The Dead Hand

by David Hoffman

  Gorbachev lost control of the nuclear suitcase, but the nuclear commanders in the military kept their cool. At least one of the three who would have to launch an attack, Air Force General Yevgeny Shaposhnikov, was openly against the putsch. He recalled in his memoir that he told Yazov that the other two commanders-in-chief, of the rocket forces and the naval forces, also backed him. Most likely, they would not have followed any orders from the clownish coup plotters.27 Yarynich, who knew well the workings of nuclear command and control, was inside the defense ministry during the days of the coup. “The vast number of people in the military were awaiting positive changes in the country, sympathized with the changes, and did not fall into a panic,” he said. “The military understood the danger of rocking the boat in this storm, and did everything to prevent the boat from keeling over.”28

  As Gorbachev flew triumphantly back to Moscow, Chernyaev recalled a sense of euphoria on the plane. But when Gorbachev landed at Vnukovo Airport at 2 A.M., August 22, it became clear the tension had taken a terrible toll on his family. On the last day in Foros, Raisa had suffered a small stroke. In the car from the airport, Gorbachev’s daughter Irina suffered a nervous breakdown, throwing herself on the seat in wracking sobs as her husband, Anatoly, tried to console her.

  “I have come back from Foros to another country, and I myself am a different man now,” Gorbachev declared. But Gorbachev did not realize how deeply the country had been transformed in those three days. The old system—the party and state that shaped his life and that he had led to glasnost and perestroika—was now dead. Gorbachev later admitted, “At the time I was not yet fully aware of the extent of the tragedy.” Perhaps shell-shocked or preoccupied with his family’s trauma, Gorbachev fumbled. He did not go directly to the White House, where crowds were waiting, nor to the huge victory demonstration the next day. He was unaware of how people had changed, wanting a complete break with the old system. Gorbachev told a press conference August 22 that the Communist Party remained a “progressive force,” despite the betrayal of its bosses. Two days later, under pressure from Yeltsin, he retreated, resigning as general secretary of the party and calling for dissolution of the Central Committee. Yeltsin suspended actions of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev was still president, but the country was rapidly disintegrating as the republics asserted independence, some before and some after the coup attempt.29

  Chernyaev was working in the offices of the Central Committee on Old Square one day right after the coup when he heard the public address system urgently instruct everyone to leave immediately. He ignored the announcement and worked on for several hours. Then, when he reached the door to leave, he saw crowds outside. For his personal safety, he was evacuated through an underground tunnel to the Kremlin. The offices of the Central Committee were turned over to the Moscow city government as thousands cheered. The party heaved its last breath.

  Sergei Akhromeyev, who had come to those same Central Committee offices six years earlier and promised to work with Gorbachev, who had been through so much with Gorbachev on arms control, pulling troops out of Afghanistan, revising the military doctrine and negotiating at Reykjavik, was despondent. He did not know about the coup attempt in advance, but once it began, he flew back to Moscow from his vacation and helped prepare the military for the assault on the White House that never came. Akhromeyev was not one of the original coup plotters, but he gave them an assist. After the putsch collapsed, Akhromeyev hanged himself by a white nylon cord in his Kremlin office. He left a note on his desk.

  I cannot live when my motherland is dying and everything that I ever believed in is being destroyed. My age and previous life give me the right to leave this life. I fought to the end.30

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  THREE

  ————— 17—————

  A GREAT UNRAVELING

  A day after the failed coup, Senator Sam Nunn, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, squeezed his way through a crowd on the streets of Moscow. He had flown there from a conference in Budapest after receiving a phone call from Andrei Kokoshin, deputy director of the Institute for the Study of the United States and Canada. They had known each other for years, and there was urgency in Kokoshin’s voice. Kokoshin wanted Nunn to come to Moscow immediately. Kokoshin “said there were big things happening in Russia,” Nunn recalled. “He said Russia about four times. Always before it had been the Soviet Union. The bells went off in my head.” In Moscow, Kokoshin picked up Nunn in his cramped little car and they drove directly to the White House. Yeltsin’s supporters thronged streets still strewn with stone slabs and construction debris hastily erected as barricades against the tanks. Kokoshin introduced Nunn to several people he described as the new leaders of Russia. The next day, Kokoshin took Nunn to listen to the debates in parliament about the breakup of the Soviet Union. When Nunn left the building, he pushed his way through a crush of people. There was an atmosphere of intense excitement. “A new country was being created,” he recalled. The crowd was shouting, “Down with the Soviet Union!”

  Next, Nunn went to see Gorbachev in the Kremlin. They talked for about an hour. “I thought he looked shaken,” Nunn recalled. “Obviously, he had been through quite an experience. And we talked a good bit about what was going to happen to the Soviet Union. He was still saying it was going to stay together. He was still the president.” Nunn brought up the issue of command and control over nuclear weapons. In the back of his mind, he was worried about all the small, easily transportable tactical nuclear weapons that were spread among the republics. Gorbachev “tried to reassure me that the Soviet Union was going to remain intact, and that things were under control,” Nunn recalled.

  As he was leaving, Nunn turned to Gorbachev. “Did you lose command and control while you were in captivity?” he asked.

  Gorbachev would not answer the question.1

  Nunn grew up in a leading Methodist family in Perry, Georgia, population 11,000, in red dirt farm country. His father was a lawyer-farmer who was mayor of Perry when Nunn was born, and had served in the State Legislature and on the State Board of Education. After graduating from Emory University law school in 1962, Nunn went to Washington for a year, as a staff counsel on the House Armed Services Committee, returned to Georgia, served in the State Legislature and won a race for the U.S. Senate in 1972. Nunn had been mentored and influenced by powerful southern Democrats of an earlier generation, conservatives who were bulwarks of the military, among them Carl Vinson and John Stennis.2 In the Senate, Nunn was a moderate-conservative, wary of Soviet intentions; he voted for Reagan’s military buildup but was also an advocate for arms control agreements, especially to reduce the dangers of accidental nuclear war. Arms control, he once said, should “take the finger of both superpowers off the hair-trigger.”3

  What Nunn saw in Moscow after the coup brought back a personal memory from a Cold War flashpoint many years earlier. In 1974, when he had been in the Senate for only a year, Nunn toured NATO headquarters in Brussels and American military bases in Germany and Italy.4If war were to come in Europe, the first battlefield would be divided Germany. Soviet war plans called for a massive sweep of sixty divisions from East Germany and Czechoslovakia into West Germany, reaching the German-French border within thirteen to fifteen days.5 They would face NATO’s tactical or battlefield nuclear weapons. American scientists and engineers had created tiny warheads that could fit into small missiles and artillery shells. The firepower of these miniature nukes was an alternative to using massive numbers of troops. The West had deployed seven thousand nuclear weapons in Europe during the period when Nunn visited. A substantial number of U.S. aircraft and missiles were on five-minute alert in case of a crisis.

  At a U.S. tactical nuclear weapons base in Germany, where bunkers held warheads and shells, Nunn was shown the relatively small devices, including warheads that could be easily moved by one or two men. Nunn was reassured by the commanders that all the weapons were secure. As h
e left the building, a sergeant shook hands with him. In his hand, Nunn felt a piece of folded paper. He slipped it into his pocket.

  “Senator Nunn,” it said, “please meet me and some of my guard buddies at the barracks around 6 tonight after work. I have very important information for you.”

  That night, Nunn and his staff director, Frank Sullivan, went to the barracks. The sergeant and “three or four of his fellow sergeants related a horror story to me,” Nunn later recalled. “A story of a demoralized military after Vietnam. A story of drug abuse. A story of alcohol abuse. A story of U.S. soldiers actually guarding the tactical nuclear weapons while they were stoned on drugs. The stories went on and on for over an hour.” Nunn left “thoroughly shaken,” he said.6

  In Europe, Nunn also saw how easy it would be to stumble across the trip wire to nuclear war. In his report to the Senate, Nunn wrote, “There is a considerable danger that tactical nuclear weapons would be used at the very outset of a war, leading to possible, or even probable, escalation to strategic nuclear war.” Nunn recalled that NATO briefers had told him they would want nuclear weapons released “as soon as necessary,” but “as late as possible.” Nunn felt they didn’t put enough emphasis on as late as possible.

  For many years, Nunn worried that the small, tactical nuclear weapons were even more fraught with danger than the huge intercontinental ballistic missiles. What if there was a minor skirmish over Berlin that got out of hand? “All of a sudden, bang, you’ve got a request on an American president’s desk to be able to use battlefield nuclear weapons,” Nunn said. “I was convinced nobody in the world had any idea what was going to happen after that started. You can sit around and read all the analytical stuff in the world, but once we start firing battlefield nuclear weapons, I don’t think anybody knew.” In the 1980s, Nunn added a new dimension to his concerns about accidental nuclear war. He realized the superpowers could be drawn into confrontation by gaps in the early-warning systems. A lone missile, perhaps from a third-country submarine, if mistaken for a first strike, could unleash a retaliatory onslaught before anyone would know how it began. Nunn asked the U.S. Strategic Air Command whether they could detect the origin of a submarine missile launch rapidly and accurately. After a top-secret study, they reported to Nunn that while the United States had a “fair” capability to pinpoint the origin, the Soviet Union’s warning systems were much worse. If the Soviets spotted a missile from, say, China, and thought it was really from the United States, a terrible miscalculation could follow.7

  Now, on a crowded street in Moscow in August 1991, all of Nunn’s experience, knowledge and fears about nuclear danger came together once again. Who would protect thousands of small atomic bombs spread all over the Soviet Union? What if the Soviet Union plunged into chaos and civil conflict? Who was responsible for command and control? What if the Russian military were as demoralized as the American soldiers had been after Vietnam? As he flew home, Nunn said, “I was convinced of two things. One, that there would be no more Soviet empire. And two, that they and we had a huge, huge security problem.”

  Sitting on the deck of his family home at Walker’s Point, Maine, with a sweeping view of the Atlantic Ocean, Bush pondered the aftermath of the coup at the end of his summer holiday. In a morning press conference September 2, he said he would not “cut into the muscle of defense of this country” to provide aid to the faltering Soviet Union. At lunch, alone on the deck, writing in his diary, he recalled that on this day forty-seven years before, he had been shot down in the Pacific during World War II. So much had changed. Just that morning, he had recognized the independence of the Baltics.

  In these days, Bush raised with Scowcroft the possibility of a sweeping new initiative to reduce the danger of nuclear war.8 For all his emphasis on prudence and his characteristic caution, Bush acted boldly. Within three weeks, he launched a significant pullback of U.S. nuclear weapons, both land and sea. He did it without drawn-out negotiations, without a treaty, without verification measures and without waiting for Soviet reciprocity. Raymond L. Garthoff, the historian, called it an arms race in reverse—and downhill. In a nationally televised address from the White House on September 27, Bush said, “The world has changed at a dramatic pace, with each day writing a fresh page of history before yesterday’s ink has even dried.” Bush announced the United States would eliminate all of its ground-launched battlefield or tactical nuclear weapons worldwide, and withdraw all those on ships; stand down the strategic bombers from high-alert status; take off hair-trigger alert 450 intercontinental ballistic missiles; and cancel several nuclear weapon modernization programs.9 The announcement meant a pullback of 1,300 artillery-fired atomic projectiles, 850 Lance missile nuclear warheads, and 500 naval weapons. In one stroke, Bush pulled back naval surface weapons that the United States had earlier refused to even discuss as part of strategic weapons negotiations.

  On October 5, Gorbachev joined the downhill arms race. He announced a pullback of all ground-based tactical nuclear weapons and removal of tactical nuclear weapons from ships and submarines, took strategic bombers off alert and removed 503 intercontinental ballistic missiles from combat readiness. Again, the world witnessed real disarmament at lightning speed. The CIA noted in a report that Gorbachev’s initiative would essentially eliminate the nuclear capability of Soviet ground forces.10 Only weeks before, in St. Vladimir’s Hall in the Kremlin, Bush and Gorbachev had signed a strategic arms treaty that took nearly a decade to negotiate and allowed seven years to implement; now they both acted immediately, without a single negotiating session. Nothing was binding, and nothing was verifiable, but it was the most spontaneous and dramatic reversal of the Cold War arms race.11

  On October 21, Bush wrote a note to Scowcroft, his national security adviser. “Please discuss,” he said. “Does Mil Aide need to carry that black case now every little place I go?” He was asking about the “football” with the codes for managing a nuclear war. Bush did not think it was still necessary for a military aide to shadow him with the suitcase. Scowcroft and others persuaded him it was still necessary. At the State Department, a new policy memorandum informed Baker: “The Soviet Union as we know it no longer exists. What matters now is how the breakup of the Soviet Union proceeds from this point onward. Our aim should be to make the crash as peaceful as possible.”12

  It is hard to overstate the sense of relief, triumph and fresh possibility that arose from events in the Soviet Union that autumn. Forty-five years after George Kennan had written the Long Telegram, which laid the foundation for the Cold War strategy of containment, the protracted, draining competition that had shaped so much of the world abruptly came to an end, without cataclysm. “Today, even the most hard-eyed realist must see a world transformed,” said the CIA director, Robert Gates, who had voiced grave doubts about Gorbachev for years. “Communism has at last been defeated.”13

  Yet even in these days of euphoria, when one could forget about the movie The Day After and the horror of nuclear winter, a danger appeared on the horizon. The threat was still masked by layers of Soviet secrecy and overshadowed by the celebratory mood. But an early hint came with Gorbachev’s pullback of tactical nuclear weapons. The warheads were hastily moved to new storage depots by train. Could a weakened Soviet military, barely able to feed hungry troops, adequately protect the nuclear charges? With so many competing power centers—republics breaking away into new nations—could the Soviet system of centralized command and control remain intact? No one knew the answers to these questions, but signs of chaos and upheaval were everywhere. The Soviet rail cars were relatively primitive, lacking sophisticated alarm systems. The warheads were deactivated before being put on the trains, but there were no armored blankets to protect them from a bullet or shrapnel. The warhead depots were filled to capacity. Sometimes the trains just stopped dead on the tracks. There was an acute shortage of containers to protect the uranium and plutonium removed from dismantled weapons. The Soviet system did not have a suitable, secure warehouse to
store these dangerous materials over the long term. When a Soviet official visited Washington that autumn, he was insistent on the need for help from the West to build a secure warehouse for the plutonium from warheads. Thousands of plutonium pits, the essential chunk of material used to cause the nuclear explosion, were stored like so many boxes in a furniture warehouse. “The containers are sticking out of the windows!” he warned.14

  No one was prepared for an arms race in reverse.

  As he flew home, Nunn pondered what he had seen. He felt the United States had to help Russia and the other new states just emerging from the Soviet breakdown. “We could end up with several fingers on the nuclear trigger,” he thought. It was a nightmare of the nuclear age, yet concrete action was difficult to envisage. The dangers seemed pressing, but details were still scarce. One of the best-informed American experts about the Soviet system was Bruce Blair, the scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington, who had asked many of the key questions about Soviet nuclear command and control during his research in Moscow. Although Blair felt the old Soviet system of rigid, central controls was reliable, he shared Nunn’s worry about what would happen if it broke apart.17Another informed expert was Ashton B. Carter, a physicist, professor and director of the Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. During the 1980s, Carter had served at the Pentagon, and understood the complexity of the American nuclear command and control systems.16 Carter recalled telling Nunn that keeping a lid on nuclear weapons was not purely a technical matter. “A nuclear custodial system is only as stable as the social system in which it is embedded,” he added. “And it’s really made up of people and institutions and standard operating procedures and so forth, not just gizmos. When all of that is in the middle of a social revolution, you’ve got big trouble.”