In early 1991, several scientists went deep into the Siberian tundra on a covert mission. They worked for a secret laboratory funded by the Soviet government, and they needed a sample of variola major, the virus that causes smallpox.
They headed to a cemetery from the 1800s reserved for smallpox victims and cut deep into the ice. They extracted several corpses still wrapped in caribou fur. The ice had preserved the bodies well, and the scientists took bone and tissue samples, hoping they still contained the virus.
The scientists were looking for a cover. They had been working on smallpox as a possible biological weapon, and now they needed to explain themselves.
Smallpox as a Biological Weapon
When the scientists cut into the Arctic ice, the U.S.S.R. had just been inspected by the World Health Organization (WHO) authorities and unhappy representatives from the U.S. and the U.K. They all demanded to know why the Soviets were working with a virus that had been eradicated more than a decade prior.
