Dastan Eleukenov: It was so highly classified that in Almaty, which was the capital of Kazakhstan at the time, where republic's political leadership was located, no one knew about that site, nor...
A tiny number of people knew. In the first place, of course, this had less to do, I think, with the fact that it was a site where weapons of mass destruction were produced than with the fact that by the time the decision was made to build that plant, the Soviet Union had already signed the Conventions on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Chemical Weapons... um, Biological Weapons. And of course, the ink on those agreements was not even dry when the construction began. This was, it goes without saying, in flagrant violation of our international commitments.