evidence: Vozrozhdeniya Island was an actual island in the pre-Soviet Aral Sea. The Soviet military decided that such an isolated location would be a useful site for bioweapons research, starting in 1948 with a center named Aralsk-7. With the shrinkage of the Aral Sea, in 2001 Vozrozhdeniya Island attached itself to the mainland, thus becoming a peninsula. At that point in time, the Soviet Union had dissolved, but remnants of bioweapons research remained on the island, but now theoretically accessible by land. With American assistance, Uzbekistan decontaiminated ten anthrax burial sites in 2002.