It’s a little worrying that there are not one, not two, but three places on Earth that we refer to as Anthrax Island.
Today’s Moment of Science… Anthrax Island, USSR Edition.
World War I was also called the ‘chemist’s war,’ on account of half of Europe dousing the other half with mustard gas and phosgene. Though we may have put an end to using the nastier weapons on the battlefield for the most part, good luck getting the world’s superpowers to stop tinkering in the dark arts when left to their own devices.
Vozrozhdeniya Island, also known as Aralsk Island, was a little soviet paradise on the border of modern day Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Thousands of kilometers from Moscow and safely hidden away from prying eyes by the Aral sea, the beautiful island was just the place to bring their best scientists to test out a bunch of highly deadly shit.
Aralsk-7 became one of many secret soviet cities, absent from maps, existing only when it became too inconvenient to pretend it didn’t. The laboratory was built in the late 1940s, undergoing a major expansion in the 1950s. The population of the island swelled to about 1,500, mainly scientists and support community. The island was 200 square km, and most activity from the lab took place in the settlement of Kantubek. Life there, as often was the case for the secret cities, was better than most other places in the USSR.
Enjoying the good life, chilling on an island, spraying new and unusual strains of smallpox. As you do.
Genetically engineered cholera, leprosy, botulinum, Venezuelan equine encephalitis, typhus, Q-fever, bubonic plague, drug-resistant tularemia, and legionnaires that showed no symptoms until you were a bit too fucking dead to treat it were all on the menu.
Most famously, they cooked up loads of anthrax. Not just there, but in over fifty sites around the USSR. In making antibiotic resistant anthrax, they’d birthed a monster. They also tweaked the spores to be a smidge smaller, allowing them to be inhaled more easily, making it all the more deadly.
We’re not even to the part where they started fucking up absolutely everything.
In 1971, the research vessel Lev Berg was in the Aral Sea when they saw a brown haze floating in the distance. When it wafted into their air space, the lack of immediate health effects left them largely unconcerned. One scientist even ran some tests on the mysterious brown fog.
Smallpox. It was motherfucking weapons grade smallpox.
You may be wondering what makes something already as yikes as smallpox ‘‘weapons grade”. The scientist who ran those tests? She was vaccinated, still caught the disease, and spread it to nine other reportedly vaccinated people.
The fucked up shit that happened there was seemingly without end. A boat was spotted drifting aimlessly in the sea, the occupants of which were found deceased from the bubonic plague. In 1988, a herd of 50,000 antelope in the area all died in an hour. Nobody knows why. Eventually the USSR was like “we might have a little too much anthrax,” and sent the nation’s anthrax supply to be buried in Aralsk.
It’s unclear how much anthrax was dumped there. In their haste, they dug some pits and just kinda dropped somewhere between a hundred and two hundred tons of anthrax into them.
Anthrax is super fucking hard to kill. Like Rasputin hard to kill. Like tardigrade hard to kill. Like covid conspiracy theory hard to kill.
This all would have been kinda sorta fine because it’s an island and it wasn’t like the government was going to collapse, right?
Then the USSR collapsed.
Then the Aral Lake dried up.
For a while they were like “nothing to see here, comrades.” Then, after 9/11, there were several anthrax attacks via mail in the US. Though the supply in question was not traced back to the former Soviet island, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan were like “hey, uh, little help here?”
The US worked with the two governments to help decontaminate the island. Even with a thorough clean-up effort, plenty of sealed samples containing god knows what were found on the island. It’s going to take more than a few months and some bleach for me to believe the island that farted a cloud of mutant smallpox is open for business.
This has been your daily Moment of Science, reminding you that we probably still don’t know about all of the Soviet secret cities yet.
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