When Weber’s team touched down by helicopter four years ago, he saw dozens of buildings now abandoned but once used to house more than 1,000 scientists and their families. Scattered about on the ground were hundreds of gas masks, empty cages and petrie dishes. Renaissance Island was where the world’s deadliest germs, including anthrax, the plague and smallpox, were developed. While smallpox was tested indoors, scientists regularly set anthrax free in the open air. 
       U.S. spy plane photographs taken in the 1960s identified the site as a possible biological testing area, but it was only some 30 years later when Ken Alibek, the former head of the Soviet germ warfare program, defected to the United States that the full story emerged. 

OLD HABITS DIE HARD 
       Renaissance Island, throughout its history, was run essentially by a front company у a pharmaceutical firm in Moscow called Biopreparat. The company is still in operation today, and U.S. intelligence sources say so is the infrastructure to make biological weapons in Russia. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Biopreparat was privatized. Today it is run by former Russian army officers.

Biopreparat’s assembly lines once worked at dozens of large factories, including one in Stepnogorsk, now in present-day Kazakstan. During its heyday, it was the largest production facility of biological weapons in the world. Today, the U.S. government is paying million to have it cut up and dismantled. 
       At the top-secret facility, former chief Alibek engineered the germs to be super resistant to antibiotics. “People can die during a conversation, for example. They start bleeding through the nose and mouth, they die,о he said. 

Renaissance Island was used as an open-air testing ground. At night, to avoid American satellite detection and because most biological agents are more effective then, Soviet scientists would move monkeys in cages downwind from the labs. Bomblets would explode overhead releasing deadly germs, like a fictional horror movie. 
       “The cloud would start moving towards the monkeys. They were crying because they knew they would die,о Alibek said. Thousands of Animals were killed. 
       “I think there was a sense of shock when we learned of the scale, the monstrous scale of the program and also how far it had progressed,” Weber, the U.S. Department of Defense expert, told NBC News. 

TARGETING CAPITALIST ENEMIES
       But the apparent target of the Soviets’ most sinister weapons was Americans. Alibek was ordered to prepare a strain of anthrax, smallpox and the plague to be delivered in the warheads of SS-18 intercontinental ballistic missiles pointed at American cities. 
       “New York, Seattle or Chicago, Boston,” Alibek said. “Believe me, depending on a very specific scenario, we would see very large numbers of killed and infected people.” 
       Bill Patrick, an American who made biological weapons for the U.S. government until they were outlawed, debriefed Alibek when the scientist defected. 

“It’s almost unbelievable what they could have used on us,” he said. ”[It’s] incomprehensible. You cannot conceive of the casualties that would have occurred.” 
       In the 1980s, as the Cold War frost between Moscow and Washington was supposedly melting, U.S. and British leaders became increasingly aware of the Soviet bio-weapons program and pressured then-leader Mikhail Gorbachev to come clean. Gorbachev, according to Alibek, continued to develop biological weapons. When confronted with evidence that outside governments were learning more, the order was issued in 1988 to bury the evidence. 
       The anthrax was placed in 60-gallon drums and bleach was poured on top to neutralize the germs. According to U.S. sources, close to 100 tons of anthrax were then moved by rail about 1,000 miles to Renaissance Island. Officials charged with the burial, however, didn’t want to waste valuable steel drums, so they poured the anthrax out into 11 sandy burial pits. 

LIVING, DEADLY THREAT 
       U.S. government sources said that when their inspection team took soil samples of the island four years ago they found the anthrax spores were still alive у an alarming discovery. 
       “The primary [threat] would be if a rogue nation or terrorist state was able to obtain access to these spores, which were perfected over many decades of work by the Soviet Union, and then culture them and deploy them as a bio-terrorist weapon against a subway system in New York or inside an airplane,” Weber said. 
       “Really, America is vulnerable to such an attack on our homeland, and that’s why we think it’s most effective to try to reduce the threat at the source.”