Authors: David Hoffman
Baker and Yeltsin were left alone at the end of their meeting to talk about nuclear command and control. Yeltsin gave Baker a description of how the system would work: in effect, only he and Shaposhnikov, commander of strategic forces with control over all the nuclear weapons, would possess the briefcases, the Cheget. The three other republics with nuclear weapons, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan, would get a “hot line,” a telephone, but not a nuclear briefcase. Gorbachev still had a briefcase, but his would be taken away by the end of December, Yeltsin said. The system was one of “consultation,” Yeltsin said, “not coordination.”
According to Baker’s notes of the conversation, Yeltsin told him the leaders of the other republics didn’t understand how nuclear command and control worked. “They’ll be satisfied with having telephones,” he
said. And once Russia got all the nuclear weapons back on its soil, even the telephones would be removed. Baker wrote in his notes:
“5 tele.—2 briefcases for now
Only Pres. of Russia can launch—Def. Min. won’t be able to alone.”
Later, in a private meeting with Shaposhnikov, Baker asked him to go over, once again, the nuclear command and control arrangements. Shaposhnikov confirmed what Yeltsin had told Baker.
“Who gives you orders today?” Baker asked.
“Gorbachev,” Shaposhnikov replied. He would not speculate about the future.
But Baker was worried. He had written at the top of his notepad a question: “Who gives Shaposhnikov his orders?”
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About 5
P.M.
on December 25, Gorbachev called Bush, who was at Camp David celebrating Christmas morning with his family. The Soviet president said he planned to resign, stepping down as commander in chief and transferring his authority to use nuclear weapons to Yeltsin. “I can assure you that everything is under strict control,” he said. “There will be no disconnection. You can have a very quiet Christmas evening.”
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At 6:55
P.M.,
Gorbachev entered the crowded Kremlin television studio, Room No. 4, crammed with network cameras and bright lights. He was carrying a briefcase with his departure speech, and a decree giving up his role as commander in chief of the armed forces. He put the decree on the small table and asked Andrei Grachev, his press secretary, for a pen. He tested it on a sheet of paper and asked for one with a smoother tip. The head of the CNN crew reached over Grachev’s shoulder and offered his own pen to Gorbachev. With a flourish, he signed the document just before he went on the air.
His short address reflected his long, remarkable journey. When he took office in 1985, Gorbachev said, he felt it was a shame that a nation so richly endowed, so brimming with natural resources and human talent endowed by God, was living so poorly compared with the developed countries of the world. He blamed the Soviet command system and ideology, and he blamed the “terrible burden of the arms race.” The Soviet people had “reached the limits of endurance,” he said. “All attempts at
partial reform—and there were many—failed, one after another. The country was losing its future. We could not go on living like this. Everything had to be drastically changed.”
After the speech, Gorbachev went back to his office, where Shaposhnikov was waiting for him, along with the duty officers carrying the suitcase with the nuclear command codes and communications links. Yeltsin earlier agreed to come to Gorbachev’s office to get the Cheget. But Yeltsin was upset by something in Gorbachev’s speech and changed his mind, refusing to come, proposing instead they meet halfway, in Saint Catherine’s Hall. Gorbachev thought this was a stupid game, and brusquely decided to dispatch Shaposhnikov and the duty officers off with the suitcase without him. “They disappeared into the corridors in search of their new boss,” recalled Grachev.
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The Soviet hammer-and-sickle came down after the speech, and the Russian tricolor flag was hoisted over the Kremlin.
The collapse of the Soviet Union marked the end of seven decades of a failed ideology, hypermilitarization and rigid central controls. It left behind 6,623 nuclear warheads on land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, 2,760 nuclear warheads on sea-based missiles, 822 nuclear bombs on planes and 150 warheads deployed on cruise missiles, as well as perhaps another 15,000 tactical nuclear warheads scattered in depots, trains and warehouses.
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It left behind at least 40,000 tons of chemical weapons, including millions of shells filled with nerve gas so deadly that one drop would kill a human being. It left behind tons of anthrax bacteria spores, buried on Vozrozhdeniye Island, and perhaps as much as 20 metric tons of smallpox in weapons, as well as pathogens the world had never known, stashed in the culture collections at Obolensk and Koltsovo. It left behind hundreds of thousands of workers who knew the secrets, and who were now embittered, dispirited, and, in some cases, down to their last sack of potatoes.
I
n a televised speech on December 29, 1991, Boris Yeltsin promised to rule an entirely new country. “We are abandoning mirages and illusions,” he declared. “We are ridding ourselves of the militarization of our life, we have stopped constantly preparing for war with the whole world, and much more besides.” Yeltsin described the grim inheritance from the Soviet Union: devastated farmlands, the economy “gravely ill,” and towering external debt.
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In a gamble with history, Yeltsin attempted to make a rapid leap from failed socialism to a market economy, setting prices free and putting the colossal stock of state property into private hands. Yeltsin believed it was the only route for Russia to become a normal country, tap into global markets, modernize aging factories and lift living standards. But there were stark, unsettling dislocations. A few tycoons, known as oligarchs, grew wealthy, while millions of workers got their wages months late, if at all, or were paid in barter goods, such as socks and jars of pickles. Even though the new capitalism featured stock markets, private banks, expensive restaurants, luxury cars and sparkling new office towers, the deeper transformation—creating a modern industrial base, building rule of law, civil society and a diversified economy—was excruciatingly difficult and did not come about at first. The sad reality of these years was that many people could not adapt to the new world, and were set adrift. The
weapons scientists and workers of the sprawling Soviet defense complex were among them.
Yeltsin deliberately let the military-industrial complex atrophy. He viewed the old defense establishment as a relic of the hypermilitarization that had so doomed the Soviet Union, and had little faith the aging institutes and factories could ever be converted to peaceful purposes or be of much use in the new capitalism. Yeltsin and his team were determined to completely raze the Soviet system and build a new one. There were many reasons for this approach, not the least of which was that Yeltsin possessed a much stronger view of what he wanted to tear down than what he wanted to build. He sought to eliminate the overweening state that he knew at first hand, while he had no model, just instincts, for constructing a modern free-market democracy. It was an enormous task. As Yeltsin biographer Leon Aron pointed out, Yeltsin’s first revolutions were carried out against the party and the Soviet empire, both with a rising tide of popular support. This time, Yeltsin had only “the shallows and fetid waters of the ‘command economy,’ choked with decomposing and toxic debris.”
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On February 14, 1992, in a car speeding through the forests of western Siberia, James A. Baker III, the U.S. secretary of state, witnessed a breathtaking tableau: white snow, frozen lakes, birch stands and a storybook
troika
—a sleigh pulled by three horses—in the distance. Then he passed through several checkpoints and barbed-wire perimeter fences to arrive at the citadel of Soviet nuclear bomb builders, the All Union Scientific Research Institute of Technical Physics, Chelyabinsk-70, one of two Soviet nuclear weapons design laboratories, a facility so secret it was not on any Soviet map. Chelyabinsk-70 was established in 1955 as a competitor to the first Soviet nuclear weapon design bureau at Arzamas-16. The scientists at Chelyabinsk-70 had pioneered miniaturization of nuclear warheads for the Soviet Union, allowing many small explosives to be placed atop a giant intercontinental ballistic missile, or put inside shells so small they could be fired as artillery on the battlefields of Europe.
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The two labs were analogous to Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
As Baker pulled up to the main building at Chelyabinsk-70, about eight stories tall, hundreds of technicians and scientists pressed against every available window, shouting and waving. Their jubilation took Baker by surprise. “I felt a bit as though I had landed from Mars,” he recalled, “an alien curiosity that these men and women just had to see with their own eyes.” The facility itself was another shock, shabby and threadbare. Whereas Livermore and Los Alamos were champions of supercomputing, there were no computer monitors in sight. When Baker was escorted to a small lecture hall to meet with twenty-five of the institute’s senior scientists, he sat with his back to a dusty chalkboard. It reminded him of a Princeton undergraduate classroom in the 1950s. He told the scientists, seated in front of him, “This is every bit as remarkable for us as it is for you.” Later, he recalled in his memoir, “As we sat down, I thought, here are the men that designed the weapons that defined the Cold War, and we’re about to discuss how we in the West can help them secure their future.”
The scientists and engineers talked openly of their deteriorating living standards. This once-insular elite was in trouble, and reaching beyond the barbed wire for help. Yevgeny Avrorin, the scientific director, standing at the end of the table by the blackboard, said the laboratory faced a “difficult, trying situation” as government subsidies dwindled. The scientists didn’t want handouts, he said; they wanted productive and challenging work. They possessed an enormous storehouse of knowledge and equipment, and felt they had much they could give back to society. The deputy director, Vladislav Nikitin, said that salaries for top scientists were no more than fifteen hundred rubles a month, or $15 at the official exchange rate. Chelyabinsk-70 employed sixteen thousand people, about nine thousand technicians and about seven thousand scientists and engineers. “We have no shortage of ideas,” Avrorin said, presenting Baker with a long list of commercial products they could produce if they had Western investors: artificial diamonds, fiber optics, food irradiation, nuclear medicine. But they had no investors, and no way to reach any. Avrorin didn’t yet have e-mail. Avrorin then handed Baker the paper he had been reading from, apologizing for a hasty translation into English.
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Baker appealed to them not to lose hope. “We know that right now your options at home are limited and outlaw regimes and terrorists may try to exploit your situation and influence you to build new weapons of
war.” As the physicists and engineers scribbled in tiny notebooks, Baker added, “Some talk about the brain drain problem. But I think we should talk about the brain gain solution, and that is a solution of putting you to the work of peace, to accelerate reform and build democracy here, to help your people live better lives for decades to come.” He described plans by the West to establish a new center, with international funding, to support their science and technology work.
Baker’s visit offered a hint of a crisis that was gathering force and would persist for years. If Chelyabinsk-70, located 1,118 miles east of Moscow, was at all emblematic of the Soviet military-industrial complex, then the potential for disaster was greater than anyone had imagined: scientists with knowledge to build weapons of mass destruction were wanting for food and medicines.
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Anne M. Harrington arrived in Moscow with her family just after the August 1991 coup attempt. Her husband was a foreign service officer in the political section of the U.S. Embassy, and the State Department was starting a new program to provide more opportunity to spouses, offering them positions as analysts. Harrington, eager to help, became the science and technology analyst in the Moscow embassy. Her office was dreadful, located in an underground, windowless annex. After a recent fire in the main embassy building, sacks of wet, burned documents were piled nearby. The odor of cinders lingered. Harrington worked on a desktop thrown over two wooden sawhorses. She volunteered to track the “brain drain” problem because no one else was interested. “I put up my hand and said, ‘I can do that,’” she recalled. In the first weeks after the Soviet Union collapsed, Harrington met with science counselors from other Western embassies, and sent a cable back to Washington. “Is brain drain good or bad?” she wrote, adding:
Should Western countries be concerned if Russia loses its best scientists? After all, we all spent 74 years fighting the Soviet system, why should we let them maintain the capability to rebuild a threat? It was largely agreed that stripping Russia of its scientific potential is not constructive if the country is ever to stabilize. It
was also agreed that nonproliferation is the major concern and that no one really worried about departing botanists. Soviet science was highly compartmentalized and there was strict control over the relatively small number of scientists whose knowledge presents a real threat.
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But would that “strict control” hold? It was unimaginably difficult to estimate the scope of the problem, since there were thousands and thousands of individuals, only a vague understanding in the West of the jobs they held and the institutes where they worked, porous borders and unknown temptations. One small leakage of highly skilled bomb-builders could lead to disaster. Reports surfaced of Soviet nuclear scientists traveling to Libya and Iraq. President Saddam Hussein of Iraq, just a year after the Persian Gulf War, was still trying to hold on to nuclear weapons know-how, and the specter of even a single bomb-builder making his way to Baghdad caused real concern.
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Iran also had nuclear ambitions. Harrington said she was well aware that Russians could easily travel through Kazakhstan or Moldova, and perhaps far beyond, without being noticed. “You could go anywhere, leave, come back, and who would be the wiser? We were critically aware of the fact that people could move around without anyone knowing where they were going.” Moreover, leaving the country was not the only proliferation threat. Knowledge could be sold to outsiders who came to Russia. Bomb or missile designers could leak their knowledge from inside the country, perhaps under the cover of giving “lectures” to eager “students” from abroad, or through business transactions. The potential disguises were almost infinite, and the secret police were no longer watching everyone. All the major defense factories and design bureaus included a Soviet internal security office, known as “the regime,” but they, too, were desperate for survival and often eager to help the scientists make business deals. By one informed estimate, a core of sixty thousand people had developed and designed weapons of mass destruction and their delivery systems. About half learned their trade in the aerospace industry, twenty thousand in nuclear and ten thousand in chemical and biological warfare. Perhaps half of these minds were located in institutes around Moscow. No one knew for sure how many could become wayward weaponeers, nor which, nor how to reach them quickly, nor how to stop them.
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