WHO Says It Advised Ukraine To Destroy Pathogens In Health Labs To Prevent Disease Spread (reuters.com) 204
The World Health Organization advised Ukraine to destroy high-threat pathogens housed in the country's public health laboratories to prevent "any potential spills" that would spread disease among the population, the agency told Reuters on Thursday. From the report: Biosecurity experts say Russia's movement of troops into Ukraine and bombardment of its cities have raised the risk of an escape of disease-causing pathogens, should any of those facilities be damaged. Like many other countries, Ukraine has public health laboratories researching how to mitigate the threats of dangerous diseases affecting both animals and humans including, most recently, COVID-19. Its labs have received support from the United States, the European Union and the WHO.
In response to questions from Reuters about its work with Ukraine ahead of and during Russia's invasion, the WHO said in an email that it has collaborated with Ukrainian public health labs for several years to promote security practices that help prevent "accidental or deliberate release of pathogens." "As part of this work, WHO has strongly recommended to the Ministry of Health in Ukraine and other responsible bodies to destroy high-threat pathogens to prevent any potential spills," the WHO, a United Nations agency, said. The WHO would not say when it had made the recommendation nor did it provide specifics about the kinds of pathogens or toxins housed in Ukraine's laboratories. The agency also did not answer questions about whether its recommendations were followed. On Wednesday, Russian's foreign ministry claimed that the U.S. operates a biowarfare lab in Ukraine, "an accusation that has been repeatedly denied by Washington and Kyiv," reports Reuters. A spokesperson for the ministry went on to claim that Russian forces unearthed documents in Ukraine that showed "an emergency attempt to erase evidence of military biological programs" by destroying lab samples.
Not only has Ukraine denied these allegations, Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby called them "laughable" and suggested Moscow could be laying the groundwork to use a chemical or biological weapon.
In response to questions from Reuters about its work with Ukraine ahead of and during Russia's invasion, the WHO said in an email that it has collaborated with Ukrainian public health labs for several years to promote security practices that help prevent "accidental or deliberate release of pathogens." "As part of this work, WHO has strongly recommended to the Ministry of Health in Ukraine and other responsible bodies to destroy high-threat pathogens to prevent any potential spills," the WHO, a United Nations agency, said. The WHO would not say when it had made the recommendation nor did it provide specifics about the kinds of pathogens or toxins housed in Ukraine's laboratories. The agency also did not answer questions about whether its recommendations were followed. On Wednesday, Russian's foreign ministry claimed that the U.S. operates a biowarfare lab in Ukraine, "an accusation that has been repeatedly denied by Washington and Kyiv," reports Reuters. A spokesperson for the ministry went on to claim that Russian forces unearthed documents in Ukraine that showed "an emergency attempt to erase evidence of military biological programs" by destroying lab samples.
Not only has Ukraine denied these allegations, Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby called them "laughable" and suggested Moscow could be laying the groundwork to use a chemical or biological weapon.
Nuclear power plants leaks and those canceling out (Score:2)
Nuclear power plants leaks and those should cancel out, radiation killing the pathogens /s
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There are no nuclear power plant leaks. None of the buildings in the Chernobyl attack had anything to do with nuclear power, the dome is intact and although the workers are in desperate conditions (which raises the risk of accidental releases), there's no actual power generation going on so any release will be very local.
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There are no nuclear power plant leaks.
Chernobyl is not the only nuclear power plant in Ukraine. I don't know that the other ones are leaking after Russian attacks, but then you don't know that they aren't. There are plenty of radioactive materials in Chernobyl so an accidental strike and fire could easily lead to nuclear materials being dispersed, though almost certainly not an actual melt-down.
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We know they're not leaking into the atmosphere. The global network of sensors for detecting radioactive particles is extremely good.
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We know they're not leaking into the atmosphere. The global network of sensors for detecting radioactive particles is extremely good.
Except when they lose power, as the ones in and around the Chernobyl have, thanks to Putin's Pirates.
No power, no sensors, no communications with the "global network".
So how, exactly, do we "know they're not leaking" ?
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Oh, look, someone rediscovered ascii art.
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there's no actual power generation going on so any release will be very local.
Correct me if I'm wrong please, but my understanding is that the fuel cooling pool is not beneath the sarcophagus and so if water levels in the pool fall enough to partially expose the rods, there is risk that they will burn and material will be put into the atmosphere. I'm reading articles that say it will take 40 days for the pool to "dry out" but because they're not every technical sadly they don't tell me whether that means to expose the fuel, or completely dry out.
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There's a chance of a relatively local fire. It'll hurl heavier material over some distance, probably over the entire exclusion zone and maybe a bit further, but the circumstances in the Chernobyl reactor disaster (in which the radioactive cloud circled the world three times) won't happen again.
With the disaster, I was personally measuring uranium in rainwater in England. (The local reactors only dump the uranium into the seas.) I cannot think of a catastrophe that would result in me doing so again.
Let's ta
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Thanks. Do you have any insight on what fraction of 40 days is relevant? Seems like plenty of time to get things back up and going if it's any significant portion of it. Or if the 40 days number is bullshit for that matter
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false flag (Score:5, Insightful)
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They have form on this. Accuse another country they are invading of having chemical weapons, then deploy their own chemical weapons.
At this point it's a near certainly that they are about to commit another war crime (using chemical weapons) in Ukraine.
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At this point it's a near certainly that they are about to commit another war crime (using chemical weapons) in Ukraine.
This is how Russia "helped" gas people in Syria but Syria didn't even bother with a pretext.
I hope countries are sending Ukraine a lot of equipment for dealing with chemical warfare.
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They learned that from the Orange Shitgibbon. They also learned from him that if you throw your feces about like our simian cousins, some of it will stick to the walls.
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Actually, no. This is how Russia has operated for decades. I would venture to say they both of them learned it from Joseph Goebbels.
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We know at this point that anything that Russia accuses anyone else of doing, they are actually doing themselves.
What? Russia would never invade Ukraine, that's silly. Err-*checks date* I mean Russia would never unleash biological agents in Ukraine, that's silly.
The trouble with accusing someone of projection... (Score:2)
But people will believe what they want to believe. It was easy to believe the worst of Saddam, because he was awful, and his having secret WMDs would have been perfectly in character. But...
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I suspect you may well turn out to be right there. The problem is, many other countries do precisely the same. Until it is illegal for a government to use disinformation as a weapon (it is, after all, a weapon used by a military commander specifically and intentionally against civilians) and there is a means to enforce such a prohibition on any country whether they sign up to that international court or not, there's nothing that can be done about it. "Truthiness", information warfare and disinformation camp
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Re:false flag (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, the US population did believe there were WMDs in Iraq, didn't they?
This is just Russia recycling US tacics that worked very well in the past.
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Well, the US population did believe there were WMDs in Iraq, didn't they?
This is just Russia recycling US tacics that worked very well in the past.
There's a key difference here in that independent US and UK media at the time made it possible to work out that the US was lying about WMD. Russia has suppressed it's independent media so there's no safety valve of sanity.
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The real concern is that this is Russia reusing German tactics which worked in the past, namely the art which Goebbels perfected — accusing your enemy of what you are doing. Which raises the question, is Russia about to use bioweapons against Ukraine, and claim that Ukraine accidentally released them, possibly while transporting them somewhere to be used against Russia?
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Well, the US population did believe there were WMDs in Iraq, didn't they?
Before the war, I knew a professor who had a collection of over 4,000 news articles that proved Iraq was trying to get nuclear weapons. I found that convincing beyond argument (I still didn't want to invade).
When it turned out those 4,000 articles were wrong, I learned something about the news media. Quantity doesn't equal quality, at any number.
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The human condition is that everybody already has their own little problems in their lives. They have neither the time nor the energy to climb out of the Plato's cave that is the mainstream media and the propaganda therein. Nor c
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Most Countries Have These (Score:3)
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"They have a doctor's office, they must be preparing an invasion!"
Inverse Covid Conspiracy (Score:2)
Wouldn't it be funny if a dangerous pathogen escaped this lab and then the Trumpkins started spreading conspiracy theories that the release actually came from a live animal market to divert fault from Trump's dom daddy...
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China already is spreading the rumor that COVID escaped from a lab in the US where they were doing illegal research.
WHO - are we trusting it today ? (Score:3)
Just to confirm, are we trusting WHO today ?
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Just to confirm: You're saying you trust Russia more than WHO as a reliable source of information?
Just normal procedure (Score:3)
Note that bleach and most disinfectants shouldn't be applied internally, Mr. Trump & Republicans.
ASCII art filter is working well I see. (Score:2)
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I'm hoping there should be sarcasm tags there, although there really are people stupid enough to believe that.
Komrade Tucker kkkarleson believes it (Score:2)
I'm just stating a fact. Really it is factually true that Tucker Swanson Carlson is encouraging all Americans to believe the Russian propaganda on it. For their own selfish reasons China wants to normalize this perhaps due to the fact that they did not allow investigators to fully consider the lab leak hypothesis or even determine the origins. Latest evidence is extetrmelt weak but leans towards the market place spread but that doesn't actually tell us how it got there.
One has to realize that nukes, bio
Re: Covid homo-sapiens-cide (Score:2)
I think the best explanation is that every time Xi Jinping farts, a new pathogen is released into the environment, and sometimes those pathogens spread. That would explain both SARS 1 and SARS 2.
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Someone should give it the other Funny mod it needs. The story needs a joke.
The obvious one I was looking for was about Putin's claim they are trying to destroy evidence, but that sick joke already appears in the story summary without the humor attached.
I suppose it's better that Putin uses the excuse to go with chemical weapons rather than stepping all the way up to "tactical" nukes. Sad joke to imagine such a thing exists? To go nuclear I think he'd have to manufacture a nuclear "incident" in Russia first
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There is no evidence that I know of that the labs involved have anything to do with military applications. No, we're not living out "1984". There are no bioweapons labs in Ukraine any more than there were WMDs in Iraq. This is a simple copy of George Bush's own deceptive tactics to justify leveling cities.
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"Tucker Carlson: Someone needs to explain why there are dangerous biological weapons in Ukraine
The Pentagon is lying about this - why?"
https://www.foxnews.com/opinio [foxnews.com]...
"We never imagined Ukraine would have biological weapons. Why would Ukraine have bioweapons? So, it seemed like a pretty strange question, but it wasn't half as shocking as the answer he got. Here's what Toria Nuland said.
SEN. MARCO RUBIO: Does Ukraine have chemical or biological weapons?
VICTORIA NULAND: Ukraine has a biological research faci
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Those are left over Soviet labs. And the U.S. had been working with the Ukrainians to convert them into respectable research labs. But thanks for repeating the Russian line. Now go pass go and collect your rubles, I hear they may be worth something someday.
And just a hint: referencing Carlson and Rubio isn't helping your case.
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Carlson is entertainment for his base, but is asking good questions.
Carlson is almost never asking good questions. The reason I say this is because Carlson has a very well funded show and can afford research staff. So why is he asking his audience and feigning ignorance? The obvious reason is because he's trying to manipulate them into a particular conclusion.
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None of this is any real surprise to anyone or any sort of consipiracy. There are leftover Soviet labs and they're still doing work on dangerous pathogens. Is this actually a surprise to anyone? Is Russia claiming that they _don't_ have labs doing research on dangerous pathogens? Is the US? For any of those countries, I'm sure they don't like to talk about it because it's classified. No big surprise there. Frankly, we expect governments to be doing research on this sort of thing because it's necessary to be
Re:Nice newspeak (Score:5, Insightful)
Carlson is entertainment for his base, but is asking good questions.
He is asking leading questions. Leading questions are a key propagandist's tool, because they get the sheep where they're wanted without committing the propagandist to asserting anything. You know they're asking a leading question because they don't actually bring in anyone who could answer the question. The sheep are left to fill in the blanks with their ignorance.
You can also tell they're leading questions because the propagandist doesn't ask any question leading in other directions, like why would the US fund biological warfare research in *Ukraine*, a country right next to Russia and with no level 4 biosafety labs? This stuff is straight up Kremlin propaganda [snopes.com] being rehashed by a Putin apologist.
There is nothing mysterious about medical research labs having shit you don't want some 18 year old Russian conscript mucking around with. If you study pathogens, you've got hazardous materials on hand.
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the propagandist doesn't ask any question leading in other directions, like why would the US fund biological warfare research in *Ukraine*, a country right next to Russia and with no level 4 biosafety labs?
Uhhh, good question? That is literally the "leading" questions that Carlson IS asking. The other naysayer above you literally said they are. I am not claiming they are, I have no clue. But apparently they are doing SOME pathogen research because Victoria Nuland and now the WHO at least admitted that pathogens exist. What are they using pathogens for? Why are the in *Ukraine*? Ukraine is not known for biological research. The fact that these USED to be bioweapons research labs (that were subject to he Threat
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Research into pathogens is *not* biowarfare research, any more than a civilian nuclear power plant is a nuclear bomb.
Re: Nice newspeak (Score:2)
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Well, one area of research they're known for is avian zoonotic diseases, since they are on a migratory bird paths between Europe and Asia. Ukraine has endemic transmission of a number of vector borne diseases such as Chikungunya and Bunyamwera. Ukraine also conducts research into HIV and tuberculosis.
Ignorance about a country provides a broad canvas for propagandists to paint; while Ukraine is in part of the world that doesn't occupy much American head space, it its not a small country; if it joined the EU
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They're *publishing* for Pete's sake. What more proof do you need than that? What proof do they owe *you*, when you can't even be bothered to do a Google Scholar search?
As for their being third world *now*, I wouldn't dispute that. Russia has bombed their hospitals, schools, and supermarkets. But prior to the invasion they were above the world median for development.
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What part of the WHO's announcement says anything about the WHO or Ukraine being terrified of competent BSL-4 trained Russians taking this stuff?
Again, "There is nothing mysterious about medical research labs having shit you don't want some 18 year old Russian conscript mucking around with.
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Nope. Not going to watch a 2 hour, 20 minute video to find some unspecified statement. The transcript doesn't hit on Nuland using any term like "flu," "virus," "lab," "laboratory," or "weapon."
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It does not take 20 years to convert labs.
How long does it normally take? You know nothing about biological labs.
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I literally have no idea why you think what Tucker says is informative or worth listening to. Of all the people in the world, why him?
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ok, it's time for you to stop watching cable news.
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Then you'll love these questions, I borrowed them right from Carlson's playbook.
"How sure are we that tsilvergun doesn't fuck goats? I mean he says he isn't but what has he done to make him trustworthy?" "Isn't it correct to assume tsilvergun fucks goats until we have evidence that he doesn't? So far no evidence has been shown!"
That's a Tucker Carlson question, if you think that's "good questions" then you're precisely the kind of moron he is pandering to with out of context bullshit.
Just to be clear I'm no
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So secret that literally the entire world knows about them.
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Studying how to cure Anthrax is not a military application. It is a medical application. The military may then use it, but it is still a medical application. Just as the military using penicillin does not make penicillin a weapon.
There is also a major difference between developing a cure and developing a bomb. Most militaries have long since decided bio bombs are just not effective at attacking an enemy and are more dangerous to those who use them, so only a few militaries still bother.
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There is no evidence that I know of that the labs involved have anything to do with military applications
Most of these are military contracts; it's not a stretch to assume a military contract be used for military applications. https://www.riotimesonline.com... [riotimesonline.com]
At any rate, we'll probably find out for sure in the next couple months anyway
The military part is in plain sight (Score:2)
As Glenn Greenwald pointed out [substack.com], the Anthrax that was used in terrorist acts in the early 2000s came from a US Army lab that was being used for vaccine research.
COVID-19 probably has a similar origin. Legitimate Chinese research that got out because an infected animal was sold by a corrupt lab worker in the local wet market. A sad, but common practice apparently and doesn't require a dastardly conspiracy
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COVID-19 is almost certainly natural. There is nothing to indicate it escaped from a lab and despite intense research by people desperate to find a way to blame the lab, nobody has found any evidence. Rather, we find virtually identical strains all over the place and most researchers are happy to accept that this is a perfectly natural virus.
Re: Nice newspeak (Score:2)
Unlike Ukraine, Iraq actually did at one point have WMDs, and even used them on civilians.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
The incident was the largest chemical weapons attack directed against a civilian-populated area in history,[2] killing between 3,200 and 5,000 people and injuring 7,000 to 10,000 more, most of them civilians.[3][4] Preliminary results from surveys of the affected region showed an increased rate of cancer and birth defects in the years afterward.[5]
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True, and then they were all destroyed, the UN repeatedly verified they were all destroyed, and Georgie decided to fabricate evidence instead in order to go play cowboys.
Re:Nice newspeak (Score:4, Informative)
So what you're saying is that there WERE bioweapons labs, that they have stopped being bioweapons labs and are gradually destroying the key components of bioweapons that remain from the time that they were bioweapons labs.
That's rather different.
For the same reason, Chernobyl WAS a nuclear power station, it has been decommissioned, it no longer generates any power and cannot easily be made to do so. The components are still present, the area is highly radioactive, the dangerous materials that are present are no less dangerous simply because the generators are all switched off, but it stopped being a functional nuclear power station some time ago. It is now just a repository of really, really dangerous material that needs some machinery - such as coolants - to stay functioning if the local area isn't to become massively more contaminated.
Re: Nice newspeak (Score:2)
Micky mouse has spoken !
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I'm not convinced it's necessary to have most of the biolabs the US has. You make it sound as though enhancing a virus is like assembling lego blocks. It's a little more difficult than that. You also make it sound like destroying biohazards is something you can do trivially. Well, no, you can't. In some cases, such as prions, even total incineration doesn't seem to alter the effect.
Asking questions is perfectly sound and legitimate. The problem is with asserting an answer based on personal preference. As I
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There are no bioweapons labs in Ukraine any more than there were WMDs in Iraq.
There are; the Soviets built them. For a number of years now the US has been working with Ukraine to destroy things like anthrax stockpiles and convert them to civilian use.
The smart-a** in me wonders what the civilian use of an anthrax stockpile might be.
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It literally says "bioweapons" in the linked page.
Fuck you're an idiot
Cooperation under the new agreement will not be limited to physical security over pathogens. Funds also will be available for the peaceful employment of scientists whose skills and financial insecurity could render them potential targets for states or independent groups looking to acquire bioweapons capabilities.
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The key word there is "were". The Threat Reduction Act, in 2005, pushed it firmly into past tense. Any research done there now is not going to be based on weapons research. There will be refrigerators in America that still contain undocumented smallpox samples. That seems almost certain, given how often such undocumented vials turn up. It would seem very wise, then, to not allow hostile regimes access to any of those refrigerators, just in case.
We don't know - can't know - how much legit research with dange
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Propaganda language is a thing of its own. "Ukraine is ruled by nazis!" (nevermind they're Jewish). "We're going to punish oligarchs and Putin with sanctions" (nevermind that sanctions mostly cause damage to poor people).
It's almost impossible to get any real coverage of the conflict any more. Pretty much everyone who has any media presence in the region has a narrative to push. There's next to no journalism left.
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It's going to be difficult for anyone in the West or Russia (not to even mention Ukraine itself) to not get emotionally invested, because the conflict, Western sanctions and Russian counter-sanctions are going to hurt a lot of people that are in middle and working classes as well as poor.
And when people suffer greatly, they start looking for the scapegoat. One of primary purposes of propaganda is to provide one. I.e. "It's the Jews!"
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So you figure we don't need to study pathogens in order to combat them? You should sue your grade school for lack of education.
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Most of us are aware that both sides are incentivized to lie in this situation.
Citation needed. Looking around, I see no evidence of such awareness.
I would argue that there have been quite a few very clear cut cases of right and wrong. For example, the US wars in the Middle East. The US waltzes in, destroys one country after another, achieves none of their stated goals, but ends up with trillions of dollars of pork cut to the cronies in the war machine and a death toll of millions of brown people, and that's not counting the lesser suffering. There is no other country who has done so
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Man your post is severely schizophrenic.. I'm going "Yeah. What? What? Good point. What the fuck nonsense is this? Decent point. What on earth are you talking about?"
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My goodness, just trying to unpack your post here...
So you can't group all the US wars in the middle east together. The first gulf war was a UN resolution and had lots of justification, and Stormin' Norman stopped and withdrew when he was about to overstep the bounds of the authorization provided by the UN mandate. Afghanistan was because Al Qaeda had carried out the 9/11 attacks on the US, and they were hiding in Afghanistan, so it was justified on the basis of self-defense, not some humanitarian cause.
Re: Nice newspeak (Score:2)
The thing I don't understand is that Russia's war on Ukraine clearly violates international law, and they're even actively committing war crimes. What's the point in having laws against war crimes if they go unenforced?
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The only laws that actually exist are the ones someone is able to enforce. There is only one situation where you can actually enforce war crime laws, and that is when you have defeated the opponent and you have the bad guys locked up.
Like, not just Putin, but Bush W, Obama, Trump and now Biden too are war criminals, bombing countless brown p
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I'm not saying that if you have to commit all of the possible war crimes if you wage war, I'm just saying that you are going to commit some whether you plan to or not, you will probably not feel bad about them and you will certainly commit enough of them on purpose. Not that you would admit to doing so publicly. So there is no moral superiority to be found in arguments between the kettle and the pot about being bla
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So you can't group all the US wars in the middle east together.
I'm grouping them together all right. Not just Iraq twice and Afghanistan, but also Libya, Syria, Yemen and Somalia. If someone does something bad, you will ask them questions, and they will justify themselves, and maybe they will convince you. But if every time something bad happens it's the same fucking guy in the middle of it, you will have to rethink their justifications and consider the fact that maybe they're just the fuckups that they are.
You can't blame NATO for playing their hand smartly.
Smart or not, but I am definitely blaming them for playing the
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You no longer feel any joy? Hey. Here's an idea. Quit! Get the fuck off the internet! It would also help with not having to read all this retarded bullshit you keep spouting.
Thanks for taking one for the team.
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There's a difference between a lab with dangerous pathogens (e.g. versions of swine flu) that one would just as soon didn't leak out and a lab whose sole purpose was the creation of bioweapons (Russia and lately Tucker Carlson conspiracy theory). It's not an overly complex situation.
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There's a difference between a lab with dangerous pathogens (e.g. versions of swine flu) that one would just as soon didn't leak out and a lab whose sole purpose was the creation of bioweapons (Russia and lately Tucker Carlson conspiracy theory). It's not an overly complex situation.
Russia knew that they used to have bioweapons labs because Russia built them. Just like America knew that Saddam used to have WMDs because we sold them to him.
Downvotes incoming in 3, 2, 1...
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Do you have any form of proof of this ?
On the 'there are military biolabs' side is a random tweet on Feb 24th with numerous re-tweets in the past weeks culminating in Russian official statements last week and Fox's Tucker Carlson jumping on the bandwagon.
On the 'there are no military biolabs' are the US Government (which of course can't be trusted), multiple independent international watchdog groups (which of course can't be trusted) and the Ukranian Government (which of course can't be trusted). That woul
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Do you have any form of proof of this ?
I don't know that they have/had former Soviet biolabs there or not, but I do know for certain that Ukraine is among the nations involved in the Cooperative Threat Reduction [wikipedia.org] program to "decommission nuclear, biological, and chemical weapon stockpiles". The Soviet Union most certainly had biological weapons labs in multiple nations.
Note nobody is claiming these are ex-Soviet biolabs so you're on a bit of a island there with your own personal take on the conspiracy theory.
Note that Russia, which apparently wants to reform the Soviet Union, has nothing to gain by pointing out that the USSR built the bioweapons labs. I haven't gone down the "Cooperati
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Intelligence agencies (with members literally working at CNN): "Dangerous biotech labs in Ukraine? That's insane conspiracy talk!"
Hours later: "We can't let these dangerous biotech labs in Ukraine fall into Russian hands."
No, the conspiracy theory was bioweapons, not biotech.
Biotech labs are fairly ordinary, and they tend to have dangerous stuff because the stuff that needs studying is often dangerous.
Bioweapons labs are a lot less common, and they're things that you keep in really secure locations where you have a lot of control.
The idea that the US would have a bioweapons lab in Ukraine is frankly kinda dumb:
a) Ukraine, despite being Democratic, is still really corrupt. And the last place you want your bioweapons is in a p
Re: Ok (Score:3)
Do bioweapons labs have large billboards /signboards saying "BIO-WEAPONS LAB" on them ?
Or do they say something else like Biotech Lab or Bio research lab or some such nomenclature...
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Do bioweapons labs have large billboards /signboards saying "BIO-WEAPONS LAB" on them ?
Or do they say something else like Biotech Lab or Bio research lab or some such nomenclature...
So your argument is basically Russel's Bioweapons Lab [wikipedia.org]?
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Having a virus for the purpose of testing a vaccine doesn't mean you're researching weapons tech, and it certainly doesn't mean you can build a bomb with the stuff. It also doesn't mean you can stop any disease created from decimating your own side, your allies and ALL of the neutral countries that might suddenly become less neutral and beat your country back into the stone age.
In general, very few nations bother with pathogen weapons. Nerve agents are easier to produce and control.
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Twisting information like that, you oughta be on Fox.
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Since different classes of reactor have different weapons proliferation risks, the easiest solution to the Iranian problem is to declassify and de-restrict all nuclear technology with a low risk, and to permit unrestricted shipments of that technology to national governments. If the Iranians genuinely want to have energy production and to wean themselves off fossil fuels (which would be a very good thing) then ramping up their ability to do so to the max is the smart move. If they want weapons tech, such a
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Nobody, that I know of, said labs didn't exist. What people said didn't exist were MILITARY, WEAPONS-PRODUCING labs. There's a bloody great qualifier there that you seem keen to ignore.