ANTHRAX AND YELLOW RAIN

For more than a decade, there was continual argument between apologists - who contended that the lovable rulers of the Soviet Union would never do anything so dastardly as to violate the ban on biological weapons or provide chemical weapons to their surrogates in places like Southeast Asia (yellow rain) and Angola - versus Western observers who noticed that the Soviets were, in fact, doing these things.

This argument was epitomized by numerous articles in the Wall Street Journal in opposition to the pro-Soviet positions of one Mat-thew Meselson at Harvard who saw only bee pollen instead of chemical weapons and agreed with the KGB that only contaminated meat had caused anthrax deaths in Sverdlovsk. There, under chief Communist Party official of the Sverdlovsk region, Boris Yeltsin, citizens died of anthrax apparently released from a nonexistent Soviet biological weapons facility. (It couldn't exist because it was proscribed by treaty.) When political conditions permitted, the Wall Street Journal sent investigators to Sverdlovsk, verified that the deaths were due to inhalation of anthrax spores, and published a series of articles about this.

In Science 266 pp 1202-1208 (1994) is published an excellent research article by M. Meselson, J. Guillemin, M. Hugh-Jones, A. Lang-muir, I. Popova, A. Shelokov, and O. Yampolskaya reporting on the Sverdlovsk anthrax outbreak. Based on information on each anthrax victim as gathered by its Russian authors, this article definitively proves that human and animal deaths from anthrax up to 2.5 miles and 30 miles respectively downwind from a Soviet military compound were caused by anthrax spores released from that compound. The paper concludes, "In sum, the narrow zone of human and animal anthrax cases extending downwind from [military] Compound 19 shows that the [anthrax] outbreak resulted from an aerosol that originated there.'' Aerosols of anthrax spores have been used in biological weapons for about 50 years. They are so common that American troops were inoculated with anthrax vaccine and huge quantities of appropriate antibiotics were shipped to Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War.

Remarkably, Matthew Meselson, who used his position at Harvard as a major smoke screen to hide such Soviet actions, is the unapologetic first author of this publication. The many people whose deaths in the Cold War were facilitated by Professor Meselson and other Soviet apologists would undoubtedly be delighted to be alive and able to read his paper in Science.