BACKGROUND: The Aral Sea’s Vozrozhdeniie Island was the main open-air testing ground for Soviet biological warfare weapons. Weaponized agents included tularemia, epidemic typhus, Q fever, smallpox, plague, anthrax, Venezuelan equine encephalomyelitis, Glanders, brucellosis, and Marburg infection. Numerous other agents were studied for possible use as biological weapons, including the Ebola virus, AIDS, Junin virus (Argentinian hemorrhagic fever), Machupo virus (Bolivian hemorrhagic fever), yellow fever, Lassa fever, Japanese encephalitis and Russian spring-summer encephalitis. The desiccation of the Aral Sea is destined to release these deadly toxins into an environment already critically taxed in a region unable to cope with the legacy of enviornmental destruction caused by Soviet cotton production. Health experts maintain that once these toxins are unleashed, it will be nearly impossible to contain them.

The Aral Sea at one time was the world’s fourth largest lake, after the Caspian Sea, Lake Victoria, and Lake Superior. It covered an area the size of southern California, draining an immense area covering Tajikistan, Afghanistan, northeastern Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan. During the 1950s, sixty cubic kilometers of water flowed annually into the Aral Sea. Soviet planners in Moscow had decided that Central Asia would become the USSR’s cotton plantation, and the waters of the Amu and Syr Darya rivers were diverted to irrigation of the crop. Fifty years later scientists estimate the Aral Sea receives only between one to five cubic kilometers per year, whereas thirty-five cubic kilometers a year are necessary simply to stabilize the remaining shoreline.

The diversion of waters has led to a dramatic decrease in the Aral Sea’s surface area, shrinking its coverage from 26,000 kilometers in the 1960s to about 11,000 kilometers today. On an American scale, it is equivalent to losing both Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. Natural decline has been equally precipitous. Only two species of fish are left of the more than twenty that thrived fifty years ago. Only thirty-eight of one hundred and seventy-eight indigenous animal species are still present. Salinity has increased 400%, higher than that of the North Sea. The moderating effect of the Aral Sea on the desert climate has also been lost. The region’s weather has become more continental, with warmer summers and cooler winters. The climate is much drier and temperatures more variable. Unfortunately, Uzbekistan cannot wean itself from its dependence on cotton, its "white gold," which uses huge amounts of water resources and sucks the Aral Sea dry. The country produces over 5,000,000 tons of cotton per year, which accounts for nearly one-third of state revenues.

IMPLICATIONS: The effects of Aral Sea desiccation on the local population has been as, if not more, catastrophic than it has been on the environment. Drinking water contains 7-16 times the maximum permissible level of pollutants and pesticides. This pollutant level rises to 900 times the acceptable levels in drainage and irrigation canals. Every pregnant woman in the region suffers from anemia. Seventy percent of tenth grade boys have serious morphological abnormalities in their sperm. Morbidity rates for malignant tumors are increasing 3% each year. Life expectancy is as low as 40 years for men in some areas, while infant mortality rates reach 110 per 1000. As the sea shrinks, salinized land emerges. Today, an estimated 75,000,000 tons of toxic salts and dust each year blow off the Aral Sea’s exposed sea bed to as far away as the Himalayas, Belarus and the Arctic shores of the Russian Federation.

When the USSR in 1988 decided to get rid of the evidence of their Chemical Biological Weapons program, nearly one hundred tons of anthrax spores were loaded into steel drums, doused with bleach, and shipped to the Aral’s Vozrozdeniie Island, where the sludge was dumped into trenches and then covered with sand. Despite slipshod Soviet efforts at eradication, anthrax spores have survived. American scientists have been visiting the island for the last four years and have been able to culture anthrax from their samples. The pulmonary form of anthrax has a fatality rate that can reach 90%.

As the Aral Sea shrinks, Vozrozdeniie Island has grown from 200 to 2000 kilometers long. The regional worry is that a land bridge will form to the island, allowing infected wildlife to transmit these diseases to the mainland. At one point there is only a five-foot deep two mile water channel between Vozrozdeniie and the coast. Kazakh scientists believe that if nothing is done, the island will be joined to the mainland within ten years. Kazakhstan has already experienced outbreaks of plague in Aral’sk, a port city. But the Aral Sea toxins will not be confined to Central Asia.

CONCLUSIONS: The 4 June 2000 issue of the Australian newspaper The Age carried a report that Osama bin Laden's associates had recently bought anthrax and bubonic plague viruses from Kazakh arms dealers. Economic desperation and terrorism are a potent mix. Should these viral agents be unleashed, the human and economic cost would be enormous. A 1997 report published by the Center for Disease Control estimated that such an attack on 100,000 people would cause tens of thousands of deaths and would cost between US$ 477.7 million to US$ 26.2 billion. Emergency services would be immediately overwhelmed.

It is imperative that the West immediately focus its attention on the ecological and biological implications of the Aral Sea debacle, and help Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan resolve their problems. Otherwise, their problems may visit the West in a form more virulent than anything seen since the Black Death. As the Uzbek proverb says, "At the beginning you drink water, at the end you drink poison."

AUTHOR BIO: Dr. John C. K. Daly received his doctorate from the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London in Russian and Middle Eastern Studies. He is currently a scholar at the Middle East Institute, Washington.

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