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."