Caporegime
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
39,267
Location
Ireland

Quite possibly, the biggest tragedy in Video Game History. I remember that trailer coming out and being blown away by it, who knew another decade would pass before a patched together series of maps would be released as this game. :(
 
Man of Honour
Joined
5 Dec 2003
Posts
20,997
Location
Just to the left of my PC
Here's something disturbingly messed up - Vozrozhdeniya island. A large island forcibly depopulated by the Soviet Union and used as a biological weapons research, production and testing facility. Despite being an island in a remote area and quite some distance from the mainland, there were some fatal accidental escapes of bioweapons that have since been officially admitted and the whole thing was disturbingly lax even by bioweapons standards. So, for example, wild animals were almost certainly exposed to yersinia pestis engineered to be weaponised and more potent than naturally occuring strains. Given that yersinia pestis is carried by animals and causes bubonic, pneumonic and septacemic plagues, that's a particularly bad idea. Are there still infected animals around? Maybe, though probably not as there hasn't been an outbreak. There were other bioweapons on the island and the disposal of them was wildly inadequate. Bury some, set some fires, leave. So when a team went in years later they found containers of unknown substances in the partially burned buildings. Which they didn't have the resources to search properly, let alone thoroughly decontaminate. The biggie is anthrax because we know for certain that large parts of the island were contaminated with various strains of anthrax engineered to be worse than usual and we know for certain that anthrax can remain dangerous for centuries. There was a clean-up of the main anthrax dump, but anthrax will be in the soil in some parts of the island to this day.

Well, at least it's a remote island that people can be kept away from. Except that it isn't any more. It was in the Aral sea, which no longer exists. Another area ruined by the USSR that's a whole story in itself, but the relevance here is that the former island is now part of the mainland and people and animals can easily get to it and bring out who knows what either accidentally or deliberately.

The USSR signed the treaty completely banning development and production in 1975...and completely ignored the treaty. In 1992, the Russian Federation formally acknowledged that after the deputy director of their bioweapons project defected to the USA and spoke about it in great detail. They said they would end the bioweapons program for real this time, honest. Maybe they did. Maybe they didn't.

 
Soldato
Joined
25 Nov 2005
Posts
12,444
Here's something disturbingly messed up

It's really no more messed up than their early nuclear disposal methods


Or that time they thought they could construct a reservoir with a nuclear bomb


I mean at least they forcibly depopulated the island before testing with their bio weapons :D

Brought to you by the instant gratification monkey.... **** that guy

 
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