acknowledged the escape of anthrax from a bioweapons plant. Confronted with the evidence of an unprecedented 77 infections and 64 deaths, Walker and the others began thinking hard about the biology of anthrax...
There was, in fact, little beauty in Yeltsin's career, though there was much drama and passion. Yeltsin, born in 1931, was a tough, disciplinarian Communist Party chief from Sverdlovsk, in the Urals. He made his career in Moscow under Gorbachev but constantly fretted that he was not given the authority he deserved. In mid-1991 Yeltsin became President of the Russian republic, then just a part of the Soviet Union. His finest hour came a few months later, when, with Gorbachev isolated in the Crimea, Yeltsin faced down a junta of ham-fisted communist leaders who were trying...