Why did the United States build so many biological laboratories in the former Soviet countries? Do they study chemical and biological weapons in it?

The Soviet Union had a large and illegal biological weapons program. This was of course against treaties that the Soviet Union had signed as well, so the Soviets lied to the world. When communism failed, and the Soviet Union collapsed, there were problems with weapons of mass destruction in what were now neighboring states. First, there were nuclear weapons in these former Soviet states that were now new nations. By treaty Russia became the successor nuclear power of the former Soviet Union and the other new states sent the nuclear weapons back to Russia. Also, the parts of the biological weapons programs that were in former Soviet states were now even more exposed and the Soviet Union had to come clean about their lies.

Since the government had collapsed the biological weapons scientists were not being paid, because they worked for the Soviet government. So, not only is there this infrastructure to make biological weapons and the people to man it and these people are not being paid, therefore they can’t live. Many of the scientists started to go to places like Iran because Iran could pay them. Then the weapons and weapons production equipment started to be sold to places like Iran. Iran is a dangerous totalitarian regime that supports terrorism, so this had to be put to a stop. In some way these scientists had to be paid for useful work that was not going to be used to support terrorism. So, the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program was born.

This program put these scientists and facilities to work pursuing useful, peaceful projects. This helped prevent sophisticated biological weapons from being used to support terrorism. Of course, it was a big black eye to the communists that 1. the US had discovered their lies and 2. that the US could afford to pay to support these facilities to do basically anything but biological weapons research and production. So, the communists look for any opportunity to say that this was done for some nefarious purpose. However, the facts are that the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program was done to thwart the nefarious purposes of the Soviets.

Oh an by the way, giving those nuclear weapons back to Russia may have been quite a mistake. Would Russia have attempted to annex Ukrainian territory or wage war against them if Ukraine was a nuclear power? That, or NATO should have put some bases in Ukraine sooner. The Russians would not like that, but it is coming, maybe not next week, but it is coming.