ms, how were you received in the United States by government officials?It was a shock. A shock because this country stopped this program in 1969. It's not naivet, but you know, what the mentality is here in the United States--if [you] signed a treaty, [you] cannot do anything in this case. But this type of mentality couldn't be applied to other countries. For some countries, just the process of signing one or another treaty is some kind of secret permission to activate to ... intensify this activity, because it gives some kind of cover. For example, a country now understands that it has some kind of a weapon that could be used in future war without any serious consequences. What else should be done immediately? What else do you consider to be absolutely necessary to start out? The best way is to organize a special panel of scientists, intelligence people, government, and develop a national program of bio-defense.Your suggestion is to begin the process and the research--what would be the first step?Probably not just the first step. We need to make several steps. Political steps first of all. We need to develop a procedure [on] how to organize mandatory inspections, not just between the United States and Russia. We [can't] forget that there are several countries that are interested in developing biological weapons. That's why we need to undertake some political steps.Second, we need to continue developing vaccines, but we don't have to rely on vaccines ... we need to start developing something else.Is one problem with the vaccines that there is always a variety of bugs that could be used?First of all, the amount of agents [that] could be used in biological weapons averages 50-70. But if we add possible genetically altered agents, this figure reaches 100 and more. Could somebody imagine 100 vaccines? Could somebody imagine that groups or population vaccinated against dozens or even hundreds possible diseases? That's impossible. Why? What w...