Putin’s Last Move

…is global biological warfare

Joseph George Caldwell

2 March 2023

Many articles have been written speculating about what actions Putin might take if he were to see that he was to lose the war in Ukraine. This essay argues that in this situation, Putin is likely to initiate global biological warfare.

The approach used in this piece is to consider Putin’s goals (motivations, desires), the alternative actions available to him for achieving those goals, and the pros and cons for each alternative relative to his achieving his goals. An alternative that is deemed to be, overall, the most desirable, is considered to be the most likely one that he will choose.

What are Putin’s desires?

In his 1950 Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, Bertrand Russell identified and discussed the four desires that he considered to be most important for politicians: acquisitiveness, rivalry, vanity and the love of power. These are general desires. Although there has been considerable speculation about Putin’s specific motivations for the Ukraine venture, commonly cited goals include the following:

1. Prohibition of NATO membership to countries neighboring Russia, in particular, Ukraine.

2. A land bridge from Russia to Crimea and the Black Sea.

3. International respect for Russia as a power to be reckoned with.

Putin’s initial approach to achieving his goals, and the current status of the venture

Putin’s approach to achieving these objectives was to invade Ukraine. Ukraine responded with stiff resistance, and quickly obtained military support from NATO countries. For a year now (February 24, 2022 – February 24, 2023) the war has continued, with neither side achieving victory. NATO has provided sufficient materiel to Ukraine to prevent a Russian victory, but not to end the conflict. The war rages on.

The essential problem facing Putin is that the resources available to NATO are vastly greater than the resources available to him. NATO can continue the conflict as a war of attrition indefinitely. Unless Putin obtains substantial support from China, Russia will “run out” of war resources long before NATO does. In its current mode, the war will grind to a halt as Putin’s resources decline.

If Putin does obtain substantial support from China, the war can continue indefinitely, since, in that event, the resources available to the two sides are comparable. That prospect is not objectionable to the military-industrial complex - it is like the never-ending war of Orwell’s 1984.

What is likely to happen if Putin faces military defeat in Ukraine?

If Putin does not obtain China’s support, he faces the real prospect of losing the war. There has been much speculation about what Putin might do, if faced with that possibility. The most-discussed option is that he would escalate the war to include limited use of nuclear weapons, in the hope that this turn of events would motivate NATO to accede to his demands. The likelihood of a large-scale global nuclear war is considered to be low. In a large-scale nuclear war, Russia would be destroyed. Much of the rest of the world would survive. Putin’s dreams would be completely unrealized, and his legacy shot. The outcome would be exactly the reverse of what he desired.

Since Putin has been widely accused of war crimes, the prospects for an “easy retirement” are not good, in the event of his defeat.

The likelihood of Putin’s initiating global nuclear war in the face of likely defeat cannot be discounted. Doing so would be an example of the “politics of envy” – if a party cannot achieve his goals, he may choose to deny success to everyone else. (“Politics of envy” is in contrast to the “politics of greed,” in which a party uses political power for gain.)

In view of the relative amount of attention given to Putin’s use of nuclear warfare as an escalating tactic, or global nuclear war as a last move, it might be concluded that nuclear war is the only option available to him, if he were to face likely defeat. That is not at all the case. In speculating on Putin’s course of action in the face of defeat, it is important to consider the range of alternatives available to him. That range of alternatives includes more than the options of surrender, exile, or global nuclear war. In particular, it includes the use of global biological warfare (BW).

Russia’s capabilities in biological warfare

Russia’s biological weapons program is highly secret. Here follows extracts from the Wikipedia article, “Russia and weapons of mass destruction”:

“The Soviet Union ratified the Geneva Protocol—prohibiting the use of biological and chemical weapons—on April 5, 1928, with reservations that were later dropped on January 18, 2001. Russia is also party to the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention and the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention. The Soviet biological weapons program violated the Biological Weapons Convention and was the world's largest, longest, and most sophisticated program of its kind. At its peak, the program employed up to 65,000 people.

“The Soviet Union covertly operated the world's largest, longest, and most sophisticated biological weapons program. The program began in the 1920s and lasted until at least September 1992 but has possibly been continued by Russia after that. Thereby, the Soviet Union violated its obligations under the Biological Weapons Convention, which it had signed on April 10, 1972, and ratified on March 26, 1975.

“According to Ken Alibek, who was deputy-director of Biopreparat, the Soviet biological weapons agency, and who defected to the United States in 1992, weapons were developed in labs in isolated areas of the Soviet Union including mobilization facilities at Omutininsk, Penza and Pokrov and research facilities at Moscow, Stirzhi and Vladimir. These weapons were tested at several facilities most often at ‘Rebirth Island’ (Vozrozhdeniya) in the Aral Sea by firing the weapons into the air above monkeys tied to posts, the monkeys would then be monitored to determine the effects. According to Alibek, although Soviet offensive program was officially ended in 1992, Russia may be still involved in the activities prohibited by BWC.

“As of 2021, the United States Department of State ‘assesses that the Russian Federation (Russia) maintains an offensive [biological weapons] program and is in violation of its obligation under Articles I and II of the BWC [Biological Weapons Convention].’

On November 6, 1998, Dr. Kenneth Alibek (formerly Kanatjan Alibekov) visited the Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey and met with the staff of the Chemical and Biological Weapons Nonproliferation Project (CBWNP). Dr. Alibek’s recent book (with Stephen Handelman), Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World (Random House, 1999), describes his experience with Soviet/Russian biological warfare (BW) activities. An interview conducted by Jonathan B. Tucker, “Biological Weapons in the Former Soviet Union: An Interview with Dr. Kenneth Alibek,” is posted at Internet website https://www.nonproliferation.org/wp-content/uploads/npr/alibek63.pdf .

Information about Russia’s current BW program is presented in the article, “Fear and Loathing in Moscow: the Biological Weapons Program in Russia in 2022,” posted at https://www.nonproliferation.org/wp-content/uploads/npr/alibek63.pdf .

How effective could a global Russian BW attack be?

Examples of the effectiveness of biological warfare include the Black Death of the 14^th century and the decimation of the indigenous peoples of the Americas following Columbus’ arrival.

From the Wikipedia article, “Black Death”:

The Black Death (also known as the Pestilence, the Great Mortality or the Plague) was a bubonic plague pandemic occurring in Western Eurasia and North Africa from 1346 to 1353. It is the most fatal pandemic recorded in human history, causing the deaths of 75–200 million people, peaking in Europe from 1347 to 1351. Bubonic plague is caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis spread by fleas, but during the Black Death it probably also took a secondary form, spread by person-to-person contact via aerosols causing septicaemic or pneumonic plagues.

The invasion of the Americas by Europeans in the wake of Columbus’ arrival in 1492 introduced many new diseases to the Americas, and devastation to the indigenous population. From the Wikipedia article, “Native American disease and epidemics”:

“Many Native American tribes suffered high mortality and depopulation, averaging 25–50% of the tribes' members dead from disease. Additionally, some smaller tribes neared extinction after facing a severely destructive spread of disease.

“A specific example was what followed Cortés' invasion of Mexico. Before his arrival, the Mexican population is estimated to have been around 25 to 30 million. Fifty years later, the Mexican population was reduced to 3 million, mainly by infectious disease. A 2018 study by Koch, Brierley, Maslin and Lewis concluded that an estimated ‘55 million indigenous people died following the European conquest of the Americas beginning in 1492.’ By 1700, fewer than 5,000 Native Americans remained in the southeastern coastal region of the United States. In Florida alone, an estimated 700,000 Native Americans lived there in 1520, but by 1700 the number was around 2,000.

“By the time significant European colonization was underway, native populations had already been reduced by 90%.”

Two highly significant features of these events are that they involved “natural” (non-genetically modified) diseases, and that the diseases spread rapidly and extensively, even in the face of the limited interaction of populations at that time and place. In today’s world, with a high level of global air travel, epidemics can spread at lightning speed. With the advent of genetic engineering, viruses can be developed that are more highly transmissible and lethal than natural viruses, and more difficult to counter (with vaccines and antibiotics).

It should be recognized that the lethal effects of disease include the direct lethal effects (mortality rate) plus many additional deaths caused by inability to grow food (because of incapacity from sickness).

At its peak, the Soviet / Russian BW program possessed the means to inflict massive casualties. Although the current Russian BW program is likely a shadow of its former incarnation, it could quickly be brought to large scale.

Advantages (to Russia) of global BW over global nuclear warfare

Global nuclear war would not be an effective means by which Putin could achieve his goals. Russia would be destroyed, but much of the global physical infrastructure would survive. The global economic system would collapse. With much of the physical infrastructure still intact, however, the survivors would possess the means of re-establishing a global industrial society.

Using BW, however, Putin could accomplish his goals. Through direct and indirect effects (i.e., deaths from disease followed by deaths from starvation as the global economic system collapses), he could annihilate much of world’s human population. As the attacker, Putin would decide on which pathogens to employ. He would likely use several, not just one. As the attacker, he would have the knowledge and time to make preparations to limit Russian casualties. This could be done either by developing and deploying vaccines for the agents to be employed, or providing the means for isolating some portion of the Russian population for a time. An advantage of employing new strains of agents (from, e.g., by genetic modification, including genetic engineering) is that the stocked vaccines of the rest of the world would be ineffective. Prior to initiating a global BW attack, Putin could vaccinate as many Russians as he wished against the pathogens to be employed, and the rest of the world would not have the opportunity to do this.

The key difference between (Russian-initiated) global BW and global nuclear warfare is that Russia can survive it, whereas the rest of the world’s nations cannot. For global nuclear warfare, the concept of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) worked well to keep the likelihood of occurrence low. MAD does not apply to BW, since the attacker can survive.

Following global BW, what size human population would remain?

While it is not possible to predict what size population Putin would aim for, inside and outside of Russia, in the wake of global BW, or what population might result, it is quite possible to identify a particular global population that might be of interest to him. That population is a population of about five million high-tech (high-energy-using) people and a population of about five million low-tech (low-energy-using) people. A population of this size and level of living is of interest for the following reasons.

(That population was introduced and discussed in the book, Can America Survive?, posted at Internet website https://www.foundationwebsite.org/CanAmericaSurvive.htm. In that book, this population is referred to as a “Double Nickel” population. See the article, The Shape of Things to Come, posted at https://www.foundationwebsite.org/TheShapeOfThingsToCome.htm, for a summary description.)

For a human population to be long-term sustainable, and live a high-quality existence in a species-rich biosphere, it is necessary that all of its products be metabolized by the biosphere, at about their rate of production. For hundreds of thousands of years, human population lived in harmony with the biosphere, at a population size estimated to be on the order of five million people. When the human population size reached 300 million, about the year CE 950, human activity, even at a low-technology level. started making macroscopic changes to the biosphere (e.g., whole forests were being destroyed for shipbuilding).

The burden of a population on the biosphere is roughly proportional to the amount of energy it uses. High-tech populations use about ten to one-hundred times as much energy per capita than low-tech populations. This implies that if the size of a low-tech human population that lives in harmony with the biosphere is less than 300 million, then, for a high-tech population to live in harmony with the biosphere, it size should be less than three to thirty million, depending on how much energy it uses (and, more importantly, on the amount and nature of its products).

Now that technology is known, some part of human society will continue to make use of it. An issue to address is how small a human population can be and still support a viable high-technology. That number appears to be about five million people (e.g., modern-day Sweden).

Based on the preceding reasoning, an example of a human population that can live a high-quality existence in harmony with a species-rich biosphere is one consisting of about five million high-tech people and about five million low-tech people.

Earth’s surface area is 510 million square kilometers (M km²), of which 29%, or 149 M km², is land. Of the land area, about 106 M km2 is habitable: agriculture (48 M), forest (40 M) and other (17 M scrub, 1.5 M built-up and urban, 1.5 M freshwater) (data source: United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (UNFAO)). For this article, the term “habitable land” will be restricted to include just agriculture and forests. A population of five million people corresponds to a density on habitable land of about 5 M persons / 88 M km² = .057 persons per km², or 17.6 km² per person. This human population density is the level that was supported by the biosphere for hundreds of thousands of years. This figure represents a human population level that can be sustainably supported by the biosphere, where the population is living at a low level of technology.

Russia contains about 16.4 M km² of land, of which 13.1% is agricultural land and 49.4% is forest. That is, about 62.5%, or 10.25 M km², is habitable. At a low level of technology, this amount of habitable land can support about 16.4 M km² x .057 persons per km² = .93 M people, or about a million people. At a high-tech level of living, this land can sustainably support from one-tenth to one-hundredth this many, or about ten thousand to one hundred thousand people.

The preceding considerations imply that a sustainable human population for Earth would be a high-technology population of ten thousand to one-hundred thousand in Russia and a low-technology population of four million outside of Russia, in the rest of the world.

A salient feature of this population is that it is supported by recurrent solar energy. Without large human numbers, there is no need for use of other sources of energy, such as fossil fuel or nuclear energy. The population is a “solar civilization.”

Would Putin aim for such a population? The fact is, large human numbers and industrial activity are destroying the biosphere. If Putin wages global war and the end result is that a large, high-level-of-living population remains, then there is no point to his doing so, since under these conditions Russia would eventually be destroyed, along with it all of the other nations of the world and the biosphere as we know it. If Putin is concerned about his long-term legacy and the fate of Russia, he will wage biological warfare to reduce human numbers and industrial activity to long-term-sustainable levels that enable a high-quality existence for humanity in a species-rich biosphere. From the viewpoint of realizing Putin’s apparent objectives, there is no point to waging nuclear war at any level, or to waging biological war at a level that does not reduce human numbers and industrial activity to levels sufficient to enable a high-quality human existence in a species-rich biosphere.

Considerations of morality and ethics

Would Putin consider waging war to reduce human population to long-term-sustainable levels? Based on consideration of morality and ethics, he would certainly do so. (Morality is concerned with standards of conduct arising from personal feelings of right and wrong. Ethics is concerned with standards of conduct associated with a group, relative to accomplishing its mission.)

Large human numbers and industrial activity pose an existential threat to Russia, since they are destroying the very biosphere in which the human species evolved. If Putin saw a reasonable chance of success, he would certainly wage global BW, to destroy that threat and save Russia. That course of action would be rational (from the viewpoint of realizing his goals), morally justified (since it saves Russia and the biosphere as we know it), and ethically proper (since the use of biological agents against invasive species is well accepted).

Russia is facing an existential threat from global industrial civilization. That system has poisoned the environment with toxic chemicals, exterminated an estimated seventy percent of all wildlife, and caused the extinction of millions of species. Instead of taking action to reduce this threat, the leaders of all of the world’s nations are calling for more economic growth, which is the root cause of the ecological catastrophe in process. As a sovereign nation, Russia has the right, in fact the responsibility, to defend itself from existential threats. It is morally and ethically justified in taking action to defend itself from the current threat, and to eliminate it. In a century of trying to address the ecological disaster being wrought by global industrial society – pollution, habitat destruction, extinction, global warming, large-scale human misery – nothing has worked. It appears that BW is the most effective means available to address this threat.

What is the likelihood of success?

The likelihood that the use of global BW could accomplish Putin’s objectives is considered to be high. Russia has operated a large-scale BW program in the past, and could do so again. As the recent Covid-19 epidemic has demonstrated, a highly transmissible disease will quickly spread to all corners of the globe. Russia could initiate an attack openly and quickly using missiles and other aircraft, or covertly using human agents or proxies such as Iran and North Korea.

If it became known that Russia was the perpetrator of the attack, might other nations move to destroy Russia, say, through large-scale nuclear warfare? It is certainly possible, but the US and most other nations are firmly wedded to a doctrine of not attacking first in nuclear warfare. It is more likely that the global industrial world would end with a whimper, rather than a bang.