Andy Weber: Based on President Nazarbayev's very strong, visceral commitment to foregoing, as Kazakhstan became independent, nuclear weapons, biological weapons, and in particular the nuclear weapons and biological weapons test sites that were on Kazakhstan's territory, we made a request to visit what we knew as the largest anthrax factory ever built, in a place just over the Russian border, called Stepnogorsk, Kazakhstan, which was a secret Soviet military town... previously did not appear on maps, in the middle of the steppe. And it was chosen, indeed, for its isolation. The city itself wasn't established until 1960 or so, and after the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention went into force in 1975, and after the anthrax release in Sverdlovs, now, Yekaterinburg, the Soviets expanded their illegal biological weapons program, and realized that it made no sense to have these facilities in urban areas, so they set out in the 1980s to build a new facility for the production and testing of biological weapons, bacterial and viral, on a massive scale in the town of Stepnogorsk, Kazakhstan.