What Happened Inside Russia’s Plague Lab?

About this episode

A young researcher in Siberia has died under mysterious circumstances, raising questions about a potential lab leak. Russia won’t say how it happened. Marshall Billingslea, former Special Presidential Envoy for Arms Control, says Moscow has scrubbed news reports, had officials walk back talk of an outbreak, and kept the World Health Organization in the dark. He joins School of War to fill in what the Kremlin won’t, taking us inside Russia’s expanding bioweapons program and the institute at the heart of the mystery, which defectors say ran a covert effort to weaponize the disease and make it resistant to antibiotics. He also explains how Moscow thinks about using these weapons, how China is building a program of its own, and why the most frightening of them pose a risk even nuclear weapons don’t. 2:32 — Mystery at a Russian Plague Lab 5:29 — Russia’s Bioweapons Program 7:14 — Weaponizing Plague 10:39 — How Russia Would Use Bioweapons 13:01 — Smallpox and Ebola 15:07 — Controlling the Spread 16:40 — “Your Vaccines Wouldn’t Have Worked” 18:20 — A Soviet Bioweapons Defector 20:30 — Why Bioweapons Bans Are Hard to Verify 24:58 — Irkutsk and Wuhan 29:48 — Another Pandemic? 32