Unit One Three

[Desertfox]

February 29th, 1919

The forbidding slopes of Sverdlovsk Island were the perfect deterrent to interlopers, and those that made it up would be immediately cut down by machine guns manned by crack units of the SSS, for this island was the home of Unit One Three. Very few knew of the existence of this unit, for it was this units job to develop new and more insidious ways of killing people.

"Colonel Skywalker, what brings you here today?"
 
"The possibility of war is high, I need to know what we can count on and when we can count on it."

"Well as you should know, Phosgene has been successfully weaponized, and we have just finished another batch of chlorine. Smallpox, San Joaquin Valley Fever, and Bubonic Plague, are all ready for use. We are also working on Pneumatic Plague, a lot more effective and deadly that Bubonic Plague."

"What of this Mustard Gas? Anthrax?"

"We are working but not making any headway. Mustard Gas is very effective, as it does not have to be inhaled, but we can't weaponize it at the moment. Anthrax is extremely deadly and nearly impossible to destroy. That is our main problem, our facilities are not good enough to work on Anthrax on a large scale. An accident could wipe out the entire facility and leave the island inhospitable."

"Understood, I'll see that you get the money to build the required facilities. What else is new?"

"Have you read the reports from France? Madame Curie's work? The Syphilis girls? From our own work we think that it wasn't syphilis that hit those girls. We have exposed lab mice to samples of Radium and Polonium. They have died soon after. The Radium gives of radiation that is killing the mice, even some of the workers have experience similar symptoms. If we could somehow get large amounts of the substance we could turn it into a bomb, even more effective than any of the biological ones. The Radium does not die and it is absorbed by plants and so ingested by the target in their food. We could theoretically wipe out the Chinese from the face of the Earth."

"What are the problems?"

"Cost and size. Extracting Radium from pitchblend is very expensive, time-consuming, and only yields minimal amounts. Also such a weapon would be deadly to the delivering crew or else insanely heavy due to lead shielding required. But we have considered using an unmanned zeppelin, controlled remotely from another one. it could be a devastating weapon, if we could only get the material in sufficient quantities."

"Anything else?"

"Well, nothing of importance. Now if we could only tailor bacteria to a specific race, we would have the ultimate biological weapon..."