--- title: "Russian biological weapons scientists created a plague superweapon in 1989" date: "2026-10-07" modified: "2026-10-07" authors: - name: "Blake Stilwell" job_title: "Editor-In-Chief, Air Force Veteran" link: "https://www.wearethemighty.com/authors/blake.md" url: "https://www.wearethemighty.com/history/russian-biological-weapons-scientists-created-a-plague-superweapon-in-1989/" categories: - "Books" - "Cold War" - "Entertainment" - "History" - "War History" tags: - "Books" - "Cold War" - "Military History" - "News" - "Russia" --- # Russian biological weapons scientists created a plague superweapon in 1989 ![russia biological weapons plague]() *Biological warfare is alive and well, masquerading as "gain-of-function" research.* On Oct. 2, 2026, 28-year-old Darya Shipilova, a Russian lab worker in Irkutsk, died [suddenly of pneumonia]() after allegedly mishandling a test tube containing a strain of Yersinia pestis at the Anti-plague Research Institute of Siberia. No one has confirmed how she contracted the illness. [Local media reports say]() the facility is locked down. Rospotrebnadzor, Russia’s public health service, said she died from "[pneumonia of unknown etiology]()." The agency said tests found no microorganisms connected with her work at the lab. But this wouldn't be the first time a biological agent escaped from a Russian lab. To make matters worse, Russia created biological agents during the Soviet era in similar labs, superweapons designed to infect and eradicate the population of the United States—which is the real fear behind Shipilova's death. **Also Read: [The best Cold War communist military technology was all stolen from the West]()** The Irkutsk institute is a Biosafety Level 3 facility designed to handle deadly pathogens because treatments are available. The standard treatment for plague infection is antibiotics. But if it had been somehow genetically modified to be resistant to antibiotics—or worse—it might require more than a lockdown to contain the spread of the disease. In her new book "[Biological War: A Scenario]()," author Annie Jacobsen describes a lab-created biological weapon that uses a "demon germ," a gene-spliced pathogen that combines the deadly effects of two infections to exterminate entire populations. While Jacobsen's book is mostly a fictional scenario, it's grounded in the reality that the USSR really did splice diseases to make them more transmissible and deadly. It began with modifying plague. ![plague weapon black death]() *Yeah, that plague.* Yersinia pestis, the bacteria that causes plague, is a [Tier 1 agent](), considered by the United States as "posing the greatest risk of deliberate misuse, mass casualties, or devastating damage to the economy, infrastructure, or public confidence." The reasons are obvious. It doesn't take much of the bacteria to infect a person and it can be extremely deadly in the right form. There are actually three kinds of plague, diagnosed on how the bacteria infected a subject, with different symptoms—and vastly different outcomes. The first is the one in the popular imagination: bubonic plague. The Black Death. The one that devastated Europe in the 1300s. It enters the skin through the bites of infected fleas. The bacteria find their way to the lymph nodes, turning them into painful, swollen (often black) *buboes* (where the name "bubonic" comes from). With antibiotic treatment, the fatality rate for bubonic plague is 13%. If untreated, bubonic plague has a [fatality rate of 30%-60%](). Lack of treatment can also lead to the second type, septicemic plague, which happens when the bacteria enter the bloodstream. Y. pestis in the blood causes clots and hemorrhages, turning organs black and necrotic. At best, a septicemic plague patient can expect to lose body parts to gangrene. It is, however, usually fatal. The third kind of plague is pneumonic plague, infecting the lungs. It's airborne, transmissible between humans, and 100% fatal if untreated—death can sometimes occur within 24 hours, without antibiotics. That's the kind of plague Darya Shipilova is [suspected to have contracted in her Siberian lab](). During the Cold War, the USSR knew the standard U.S. treatment for any plague was antibiotics. Once diagnosed, American doctors had no alternative but to treat the disease that way. The Soviets decided to use that against the Americans. The Soviet Union (now Russia) is one of 190 states-parties to the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, but the USSR immediately began researching ways to create biological weapons with exotic pathogens like anthrax, smallpox, and plague; weapons that would kill populations but leave infrastructure intact. With a few modifications, pneumonic plague would be the perfect weapon. So that's what they did. ![Leonid Brezhnev plague weapon]() *Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev not only authorizes Russia's biological weapons program, he named it. Shutterstock* The Soviet Union's top secret—and illegal—biological weapons organization (called Biopreparat) launched a plan called "Bonfire" in 1974. It was the USSR's program to genetically modify a disease by transferring the DNA of one germ to another, creating a hypervirulent antibiotic-resistant plague weapon that is hard to diagnose and for which there is no cure. It took 15 years. In the fall of 1989, Soviet military and scientific leaders met at Obolensk, Russia in a building that looked to the outside world like an insane asylum (complete with actors playing as inmates, according to Jacobsen's book). It was there that DNA researcher Sergei Popov revealed the biological superweapon that was immune to vaccines and antibiotics, killed nearly everyone infected, and was designed to sow fear and mistrust of America's leaders and doctors among civilians. Popov and his team engineered an augmented strip of pathogen DNA inside another agent, creating a single disease that carried the most lethal aspects of each. After someone was infected, they would begin to show symptoms of one disease. The cure for the first disease would trigger another, equally deadly one—like a booby trap. Once diagnosed with the first disease (Popov first used Legionella bacteria), the standard treatment in the United States is antibiotics. But administering antibiotics for the Soviet-made, genetically modified weapon released a myelin peptide that induced autoimmune paralysis in the victims. Another version of the plague superweapon combined the Y. pestis bacteria with Venezuelan Equine Encephalitis, a one-two punch that would kill people treated with antibiotics within days. Those were not the only creations. The United States only discovered any of this because Soviet researcher Vladimir Pasechnik defected to the West that same year and told MI6, the British Secret Intelligence Service. The outrage was immediate, but the Soviet Union didn't survive much longer after that. "You do not choose plague as a battlefield weapon," British intelligence officer Dr. Christopher Davis told Jacobsen. "You choose plague because you're going to take out the other person's country. It's the nuclear equivalent, except it's cleaner." ![gorbachev biological weapon]() *Gorbachev looks different in his Pizza Hut commercial now that you know he was willing to kill us all with plague.* The Biopreparat revelation triggered a surge in BSL-3 and BSL-4 research labs in the United States and around the world. Before Pasechnik's defection, the U.S. had two BSL-4 labs, one at Fort Detrick in Maryland, and the other at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. Today, there are as many as 15. The rest of the world caught bioresearch fever too—there are more than 3,500 BSL-3 labs and 110 BSL-4 labs across 149 countries. After the fall of the USSR, worries about biological weapons didn't disappear. They morphed into the fear of terrorists obtaining biological agents from the former Soviet Union or developing one themselves. These fears weren't totally unfounded, either. In the days following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, envelopes containing anthrax were sent through the U.S. mail to the offices of senators and media outlets. The Soviets weren't even the only foreign adversary trying to combine the lethality of two diseases to attack the United States. In 2008, Pakistan-born al-Qaeda operative Aafia Siddiqui, a graduate of MIT, was captured in Ghazni, Afghanistan. According to the FBI, she was allegedly planning a chimera pathogen attack that combined the lethality of rabies with the contagiousness of chickenpox. ![Aafia Siddiqui]() *Siddiqui was not convicted of terrorism. Her charge was attempted murder for using a rifle left unattended by a U.S. troop, according to Jacobsen.* Jacobsen's book describes what could happen if a genetically engineered version of pneumonic plague escaped from a Siberian BSL-4 research facility—and so far appears remarkably prescient. Luckily, the similarities between real life and "Biological War" have stopped (so far). Jacobsen's scenario sees the disease make its way to the United States. It does not end well, triggering a societal breakdown in just six days. **Don’t Miss the Best of We Are The Mighty** **• [Two new Cold War movies spark America’s anti-authoritarian memory]()** **• [Russia is testing the world’s dumbest weapon again]()** **• [What the Soviet Union thought as it watched Operation Desert Storm]()** ## Author Blake Stilwell is We Are The Mighty's Editor-in-Chief, covering military news, entertainment, and history, along with veteran education, employment and entrepreneurship. He is a former U.S. Air Force combat cameraman with degrees in Graphic Design, Television and Film, International Relations, Public Relations, Business Management and Middle Eastern Affairs. After leaving the military, he began working in film and television production in New York and Los Angeles, work that included ABC News, NBC Olympics, and HBO Sports. He then spent two years in Washington with White House Communications, before joining the Near East Foundation. At NEF he served as an International Development Fellow, then Communications Officer, and finally, Media Officer for the Middle East and Africa. Based in the Palestinian Territory, he coordinated strategic communications between eight country offices, international media, and government and NGO partners. He began a career focused on writing and editing in 2015 with We Are The Mighty. He left in 2019 for Military.com, but returned as Editor-in-Chief in 2025. Blake’s work has been seen on CBS News, Fox News, CBC, The Chicago Tribune, Task & Purpose, Military Times, Recoil, Skillset, American History, and was shockingly even used in a Supreme Court argument. He is an avid traveler and small business owner in Ohio, where he spends most of his energy fixing up a very old house. ### Author social links [Facebook]() [Twitter]() [Instagram]() [LinkedIn]()