The weaponization of Ustinov is one of the more harrowing episodes in "Biohazard," a new book by Kanatja Alibekov, who worked for two decades at the biological weapon conglomerate Biopreparat and was deputy director before his defection in 1992. Having changed his name to Ken Alibek, he now works for a northern Virginia consulting firm, devising ways to enhance immunity to the weapons he once designed. Alibek's book reveals the secrets of the enormous Soviet germ warfare program, and implies that many of its scientists may still be at work. As such, it's a good advertisement for the Clinton administration's $1.4 billion bioterrorism initiative, whose most visible component is a program to inoculate all 2.4 million active and reserve service members against deadly anthrax bacteria. It comes as something of a surprise, then, to learn that Alibek thinks the $130 million anthrax vaccination program is not very sound.

In this, he is by no means alone. At Dover Air Force Base in Delaware on May 5, Col. Felix Grieder, the wing commander, temporarily suspended vaccinations on the 3,600-strong base because the performance of a Pentagon briefer sent to explain the shots had been "inadequate to dispel rumors and misinformation" about the vaccine's safety, Grieder's spokesman said. The incident at Dover reflects growing skepticism in and outside the military over the safety and reliability of the anthrax shots. A movement to make the shot voluntary has been orchestrated by an extremely loose coalition of critics -- everyone from Clinton-bashing militia types to left-wing activists, along with a General Accounting Office investigator in Washington and a day-care provider in suburban Denver who serves as electronic den mother for thousands of disgruntled soldiers, sailors and airmen. In the past six weeks, top brass and Food and Drug Administration officials have twice been called before Congress to answer critics of the program. In the middle of a war, the Pentagon is being accused of reckless disregard for the health of its men and women. "It would seem that troops are being used as guinea pigs," says Mark Zaid, a lawyer who represents several sailors disciplined for refusing the vaccine.

The careful observer is inclined, initially, to interpret the uproar as a farrago of half-baked claims and misapprehensions. It began early last year when, in the course of filing a lawsuit on behalf of a former CIA agent, Zaid turned up documents revealing irregularities in the Michigan laboratory that produces the anthrax vaccine used during the Gulf War and in the current vaccination campaign. Another vector of opposition was a group of anti-war activists, including a Freeport, Maine, emergency room doctor named Meryl Nass, who has contended for many years that the United States was conducting its own biowarfare program. The documents suggested that the anthrax vaccine, licensed in 1970 but used by only about 20,000 people prior to the Gulf War, had been inadequately tested and was being sloppily produced. Furthermore, the critics claimed, some troops were suffering devastating illness after taking the shots -- and six shots in all were required for full protection.

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