A social revolution was just what Nunn had seen on the streets of Moscow.
Soon after his return, Nunn walked across the Capitol to the office of Representative Les Aspin, a Wisconsin Democrat, who was chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. Aspin earned a reputation when he first came to Congress as a publicity hound and a maverick who delighted in exposing wasteful Pentagon spending. In later years, he moved to the center, and, like Nunn, became an influential voice on military and defense issues. Right after the coup, on August 28, Aspin proposed a dramatic shift of guns to butter: take $1 billion from the $290 billion Pentagon budget and spend it on humanitarian assistance for the Soviet people. Two weeks later, on September 12, Aspin issued a white paper, “A New Kind of Threat: Nuclear Weapons in an Uncertain Soviet Union.” The United States should make sure that “the first winter of freedom after 70 years of communism isn’t a disaster,” Aspin declared.
When Nunn and Aspin met, the conversation was respectful, and at first, tactful. Nunn hoped to coax Aspin to change his approach. In Russia, Nunn said, the most pressing need was helping the Soviet Union dismantle its arsenal. They agreed on one bill that would provide $1 billion for transport of medicine and humanitarian aid, which was Aspin’s idea, as well as money for demilitarization, destroying warheads and converting defense factories to civilian purposes, which were Nunn’s priorities.17
Nunn and Aspin, both experienced politicians, seriously miscalculated the public mood.18 A recession was setting in at home, and voters were tired of overseas commitments. In early November, Democrat Harris Wofford upset Republican Dick Thornburgh for a Senate seat from Pennsylvania with an angry populist campaign, saying “it’s time to take care of our own people.” The Nunn-Aspin bill came at just the wrong moment. Polls showed Americans were opposed to sending direct aid to the Soviet Union. Aspin recalled, “You could feel the wind shift.”19
“It was clearly a firestorm, it wasn’t like it was mild opposition,” Nunn recalled. He was deeply frustrated. With his own eyes he had seen the chaos on the streets of Moscow, and he knew of the potential for nuclear accidents and proliferation, but the politicians in Washington seemed oblivious to the dangers. Some senators told Nunn they could not explain in one-minute sound bites why they should support his legislation, so they would not vote for it. Nunn went to the Senate floor November 13 and tried to break through the mood of indifference with a powerful speech. He said that even after the strategic arms treaty signed earlier in the year, the rapidly disintegrating Soviet Union, including the republics outside of Russia, still had fifteen thousand nuclear warheads to destroy, and needed help. “Unfortunately, nuclear weapons do not just go away when they are no longer wanted,” he said. The Soviet Union was short of storage space, transportation, dismantlement plants and equipment for radioactive materials handling. Nunn had learned these details from Viktor Mikhailov, the deputy minister of atomic energy, who had visited Washington and pleaded for help.20
Gorbachev returns to Moscow on August 21, 1991, after the failed coup attempt during which he lost control of the nuclear command system. [TASS via Agence France-Presse]
Gorbachev concludes his resignation speech on December 25, 1991. [AP Photo/Liu Heung Shing]
Secretary of State James A. Baker III closely questioned Russian President Boris Yeltsin about who controlled the nuclear weapons as the Soviet Union neared collapse. [AP Photo/Liu Heung Shing]
Vladimir Pasechnik, the director of the Institute of Ultra-Pure Biological Preparations in Leningrad, defected to Britain in 1989 and revealed the true size and scope of the Soviet biological weapons program. [Photograph courtesy of Raymond Zilinskas at the Monterey Institute]
Pasechnik’s business card.
In this memo to Gorbachev about biological weapons on May 15, 1990, Politburo member Lev Zaikov wrote the word biological by hand, due to its sensitive nature. [Hoover Institution Archives]
Senators Sam Nunn, Democrat of Georgia (right), and Richard Lugar, Republican of Indiana, saw the dangers of loose nuclear materials and weapons in the former Soviet Union. [Ray Lustig/Washington Post]
Andy Weber, a U.S. diplomat, located 1,322 pounds of highly-enriched uranium in Kazakhstan. Here, an image of the uranium, which was airlifted out in Project Sapphire. [Andy Weber]
Loading the uranium onto cargo planes to be flown to the United States. [Andy Weber]
President George H. W. Bush raised questions about biological weapons in a private talk with Gorbachev at Camp David, June 2, 1990. [George Bush Presidential Library and Museum]
Christopher Davis, the senior biological warfare specialist on the British Defense Intelligence Staff, makes a video recording during a second visit to Pasechnik’s institute in November 1992. Yeltsin promised to end the biological weapons program, but it continued nonetheless. [Christopher Davis]
Ken Alibek was chief of the anthrax factory built at Stepnogorsk, and later served as deputy director of Biopreparat, the Soviet biological weapons system. [James A. Parcell/Washington Post]
The Stepnogorsk anthrax facility, with underground bunkers in the foreground. [Andy Weber]
Inside the Stepnogorsk complex, machines were ready to create tons of anthrax for weapons if the Kremlin had given the order. [Andy Weber]
Dry, deserted Vozrozhdeniye Island as seen by Weber and his team as their helicopter approached for the first time in 1995. The island held clues to years of biological weapons testing. [Andy Weber]
Searching for buried anthrax on Vozrozhdeniye Island. [Andy Weber]
Weber, who helped uncover the secrets of the Soviet biological weapons program, found rusting cages once used to hold primates for germ warfare testing on the island. [Andy Weber]
In a tin can of peas at a lightly guarded institute, Weber once found samples of plague agent. [Andy Weber]
The graves of the Sverdlovsk anthrax victims. [David E. Hoffman]
“Do we recognize the opportunity we have today during this period in history and the great danger we have of proliferation, or do we sit on our hands and cater to what we think people want to hear in this country?” Nunn asked.
“What are the consequences of doing nothing?”
Nunn wondered what kind of one-minute explanation his colleagues would need if the Soviet Union fell into civil war like Yugoslavia, with nuclear weapons all over. “If helping them destroy 15,000 weapons is not a reduction in the Soviet military threat, why have we been worrying about these 15,000 weapons for the last 30 years? I do not see any logic here at all,” he said. The United States had spent $4 trillion during the Cold War, so $1 billion to destroy weapons “would not be too high a price to pay to help destroy thousands and thousands of Soviet nuclear weapons,” Nunn insisted.
“We have the opportunity for an unprecedented destruction of the weapons of war,” Nunn declared. Yet he warned, “We are going to sleep—to sleep—about a country that is coming apart at the seams economically, that wants to destroy nuclear weapons at this juncture but may not in the months and years ahead.”
“Are we going to continue to sit on our hands?” Nunn then pulled back the legislation. 21
At this critical moment, the president was nowhere to be seen. Bush did not want to take political risks for the Nunn-Aspin legislation. But a handful of influential voices from Moscow made a difference in the Senate. Hours after Nunn pulled back the bill, Alexander Yakovlev, the architect of Gorbachev’s perestroika, spoke with senators in the Capitol at an early-evening reception, impressing on them the urgency of the crisis. Two days later, Nunn relaunched his efforts. Two top officials of the Institute for the Study of the United States and Canada—Andrei Kokoshin, who had met Nunn with his little white car in Moscow, and Sergei Rogov—were both at that moment in Washington. The institute had long been a meeting point between American and Soviet experts on defense and security issues. Nunn invited them to a small lunch, to which he also brought Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, a leading Republican voice on foreign affairs. At the lun
ch, Kokoshin and Rogov warned that power was slipping away from Gorbachev by the minute, and that in a “worst-case scenario,” nuclear weapons could be caught up in the struggle for power among the Soviet republics. This was a volatile, dangerous situation, they said, urging America to “wake up.” Lugar told journalist Don Oberdorfer that the lunch with Kokoshin and Rogov was “a very alarming conversation.”22
On November 19, Ashton B. Carter, the Harvard physicist, came to Nunn’s office for a brainstorming session, along with Lugar; William J. Perry of Stanford University, who had been examining the Soviet military-industrial complex; David Hamburg of the Carnegie Corporation of New York; and John Steinbrunner of the Brookings Institution. Carter drove home the point that a Soviet collapse, now clearly visible from the daily news reports coming out of Moscow, was an immense security threat. “This is completely unprecedented,” Carter recalled saying. “Never before has a nuclear power disintegrated.” Carter had just completed a study of the potential dangers, Soviet Nuclear Fission: Control of the Nuclear Arsenal in a Disintegrating Soviet Union, and it was a snapshot of the frightening dilemma that Nunn and others confronted at the time. The study pointed out that nobody really knew what lurked behind the curtain of Soviet secrecy on nuclear weapons. But, the study warned, there were “three cardinal dangers”: the dispersal of control over nuclear weapons to different republics; the chance that weapons, components or fissile materials “will fall into unauthorized hands;” and the possibility that outside groups, including terrorists and other nations, might seek to obtain weapons, materials or knowledge from the chaotic Soviet complex, “through theft or sale.” While Nunn feared a rogue general grabbing control of the launch system, Carter responded that the threat was “all kinds of motives, all kinds of people, the wayward general to the wayward scientist to the wayward clerk, custodian and sergeant.” The next day, November 20, Lugar announced his support for immediate action on legislation in a floor speech. He decried the “quarrelsome” mood in Congress in the face of “strategic danger” to the country. “Nuclear weapons do not simply fade away; they must be disabled, dismantled and destroyed,” he said.
On November 21, at an 8 A.M. breakfast, Nunn brought sixteen senators from both parties to the Senate Armed Services committee room, where the trillions of defense spending had been authorized over the years. He told them what he had seen in Moscow and turned the floor over to Carter, who delivered a presentation without notes. Carter said command and control over nuclear weapons could not be isolated from the troubles of society. “It’s not something that you can take for granted, that it’s all wired up in some way, and it will be okay,” Carter recalled telling the senators.23 The clarity of his presentation had an instant impact. The addition of Lugar was critical. Within days, Nunn and Lugar had turned around the Senate and gathered the votes for new legislation to set aside $500 million to deal with the Soviet nuclear dangers. The outcome was a remarkable and rare example of foreign policy leadership by Congress. The Bush administration was indifferent. Ross, who was the State Department’s policy planning director, said he saw the need but recalled a sense of fatigue and exhaustion in the administration; they had just been through the Gulf War and the Middle East peace conference, and could not summon the energy for another major initiative. There was also a lingering Cold War mind-set, especially at the Defense Department under Secretary Dick Cheney. Carter recalled making a presentation of his concerns to Donald Atwood, deputy secretary of defense. “His position was very clear, which was that we had spent 50 years trying to impoverish these people, and we’d finally done it, and at this moment you want to assist?” Carter recalled. “In fact, Don had a phrase, which was freefall. He wanted them in freefall. And I felt that freefall was not safe. It was not a safe position given that they had nuclear weapons.”
Visiting Bush at the White House, Nunn and Lugar found him ambivalent. “I remember that he wasn’t saying no,” Nunn said. “He just was very cool to the whole idea. I think he was sensing the political dangers of it.” While Bush stood on the sidelines, Congress moved swiftly. The Senate approved the Nunn-Lugar bill by a vote of 86–8. Later, the total was reduced to $400 million, and it passed the House by a voice vote. To secure enough support, the legislation did not mandate that the United States spend the money, it only said the administration could. It did not require that it be new money, but rather funds shifted from other programs.
Bush’s cautious national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, shrugged at the prospect that there would be more than one finger on the nuclear trigger. After all the years of the Soviet Union as the singular source of danger, he thought it wouldn’t hurt if the central command and control were broken up into several smaller nuclear powers.24 But Baker, the secretary of state, was more alarmed than others about the prospect of nuclear bedlam after a Soviet crackup. “I wanted to make sure we didn’t have a proliferation of nuclear weapons states,” he recalled. “The more nuclear weapons you have, the less stability you have. The more chance of accidental launches, and all the rest of it, or just having little countries that have nukes, like Pakistan, getting pissed at India and letting loose.”25
On December 1, voters in Ukraine approved a referendum on independence. Then, on December 8, at Belovezhskaya Pushcha, a hunting resort outside the city of Brest in Belarus, Yeltsin and the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus declared the Soviet Union dissolved and formed a new Commonwealth of Independent States without telling Gorbachev. The collapse of the center was accelerated by Yeltsin’s fierce determination to wrest power from Gorbachev. Back in Moscow, Yeltsin went to the Soviet defense ministry in a conspicuous effort to woo the military. Baker recalled, “These moves were the stuff of a geopolitical nightmare. Two Kremlin heavyweights, jockeying for political power, calling on the army to follow them, and raising the specter of civil war—with nuclear weapons thrown into the mix.” The situation was so unsettled that Baker, due to give a speech at Princeton on December 12, could not decide what to call the dying Soviet Union. In the end, he settled for the awkward phrase “Russia, Ukraine, the republics, and any common entities.” Baker said in the speech, “If, during the Cold War, we spent trillions of dollars on missiles and bombers to destroy Soviet nuclear weapons in time of war, surely now we can spend just millions of dollars to actually destroy and help control those same nuclear weapons in time of peace.”26 Bush signed the Nunn-Lugar bill the same day.
The worst fears of Nunn, Baker and others were that loose nukes, fast money and a weak state would all come together, perhaps in some kind of proliferation-for-profit syndicate. A glimpse of this possibility materialized at 15 Ulitsa Varvarka, a pleasant street near the old Central Committee offices in the heart of Moscow. There, the International Chetek Corporation opened a makeshift but bustling one-room office in 1991. The name of the company was derived from the Russian words for man, chelovek, technologies, tekhnologii, and capital, kapital. The capital came from several leading enterprises in the military-industrial complex, including Arzamas-16, the nuclear weapons design laboratory based in the closed city of Sarov, 233 miles east of Moscow, where the Soviet Union had first developed a nuclear weapon and Andrei Sakharov had worked on the hydrogen bomb. Chetek was offering to sell a special service: underground nuclear explosions to destroy chemical and toxic industrial wastes, munitions, nuclear reactors or anything else by incinerating it with thermonuclear blasts two thousand feet underground—for a fee.27
This was the first known case of Soviet weapons scientists seeking to privatize their knowledge. A frequent booster of the enterprise in 1991 was Viktor Mikhailov, the chain-smoking deputy atomic energy minister, who had visited Washington in October, warning of the need to build safe storage for nuclear warheads. Mikhailov had spent years in the Soviet nuclear-testing program. Peaceful nuclear explosions—using blasts for digging canals, mining or other purposes besides war—had been carried out by both the United States and Soviet Union, but eventually discarded, in part because of environmental haz
ards.28 The last Soviet explosion was in 1988. What was startling about Chetek was the idea that nuclear explosions were for sale from a weapons laboratory.
In December, a group of American experts on arms control and nuclear weapons arrived in Moscow for a joint workshop with Soviet specialists on warhead verification and dismantlement. On their first night, they were surprised to find that Chetek was hosting a banquet for them at a former Communist Party training school. The toastmaster was Alexei Leonov, a commander of the joint Apollo-Soyuz missions in the 1970s and the first Soviet cosmonaut to walk in space. Mikhailov was there, too, along with officials from Arzamas-16. On entering the banquet room, each member of the delegation was handed a plastic bag containing small souvenirs and a press release, at the top of which was printed both the name of the private company and the government ministry. Mikhailov signed as deputy atomic energy minister, along with Vladimir Dmitriev, president of Chetek. The press release was defensive in tone—responding to news reports about Chetek’s activities in recent months—but it also confirmed some of the worst fears of the Americans. It said that Chetek had signed a deal with Arzamas to use nuclear explosions for the destruction of highly toxic industrial wastes. And the nuclear devices? Just to be clear, Chetek “did not have, does not have, and can not have access to nuclear devices, their components or any knowledge about them.” The press release said that “practical work” in nuclear weapons would still be done by the government.29
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