Wednesday, May 14, 2014

GLOBAL WARMING DOESN'T MATTER UNDER A PILE OF NUCLEAR ASH



The following is an excerpt from the 1997 book One Point Safe from Leslie and Andrew Cockburn. I'm pretty certain that most of it still applies. If so, it seems like every other issue is small potatoes. Basically, our hair is on fire and until it's put out, the rumbling in our stomachs is going to have to wait to be dealt with:

"It is a gray April morning in 1997. Minister of Defense Igor Nikolayevich Rodionov’s gleaming limousine sweeps into the center of Moscow. At the end of Arbat Street, across from a popular Irish bar and the offices of a witch grown prosperous selling “love spells,: it swings into the courtyard fronting the massive yellow headquarters of the Russian General Staff and the Defense Ministry. As it glides to a stop in front of the huge double doors the guard gives a crisp salute. Deferential aides hurry behind him as he strides to his office. Save for the red, white and blue on the roof, he might almost be following in the same footsteps as military chieftains of the past-Zhukov, Malinowski, Grechko, Ustinov-masters of all they surveyed.

The power of the men who occupied the Minister of Defense’s office in the Soviet days was almost limitless. This was the ultimate command center for the growing fleets of the Soviet Navy patrolling the oceans of the world with its modern warships and hundreds of submarines. Contingency war plans to send the tank armies of the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany crashing across the borders of Western Europe were crafted here. In 1968 the General Staff organized an occupation of Czechoslovakia by over 200,000 troops in a single day. The Air Armies of the Soviet Air Force and the Air Defense Forces could throw thousands of planes into the sky at any moment. Every branch of the military had nuclear weapons, 55,000 of them at their peak-nuclear artillery shells, nuclear mines, nuclear torpedoes, nuclear bombs, long-range missiles in Typhoon nuclear submarines, the largest in the world. Moscow itself was guarded by antimissile missiles with nuclear warheads. Above all there were the intercontinental missiles of the Strategic Rocket Forces, the elite service manned by the best and the brightest and striking fear into the Americans and their Western allies.

Soviet weapons had fought the Americans to a standstill in Vietnam and had given the Israelis a bloody nose in the October war of 1973. Half the economy of the Soviet Union was devoted to servicing the machine, every year pouring more tanks, planes, ships, missiles into the already bloated arsenals. Five million men were in uniform, their ranks continually refilled by the 900,000 eighteen-year-olds who twice a year obediently reported for two or more years of compulsory draft duty. Officers were the pampered elite of Soviet society, assured of good pay, the best available housing, a comfortable pension and universal respect. The most senior commanders lived like Oriental potentates, free to indulge their every whim. In the 1960s one admiral in the Northern Fleet, irritated by the untidy look of varying shades of natural rock, ordered an extensive stretch of coastline painted gray. Such high-ranking officers were paid very little, but they had no need of money. The system took lavish care of them.

Igor Rodionov will never get to decorate a cliff. If he tried he would probably find that the paint had long since been sold on the black market. Bad as things were at the time of the fall of the Soviet Union, when Bill burns found there was no money to pay for post-Communist officers’ cap badges, the state of the Russian military has grown steadily worse. Now, from the very building in which the minister sits, colonels are selling the office furniture out the back door to replace meager paychecks that never arrive on time.

Rodionov himself can remember the days when such things would have been unthinkable, when he was a rising general on the General Staff and later the commander of the General Staff Academy. He was a soldier then, uninvolved in politics. Now he must struggle to survive in a welter of intrigue. The man who sponsored him for the job, General Alexander Lebed, has since fallen from favor in the Kremlin, where the ruling powers are trying to undermine his political prospects by crushing a mafia group that controls the aluminum industry and funds his presidential campaign. Rodionov himself must compete for influence with Yeltsin against the President’s defense adviser, a mathematician names Yuri Baturin, best known for his translation of Alice in Wonderland into Russian. On this April morning Rodionov is right to feel nervous. In little over a month’s time he will be summarily sacked, leaving his successor with even less money to face exactly the same problems.

The minister has little more control over the military chieftains down the hall from his office. He only just managed to get rid of General Vladimir Semenov, formerly the Commander in Chief of the Ground Forces, despite evidence of what Rodionov called “shady property deals practiced by him and his wife.” For months Semenov simply refused to leave. He had powerful backing in the Kremlin. So does the former chief military finance manager, who has yet to be fired even though he was suspended on suspicion of corruption eighteen months ago. Charges were dropped against General Anatoly Kuntsevich, a senior officer in charge of dismantling Russia’s chemical weapons stocks, even though he had been selling the technology for advanced binary nerve gas weapons to the Syrians. And the Japanese cult leader who planned the deadly sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway was claiming in court that he had bought the blueprints for the sarin factory for $79,000 from a senior defense analyst Yeltsin.

“An honest person has two options,” sighs the minister to a Russian visitor. “Either join the thieves or go.” But the thieves and gangsters and thieves are everywhere in Russia. Businessmen, despairing of the courts, turn to extortion specialists to collect debts in exchanges for 50 percent of the take. Even arguments over a fender bender on the highway will routinely lead to appeals to the Mafiya for adjudication. Senior officials openly attend birthday parties honoring mafia chieftains. Talk-show hostss on TV have taken to speaking in mafia slang.

Today, the Minister of Defense is bemoaning a newly uncovered case of thievery by his alleged subordinates on a truly dramatic scale. He has just found out that a group of senior military commanders have coolly sold a billion dollars’ worth of weapons out of army stockpiles behind his back. The arms deal included eighty-four tanks, dozens of armored combat vehicles, long-range artillery pieces, small arms, millions of rounds of ammunition. Also part of the consignment were thirty-two R-17 Scud missiles, capable of carrying nuclear warheads. As part of the deal the military entrepreneurs had been able to privde a month-long missile training course at the Kapustin Yar military firing range. The weapons were brought by Armenia, once a Soviet republic on the far southern rim of the old U.S.S.R., close by Iran, Turkey and Iraq. The Armenians were anxious to renew a bitter struggle with the neighboring oil-rich country of Azerbaijan, a conflict that the Russian government has officially been  attempting to settle through peaceful negotiation. Since shipping this arsenal by land without official clearance would have required an arrangement with the Customs, the mercenary commanders orchestrating the deal simply airlifted the entire amount, including the tanks, at which unwittingly supplied the giant transport aircraft and their fuel. “Tanks were airlifted!” frets the minister. “Good grief.” The enormous shipment had been a total secret until one disaffected insider leaked the story to a Moscow paper.

In the meantime, the military is starving for lack of money, in some cases literally so. In the first three months of the year the Ministry of Finance has handed over only 40 percent of the money needed to feed the troops. That bare statistic did not quite convey the misery of the rank and file. The previous March, in the far eastern city of Khabarovsk, an eighteen-year-old army conscript named Mikhaild Kubarsky had dropped dead on Lermontov Street in the center of town. He died of starvation. His unit out in the countryside had not received any rations for weeks and he had wandered into town in search of food. Many of his fellow conscripts have little physical reserves to fall back on. Army doctors examining the new intake of conscripts are classifying fully one in seven as “underweight”-a euphemism for malnourished. Forty-three percent of the draftees are found to be suffering from some form of mental illness. At a desolate far eastern military base at Komsomolsk-na-Amure, not far from where poor Kubarsky died from hunger, two soldiers recently blew themselves up while trying to extract precious metals from the warhead of an air defense missile they had stolen from the ammunition dump. Other take the easy way out-currently half the noncombat deaths in the military are due to suicide.

Even the troops who have just enough to eat may soon be in rags. Already the official allotment of overcoats is one for every five men and now the minister is bemoaning the fact that for the first three months of the year he has received only one-fiftieth of the money he needs for uniforms. There is even less money for new weapons. Such money as has been spent on hardware is often wasted. During 1996, for example, a new heavy cruiser, the Peter the Great, was finally launched. It had been planned in the prosperous days of the cold war to be part of an aircraft carrier formation in the Pacific. But while it was still being built, some high-ranking admirals made a cash sale of the Pacific Fleet’s only two carriers to South Korea for scrap. So when it was finally launched the navy sent the new cruiser, which had cost $1 billion, to join the Northern Fleet, where there is at least a carrier, even if it has no planes and is rusting at the quayside.

Even Rodionov finds it hard to pretend that he heads a fighting force, though in the spring of 1997 he bravely maintains that the armed forces are still a year away from total disintegration. Just over three years before, his predecessor had told Yeltsin that the rebellious Chechen capital of Grozny could be subdued by a single paratroop brigade “in hours.” Instead, after 100,000 people had died, the Russian military had struggled home in abject defeat. In the course of a two-and-a-half-year war the army was reduced to the condition of an armed mob. Drunken tank crews roamed the countryside, threatening to level villages unless they were paid off with vodka. Other soldiers were reduced to begging for food and selling their weapons to the enemy.

In one especially humiliating episode a Chechen guerrilla unit cruised across the border to the small southern Russian town of Budyannovsk, took two thousand hostages and were eventually allowed to return home in triumph. They had passed through the enemy lines simply by bribing the border guards. The following year another invading band of Chechens were briefly trapped in the small Russian village of Pervomayskoye before escaping in safety. Among their besiegers were the elite without food or warm clothes in the 15-below weather. When it was all over, the Alpha team, hungry, frozen and embittered, had to pay their own train fares back to Moscow.

At the end of 1996 dangerous times returned for the citizens of Budyannovsk. The 20th Airborne Brigade was withdrawn from Chechnya, billeted in the town and promptly forgotten by the high command. The officers and men had nothing to do but drink. No one bothered to send their pay. They turned instead to their only possessions of value: their weapons. Hand grenades became the commonest unit of currency, valued at the equivalent of two dollars. The bar owners and taxi drivers of Budyannovsk have learned not to refuse such payment, since irritated customers would simply pull the pin and let the grenade settle the argument.

The rest of the 1.7 million men in the armed forces are hardly in better condition. Apart from the civilian population, this rabble is no threat to anyone, certainly not to potential enemies such NATO or the Chinese. The high command knows this full well, and they know that everyone else knows too. Consequently, they have made an ominous decision.

Following close behind the minister as he marches to the elevator is a smartly uniformed colonel of the Ninth Department of the General Staff, known as a shurik. He is carrying what appears to be a small black briefcase. It is no ordinary piece of luggage. This is the cheget, the equivalent of the “football” that goes everywhere with the U.S. President, the ultimate control over the strategic nuclear arsenal.

When opened with the special key carried by the minister himself, the inside of the briefcase shows a flat panel with three displays. When all three are lit up, it means that there is a nuclear alert, enemy missiles are on their way, the Russian President and Chief of the General Staff are opening identical briefcases and all three are hooked into the Kazbek nuclear command and control network. At the top, display panels give urgent information: time to impact; number of incoming. Underneath the displays is a row of fiver buttons. From the left, three of them denote various nuclear strike plans. Press any one, and a varying number of missiles will erupt from their silos and streak toward their targets. The fourth is a “cancel” button, in case someone changes their mind. Last is the “transmit” button that sends the authorization to launch almost five thousand thermonuclear missiles that are still, today, on constant alert and ready to fire at the first sign of an attack.

The nuclear briefcase is the lingering symbol of Russia as a superpower. It was introduced in the days when the shurik attended the chief of a military empire that threw a long shadow, full of menace. Decisions taken in this building were so important for the world that, every night, U.S. military intelligence officers would come and count the number of lighted windows to gauge whether something unusual was afoot. Toda, the American stay home in bed, Russia is in chaos, but this is still the headquarters of a system as ever to waging thermonuclear combat.

Throughout the cold war, the strategic nuclear arsenal had been the ultimate deterrent, a decisive supplement to the enormous nonnuclear military forces. In the early 1980s the Soviet leadership had pledged that they would never be the first to use nuclear weapons. The “doctrine” dictated that only if someone else launched an attack using nuclear weapons would the U.S.S.R. retaliate by hurling its own megatons back across the North Pole in response. In November 1993, one month after bloody fighting had erupted in the center of Moscow as Yeltsin quelled a rebellious parliament, the General Staff announced a new policy. From now on Russia’s nuclear weapons would be used to deter “the launching of aggression,” whether the enemy went nuclear or not. The cold war was over, the country was sinking ever deeper into an uncontrolled morass of corruption and decay, but Russia was, even so, a nuclear superpower. Consequently, over half the strategic nuclear force is on constant twenty-four hour alert. The minister is still one of the very few people who can blow up the world with a briefcase on twenty minutes’ notice.

Brilliant and highly trained planners have put a great deal of thought into those few minutes. Even as the United States and the West pour billions of dollars into the Russian economy, the military commanders in Moscow are haunted by the notion that the Americans might launch a surprise nuclear strike and wipe them out before they could retaliate.

The countdown starts at the instant that an early-warning radar or one of the infrared satellites detects the telltale blips of weapons rising out of the enemy missile fields, streaking into space and headed for Russia. By that time the first missiles will already have been airborne for about a minute. In twenty-nine minutes they will start hitting Moscow.

The information is flashed to the Missile Analysis Center at Venyukovski, just inside the Moscow beltway. The duty officer at the center then immediately transmits a warning to the President, the Minster of Defense and the Chief of the General Staff that a nuclear attack is on the way. A small light on the outside of their chege briefcases begins to flash. The three men insert their special keys and open them up. By the time they are patched into a teleconference over special circuits with each other and the commanders of the nuclear forces there are twenty-four minutes to go before the first missile lands.

The warning center confirms the attack. Now a special circuit is switched on, connecting missile headquarters with the missile launch centers deep in silos on the steppes, the mobile SS-25 Topol missiles roaming the countryside and the ballistic missile submarines out at sea or on alert at the dockside. The President and the Minister of Defense then have a maximum of three minutes to decide what to do. Twenty-one minutes left.

Once the two men have agreed to launch, the General Staff starts sending the launch orders together with the “unblock” codes that allow the missiles to fire. Seventeen minutes.

Far away in the missile fields the crews take three minutes to receive the order and verify that it is official. Launching the alert force takes another three to four minutes. Ten minutes to spare, with luck.

The timeline might be stretched tighter still. If the enemy launches a missile from a submarine nearer to the Russian coastline, from the Norwegian Sea for example, then that extra ten minutes disappears. Every second counts.

That is what is meant by “launch on warning,” the war plan of both Russia and the United States six years after the end of the cold war. Take more time for reflection and the nuclear mushroom clouds might already be rising over the command centers. It would be too late. To launch before an explosion gives clear proof that the attack is real, the retaliatory missiles have to be on alert all the time. This is a nuclear hair trigger, just like the similar U.S. system, and it means that the whole command and control system absolutely had to operate smoothly and without any mistakes at all. There is no margin for error.

With the cold war ended, the United States and Russia felt free to conclude arms control agreements; these were widely assumed to have eliminated the threat of a nuclear holocaust. The START treaty of 1991 called for significant reductions in the number of nuclear weapons the two sides had trained on each other. But that still left each side with up to 8,000 warheads and bombers targeted on the other-quite enough to kill a hundred million people or more. The START II follow-on treaty cuts the numbers down to 3,500 on either side, still enough to destroy two continents. There are no plans to take the missiles off alert, ready to launch on warning.

In January 1994, Presidents Clinton and Yeltsin jointly announced that they had agreed on a move that would lift the threat of instant annihilation from their two countries. Their missiles would no longer be targeted on each other but on some harmless patch of distant ocean. Now, at last, it seemed that the nuclear hair trigger was relaxed. This was the proudest arms control achievement of Clinton’s presidency, and he was glad to proclaim it at every opportunity. During his first debate with Republican candidate Bob Dole in the 1996 election he stated confidently, “There are no nuclear missiles pointed at the children of the United States tonight and have not been in our administration for the first time since the dawn of the nuclear age.” The President liked the notion so much that during the campaign he repeated the announcement at least a hundred and thirty times.

It was wonderful news. It was also untrue.

Missiles are aimed by a series of instructions fed into their guidance computers on board or at their launch control center. The Russians did indeed set their ICBMs on what they called a “zero flight plan,”, but the wartime target settings stayed in the computer memory banks. Reprogramming the missiles to head for their aim points to the United States and elsewhere would take precisely ten seconds. Resetting the American weapons would take the same amount of time. In fact, for the Russian missile launched by accident or without proper clearance from the high command would automatically head for whatever spot it had been assigned in the original war plan. Whatever President Clinton may really think, the children of the United states are as unsafe as they have ever been.

On Wednesday, January 25, 1995, the world came close to nuclear war. All because a Russian bureaucrat had forgotten to forward a letter from Oslo.

Norway has long had a peaceful scientific program in which it launches high-altitude research rockets into the upper atmosphere. Throughout 1994, the scientists in Oslo were hard at work preparing for their most ambitious flight yet. Normally the rockets they sent up were modest, single-state affairs. This time the scientists wanted to study the aurora borealis, the northern lights, and for that they needed to send the instruments at least 900 miles up. The Black Brant XXII was three times as big as anything they had ever launched before. Built in America, it had four booster stages and somewhat resembled a U.S. Trident submarine-launched nuclear missile.

Every time the Norwegians prepared one of these flights from their rocket range on Andoy Island off the northern coast they were careful to write to the Russians well in advance. They were fully aware of how sensitive letting off missiles so close to Moscow’s territory could be. Accordingly, sometime in mid-December, the government dutifully informed the Russian Foreign Ministry via the embassy in Oslo that they were about to launch a rocket for scientific research. Because the actual launch time and date depended on the weather, they were not able to give a precise date, merely stating that it would take place after 5 A.M. some time between January 15 and February 5.

The Russians lost the message. Perhaps an idle official in the Foreign Ministry simply forgot to pass the letter on to the military and left it in a file or someone else in the Defense Ministry failed to tell the people who needed to know: the General Staff, the Strategic Rocket Forces or the missile attack warning center. That is why, when Black Brant finally blasted off soon after 9:24 Moscow time on the morning of January 25, the Russian nuclear command control system started counting down.

As the rocket climbed toward a thousand miles above the earth’s surface it was following a path that was of intense concern to the Russian war planners. In the view of the high command, still wedded to the view that a surprise U.S. nuclear attack was entirely possible, the northern Norwegian Sea would be a likely launch point for a submarine missile. It could arrive in twenty minutes or less and knock out the defense communications system with the electromagnetic pulse from a high-altitude nuclear burst.

Thus the high command was especially alert for any sign of a threat from this quarter. Unfortunately, its ability to interpret such a sign was deficient. By 1995, a gaping hole had appeared in the early-warning system. Early warning depends on long-range radars on the ground and orbiting satellites. Radars alone do not necessarily give accurate information about a missile attack. The standard Russian Malnya satellites follow elliptical orbits, swooping low over the United States and Chinese missile fields before swinging further out into space when they are over Russia itself-and nearby waters such as the Norwegian Sea. The high command has long hoped to introduce newer geostationary satellites that would remain permanently over Norway and watch for a sign of a sub launch. Once upon a time, in the days when the military was serviced by half the economy, they might have got their wish. But now the technology for the infrared sensors on such a satellite has proved beyond the resources of the military technicians. None are in orbit.

Instead, the frozen water of the northern seas were scanned by aging “Hen House” long-range radars on the Arctic and Baltic coasts of Russia. The decades-old Baltic watching post is not even in Russia anymore, since it was originally built in Latvia when that country was a secure province of the Soviet Union. There was a more up-to-date early-warning radar in Latvia, but the locals blew it up after they got their independence in 1991. In fact, much of the vital early-warning system no finds itself in newly independent and not necessarily friendly countries such as Azerbaijan, Ukraine and Kazakhstan as well as Latvia.

It was to three of these antiquated monitors that Black Brant first showed itself. No one, of course, had warned the operators about the Norwegians’ plans and they feared the worst. If it were heading for Moscow it would get there in five or six minutes. There was no time to reflect on whether it was really likely that America had suddenly decided to obliterate Russia. Just as if they were still in the darkest days of the cold war, they flashed news of an incoming hostile missile to the attack warning center on the edge of Moscow. Still watching their screens, they noticed the booster stages dropping off the strange missile as it shot ever higher into space. Nothing that they saw looked any different from a military launch. Thanks to the deficiencies of their equipment, they could not tell that the missile was heading north, toward the pole.

At the missile warning center the speeding object was immediately classified as a threat. The duty officers switched on the emergency communication system to alert the General Staff command post deep underground near a small village just outside Moscow. There, the general on duty had to make the momentous decision to activate the Kazbek nuclear-command and control system. Lights flashed on the suitcases. It must have been a terrible moment as the suitcase owners reached for their keys. This had never happened before, not even in the worst moments of the Cuban missile crisis. Out across Russia, the missile operators went on high alert. They were fifteen minutes or less away from launching a massive nuclear strike at the United States. One senior general later admitted that the high command was “stressed.”
The decisive vote on whether to launch or not belonged to Yeltsin and his crony Pavel Grachev, the Minister of Defense at the time, who the month before had assured the President that Grozny could be taken in a matter of hours. (Perhaps it was fortunate, given Yeltsin’s well-known drinking habits, that the Norwegians like to launch their rockets early in the morning.) The two men talked anxiously with the Chief of the General Staff, General Mikhail Kolesnikov. He was the man who would send the final launch orders to the silo controls. It had been just four minutes since an unsuspecting Norwegian technician sent Black Brant on its way.

Of the three men, General Kolesnikov was the one who may have been most convinced that this really was the beginning of an enemy attack. The next day he was still maintaining that the innocent scientific rocket had in fact been “a new operational tactical missile.” In those desperate minutes he may well have been urging Yeltsin to give permission to launch. Technically, he could have done it all on his own.

Finally, about seven minutes into the rocket’s flight, it became patently clear that it was not headed for Russia. Twenty-four minutes after launch it finally crashed into its target, the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, far out in the Arctic Ocean. The briefcases were shut and repossessed by the ever present shuriks. The nuclear forces went back to their normal alert status, ready to launch on warning.

On the other side of the world, this terrifying brush with nuclear disaster went almost unnoticed. A few scattered newspaper accounts gave it brief mention, reporting inaccurately that the Russians had shot the Norwegian missile down. The gian antennae of the National Security Agency picked up the frantic commands and discussions that flashed over the Kazbek network that morning, but such intelligence is considered so sensitive that very few people, even in the intelligence agencies, were allowed to see the “blue border” reports describing the Russian alert. SAFE, the main classified database at the CIA Intelligence Directorate, contained no mention of the affair.

This portent of disaster would have been serious enough in the days when “Arbat,” the Defense Ministry and General Staff headquarters, still commanded and controlled a newly built the radar systems watching the Norwegian Sea indicated, the system was beginning to break down. The nuclear weapons were passing out of control.

Two years after Black Brant’s near-fatal flight, Igor Rodionov had had enough. In February 1997 he bluntly announced that “Russia might soon reach a threshold beyond which its rockets and nuclear systems cannot be controlled. [Even] today, no one can guarantee the reliability of our systems of control.” Elaborating, he referred to the “increasing psychological weariness of the corps of officers” and pointed out that “owing to a shortage of satellites, there are several hours at a time when we are unable to carry out tracking work outside the Russian borders.”

It was a dire statement, entirely contradicting the official position of both the U.S. government and the Kremlin. Boris Yeltsin derisively dismissed his defense chief’s warning as “lamentations” concocted purely in order to extract more money from the treasury. Newspapers friendly to the Kremlin said that the minister was “hysterical” and should be fired. Rodionov’s warning got no more serious attention in Washington, where administration officials dismissed the ministers’ warnings as simply a maneuver to increase his budget. Despite a state which was billions of dollars behind in paying wages and pensions, where even the workers in nuclear weapons plants were going on strike, where senior generals were doing billion-dollar arms deals or selling nerve gas technology to the highest bidder, the ultimate weapons of mass destruction were supposedly still under control.

There were people who knew better. “Rodionov is absolutely correct,” wrote Colonel Robert Bykov, a veteran of the Strategic Rocket Forces and the General Staff, who had long served in the heart of Russia’s nuclear war machine. “We could launch an accidental nuclear strike on the United States in the matter of seconds it takes you to read these lines.”

Most of the communications equipment for the nuclear control system had been put in place back in the 1970s. The complex radio systems were crammed into poorly ventilated rooms in the command bunkers deep underground and left running for years at a time. A decade later, the components were starting to break down on a regular basis. In the early 1990s the breakdowns became more frequent. Now parts of the system would suddenly switch themselves into combat mode, as if a launch was imminent.

By 1997 the system was disintegrating on an hourly basis. The very complex mechanism that enabled the President and the high command to keep firm control of the strategic arsenal had originally been designed at a secret institute in St. Petersburg known as NPO Impulse. The scientists and technicians here were responsible not only for designing and building it but also for troubleshooting and maintenance. Originally, of course, a job at NPO had been one of the most prestigious and best-paid in the country, and the people who worked there were drawn from the technical elite of the vaunted Soviet educational system. Spending their entire careers at NPO, they preserved an institutional memory of the nuclear control system. Spending their entire careers at NPO, they preserved an institutional memory of the nuclear control system they served. Now, however, there is no more money for the institute and the workers are scattering to the four winds to make a living in the new Russia as best they can.

“They are nowhere to be found,” Colonel Bykov grimly pointed out, yet the work they did long ago “continues to be the Strategic Rocket Forces’ main command and control system.”

Shelkovo, a suburb of Moscow, houses the main tracking facility for Russia’s 156 early-warning satellites. Not far from the vital military center is a bustling market of the king that have sprung up all over Russia in the last few years, with everything from cars to washing machines on sale. By 1996, the electronics stalls were getting some new customers, officers from the tracking facility up the road. They were shopping for parts to try to keep the early-warning satellite tracking system in operation. Even so, as Rodionov pointed out, there was no satellite coverage of North America for hours at a time. In a crisis, the commanders would have to make their best guess.

In a crisis, there might be other problems. On February 10, 1997, there was a wild party in the Kremlin guardroom to celebrate the victory in a parliamentary election that day of Alexander Korshakov, Yeltsin’s sinister former chief bodyguard. Among those subsequently fired for being too drunk to carry out their duties was the Ninth General Staff Directorate officer in charge of the President’s nuclear briefcase.

The system was designed so that only operators in the General Staff Central Command Post could order a launch on the direct order of the chief. But as things unravel, it becomes more and more possible that the decision to fire might be taken by someone else. Rodionov spoke of the increasing “psychological weariness of the officer corps.” This was hardly surprising, given that even the officers in the Central Command had not been paid for months and were taking jobs on the side. The Strategic Rocket Forces, once an elite 300,000-man body comprised mostly of volunteers, has been cut by almost two-thirds to 114,000 men, 70,000 of whom are conscripts. In some inter-continental ballistic missile units officers are having to work up to a hundred hours a week. Colonel Bykov told of the “smart aleck’ in a missile regiment out in the field who figured out a way of launching on his own without using the necessary password. A command post duty officer had become mentally unstable as a result of inhaling poison fumes from a faulty air duct and been taken straight to the hospital.

In conveying the seriousness of the situation, the well-educated Colonel Bykov reached for a chilling classical allusion. In ancient times Herostratus burned down the great temple at Ephesus simply in order to perpetuate his name. “Officers manning control desks are also people,” wrote the colonel. “We have no guarantee today that some Herostratus will not turn up in Russia’s missile forces.”

The Clinton administration does not share such dark forebodings. “The Pentagon, the State Department and the White House all agree, having looked at the question very carefully” said State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns in October 1996, “that the Russian government has control over its nuclear weapons force and over the nuclear material in the Russian stockpile.”

The spokesman was making the statement because someone in the CIA, frustrated by official refusal to face facts, had just leaked an intelligence report that put things in a very different light. “The Russian nuclear command and control system is being subjected to stresses it was not designed to withstand as a result of wrenching social change, economic hardship, and malaise within the armed forces,” wrote the authors of “Prospects for Unsanctioned Use of Russian Nuclear Weapons,” classified top secret. “Despite official assurances, high-lever Moscow officials are concerned about the security of their nuclear inventory.” The report confirmed that local command posts below the level of the General Staff “have the technical ability to launch without authorization of political leaders or the General Staff.”

The commander of the Strategic Rocket Forces, worried about what his own troops might do, had recently set up a special procedure for reporting unauthorized missile launches.

Even more worrying was the increasing loss of control over the 22,000 tactical nuclear weapons. “These appear to be the weapons most at risk,” stated the report, noting not only that nuclear torpedoes on submarines have locks that could easily be removed by the crews but that the KBU electromechanical blocking devices to prevent unauthorized use on other weapons were being turned off because they were too difficult and expensive to maintain. Given this situation, the CIA analysts somberly raised the possibility of “conspiracies within nuclear armed units” to commit nuclear blackmail. Russian officials themselves were particularly worried about nuclear units in the far eastern sectors, where “troop living conditions are particularly deplorable” and “where nuclear weapons might fall into the wrong hands.”

Things were obviously changing at the CIA, at least at the working level. (What was judged fit at the upper levels to put in the National Intelligence Estimates that went to the President was a different story.) When Jessica Stern had first arrived at the National Security Council she could never quite understand intelligence officials who worried about nuclear materials finding their way into the wrong hands were nonetheless adamant that there was little risk of actual nuclear warheads going astray. She always thought that this unshakable faith in Russian military nuclear security was “based on nothing.”

Part of the reason for such complacency may have been the earnestly cooperative attitude of General Evgeni Maslin, the man in charge of the Twelfth Directorate of the General Staff, the custodians of the weapons stockpile. Unlike the obstreperous Minatom boss, Victor Mikhailov, prone to getting drunk and making passes at lady interpreters in the middle of meetings, Maslin always appeared ready to bond with American officials. The general rarely raised an objection to U.S. aid proferred under the “Cooperative Threat Reduction Program” sponsored by Senators Nunn and Lugar. He gave grateful thanks for security help like the upgraded railcars arranged years before by Bill Burns or Kevlar armored blankets for wrapping around warheads in transit.

While Mikhailov denied the possibility of anyone ever making off with material from a Mantom facility, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, the charming Maslin would concede that he always worried about security. U.S. officials, charmed by this sympathetic approach and impressed by the general’s professionalism, went away convinced that whatever else was wrong with the Russian military, the nuclear custodians could still be relied on to carry out their duties. They trusted that he was telling the truth when he swore that he knew the location of every single nuclear warhead, large or small, in the Russian stockpile. They were impressed by the layers of security surrounding a nuclear weapons site-the twelfth Department detachment that had custody of the warheads themselves, the special security troops of the General Staff who provided the immediate armed protection for the site, the Ministry of Interior troops who kept watch on the area, the men from the FSB counterintelligence service who watched the guardians and each other.

Now, however, undeniable evidence was piling up that the same military rot that had been so humiliatingly revealed in Chechnya had spread to the nuclear forces. It had always been an article of faith that while miserable conscripts like Mikhail Kubarsky might be left unpaid, even allowed to starve, troops who handled nuclear weapons and especially the handpicked officers who served in the Twelfth Department were properly taken care of. Even if their pay arrived late, it did come, as did the bonuses that went with their critical responsibilities.

But by the beginning of 1996, that was clearly beginning to change, intelligence reports confirmed that the public complaints of officers like Rodionov were all too true and that even the men of the Twelfth were going short.

Knowledgeable Russians took the dire state of affairs for granted, laughing at the very question of whether the men guarding the warheads were being paid. “Of course not. The commanders of ballistic missile submarines have not been paid in four months.” If men who controlled not only nuclear warheads but the missiles that could deliver them halfway around the world were not being looked after, was it likely that anyone was bothering the guardians of a nuclear storage bunker.

A professional intelligence service such as Iraq’s, given the mission of getting its hands on a nuclear weapon, endowed with all the money it needed and with a network already in place in Russia, would find its opportunities increasing all the time. Six years after Greenpeace came so close to getting their hands on a Scud warhead in Germany, that warhead is almost certainly still sitting in the same storage site where it was dumped after being brought back to Russia. Just months before he was ejected from the Kremlin, Mikhail Gorbachev pledged to have half of all tactical bombs and warheads dismantled b y
1996. The promise has been ignored. Three thousand tactical missile warheads, artillery shells and bombs are designated for future operational use, in line with the military’s declared new policy of reaching promptly for the nuclear option in a war. The rest are stored in three huge depots in the heart of Russia, their safety locks decaying or switched off, guarded by unpaid and angry soldiers in a society where responsibility and morality are fast disappearing and thievery reigns supreme.

Despite the assurances of Maslin and others, Western intelligences agencies suspect that the high command does not know if all the weapons are present and accounted for, because they were never counted properly in the first place. In theory, they are inspected twice a year. No one checks to see if the weapon has not been exchanged for an identical-looking training dummy. Many of them, such as the Scud warheads, could be moved by just three men. The artillery shells, shorter-range missile warheads, small nuclear bombs, land mines, torpedo warheads and atomic demolition devices-“chemodan” or “suitcases”-are light enough to be lifted by just one man.

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In 1996, for a brief period, General Alexandr Lebed was Secretary of Boris Yeltsin’s National Security Council. As such he had unrestricted access to Russia’s darkest defense secrets. He knew that there were supposed to be one hundred and thirty-two nuclear suitcases in the stockpile. Worried about their security, he ordered a check to make sure that all these mini-nukes were accounted for. Despite an intensive search, he could only locate forty-eight. Eighty-four were missing.

Revealing this terrifying news to a group of visitors in May the following year, the general conceded that the explosive yield of the suitcases was low (on the order of a few kilotons), but, he joke, they would make a “decent boom.”


Eighty-four nuclear weapons, already neatly packaged in suitcases. No one knows where they are. No one knows how to stop them."

Tuesday, March 25, 2014


Saturday, January 18, 2014

LET'S DO THIS!

Hi!

I'm back, and better than ever! Smell me! Touch me! Love me!

I'm celebrating today! Why today? Because it's the only today we got, toots!

Okay, so you want to know what's happening. Here's the scoop:


1.
Early in December found me atop an Alpen slope, a salami sandwich in one hand and Angela Merkel in the other. The helicopter that had airlifted us had to beat a hasty retreat due to an onrushing avalanche, an avalanche that cost the life of Ms. Merkel. I was fortunate to have skied most of my life sans poles, so I was able to easily outrun the deadly white deluge without shedding a single crumb from my sandwich. 


2.
Stockton? Stockton!

Christmas in the Port City. Reminds of the time I spent Easter among a group of hens concerned over the location of their missing eggs. Uncomfortable and incongruent.

Did what the locals do on Christmas Day: despaired.


3.
 I cannot stop eating omelets!

Wednesday, September 18, 2013

When It Rains, It Snows!

Fender Bender Delight?

Sure, why not, sounds delicious.

<inhale><exhale>

Tastes the way a Christmas tree smells when dipped in marmalade.

Makes me feel the way I do when I decide to do things like dipping Christmas trees in marmalade.

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Watched some porn today where a bunch of cheerleaders take turns licking one girl's asshole. She liked it, which I can understand. But the other 10 girls licking said butthole, why were they so antsy to get a lick? Who in the world wants to lick a butthole? THAT'S WHERE THE POOP COMES FROM! I'll probably be singing another tune here if and when I finally take the dive and go labio-anal. There are a few asses out there that are so tempting that I don't think I'd be able to say no if I was asked to provide such service. I mean I might consider changing my mind on the subject should I ever be propositioned by someone such as Sally Jesse Raphael or Nancy Grace. And I wouldn't care if I saw her just step out of the filthiest Port-A-Potty with shit all over her face and pee still running down her leg (all portending to indicate a filthy butthole, in case you found that description superfluous), I would French kiss Amy Grant's poop shoot until they pulled me off.

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I know, I know. Typical American male, right? Weed? Check. Babes? Check. Well, what do you expect? I'm a weak American man! I just do what I'm told!



Thursday, May 16, 2013

Man...in the mirror

Man is only as smart as Mother Nature allows him to be smart.

Man is only knows as much as Mother Nature allows him to know.

Man can only reason as much as Mother Nature allows him to reason.

Whatever knowledge man possesses is but a small sliver of what exists. We can only deal with those things that our senses can detect and what our minds can fathom. I believe that there is much that we are not capable of either experiencing or grasping.


Saturday, May 11, 2013

MANIAC MIRROR

There I was, face to face with a maniac!

CRASH!!!

The mirror broken

And with that,

the maniac gone

Saturday, May 4, 2013

Sit Down Mother Fucker!

It's the small things that count. The small things done on a consistent basis.

And so it is in the relationship between those that hold office and the public it is in service to.

Due to repeated requests of deference in their presence and the proliferation of images of judges, senators, police officers, etc. being addressed as "your honor", "sir" and other such nonsense, we've been led to believe that we should be thankful for whatever beneficence is bestowed on us from those in officialdom.

I do not believe that I should be forced to call anyone by any honorific as I respect no man above myself and I would never expect anyone to refer to me in such a manner.

I cannot be forced to respect someone, they have to demonstrate by who they are as a person that they deserve my respect. If they act in a manner contrary to what I consider acceptable behavior, I feel that it is my place to discourage such acts from proliferating by signalling my disapproval through withholding both acknowledgement and any titles of respect.

As a public official, it should be understood that such positions are not given as a tribute to the office holder, but rather as a placing of trust in that person as a volunteer to serve the interests of those that put them in the positions they hold, that the honor of serving is and should be reward enough, and that they should at all times recognize their duty is to help keep the existing government as a benefit to the people of the society of which it represents.

Wednesday, February 13, 2013

This is What it Sounds Like, When Idiots Try to Make a Point

Did you ever think about the amount of words you know, not just their definitions but their different uses based on context?

What's even more interesting to me is the fact that we weren't taught these definitions and usages, we intuited them from being around other people that talk.

In fact it'd be impossible to teach every word in your vocabulary. And it's likely that the method in which you learn something plays a major part in your relationship to that concept.

Por ejemplo, if someone teaches you the definition of a word, the likelihood is that teaching is really just an authoritative gesture meant to instill in you fealty to that person's preferred definition. Whereas a natural definition arising of experience is one in which the subjective mind develops a definition that is determined by the context and allows the word to maintain plasticity in the mind.

To make it simpler: when a definition is taught, it is bound inextricably to the authority from which it arose and it remains an essentially fixed string of words. When a word is learned in the fashion in which humans have been learning language for the last however long, it's definition is determined by the person in possession of it, and it remains an eternally mutable concept.


Well cum

Hello and welcome!

I'm honored to have you.

Won't you please stay awhile?

Oh dear, I've forgotten the crumpets. Do you like toaster strudels?