The United States is sending a team to the Aral Sea island of Vozrozhdeniye, the final resting place of much of the Soviet Union's biological weapons experiments. The official purpose of the operation is to remove buried anthrax spores and decontaminate the site. But Washington is more likely looking to develop new vaccines and antibiotics while preventing anti-U.S. groups from retrieving deadly samples.

But the budget allotted for the operation, a mere $6 million, is insufficient for the task, indicating an ulterior motive for the deployment. Washington's plans may actually involve claiming samples to develop its own germ warfare treatments and keeping hostile players from getting their hands on deadly samples.

The Soviets tested and disposed of their biological weapons on the Aral Sea island of Vozrozhdeniye partly because of its remoteness. However, Moscow's inefficient irrigation practices depleted the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers that feed the Aral. Robbed of its source waters, the sea has dried to less than 20 percent of its 1960 volume, and the tiny island is now connected to Uzbekistan.

Washington is concerned that Vozrozhdeniye's proximity to the mainland makes it easier for terrorist groups or anti-U.S. regimes to come into the area and pick up samples of anthrax -- or other deadly agents -- that were specifically engineered to be more virulent and resistant to antibiotics. 

Complicating matters is the fact that the facility, once the site of the world's largest biological weapons program, hasn't been staffed in a decade. The Soviets simply buried their excess stock and left. Active bacteria and viruses, including deadly cocktails of anthrax, tularaemia, bubonic plague, brucellosis, Q fever and Venezuelan encephalitis, remain in the soil.

Decontaminating germ warfare facilities is tricky, expensive and time-consuming. Only one biological weapons location, the United Kingdom's Gruinard Island, has ever been declared clean, and that certification required multiple attempts over several decades. 

The U.S. chemical weapons disposal site on Johnston Atoll in the Pacific Ocean is expected to absorb $12 billion in funds. Investing $6 million in decontaminating Vozrozhdeniye may be a good start, but if the task were really that cheap, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, the two states that inherited the Aral Sea, would have cleaned up the area years ago.

This cost-investment disconnect indicates the United States has other things in mind for the island. First, the U.S. government desperately needs to know if the anthrax used in Florida, New York and Washington was engineered by a state. Testing the Vozrozhdeniye disposal sites will allow Washington to either exclude the Soviet facility as a source of the strains or pick up a thread for the ongoing investigation.

Second, until the United States can dedicate more resources to actually decontaminating the island, it will need to set up a monitoring system to prevent anti-U.S. groups from obtaining enhanced pathogens. The "decontaminating" team is probably more of a test-and-guard team to protect Vozrozhdeniye's questionable riches.

Finally, obtaining live samples from the island will allow the United States to begin developing advanced vaccines and antibiotics against pathogens far more dangerous than naturally occurring ones. Washington floated the idea of developing its own advanced strains of anthrax this week for use in developing such defensive measures, a step technically allowed by the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention banning germ warfare. 

Getting Vozrozhdeniye samples not only saves the United States the time of developing the strains itself, it neatly sidesteps the public relations firestorm that crafting biological agents would ignite.