Russia’s military scientists researched using monkeypox as a bio-weapon until at least the early 1990s, according to newly resurfaced interviews with a former Russian army colonel.

Ken Alibek, who was deputy chief of the USSR’s biological weapons programme until its collapse in 1991 and stayed on in its Russian Federation successor until a year later, claimed he oversaw 32,000 employees over 40 facilities.

After moving to the US, he revealed how the Soviets had investigated a variety of infectious diseases for use in warfare, focusing on smallpox until its eradication through global vaccine programmes forced them to ditch the idea.

In a 1998 interview with staff at the American Chemical and Biological Weapons Nonproliferation Project (CBWNP), he explained that smallpox was ruled out as stray cases caused by an accidental leak in Russia would now be ‘difficult to explain to the international community’.

He said: ‘So we developed a special program to determine what “model” viruses could be used instead of human smallpox.

‘We tested vaccinia virus, mousepox virus, rabbitpox virus, and monkeypox virus as models for smallpox.

‘The idea was that all research and development work would be conducted using these model viruses. Once we obtained a set of positive results, it would take just two weeks to conduct the same manipulations with smallpox virus and to stockpile the warfare agent.

‘We would have in our arsenal a genetically altered smallpox virus that could replace the previous one.’

Russia’s Ministry of Defence decided to continue working with monkeypox to ‘create future biological weapons’ after the end of the USSR, Dr Alibek added.

[link to metro.co.uk (secure)]