The Twilight of the Bombs

by Richard Rhodes

  If my personal experience of carrying American technology into the FSU six months later is relevant, Cochran’s scanning equipment would have been intriguing even to the scientists among the FSU representatives watching his demonstrations. I delivered a laptop computer to my Russian research assistant, a geologist, in June 1992 to facilitate communicating with him by e-mail; dazzled, he characterized the obsolete laptop as “science fiction” and said neither he nor his many scientist friends had ever seen one. I also gave him a printer and a fax machine; we searched all over Moscow for fax paper before we found a roll at a new office-supply store on the outskirts of the city. Thereafter my assistant, who lived with his wife and small daughter in a single room in a communal apartment, kept his office equipment hidden under his bed, fearing he would lose his life at the hands of thieves intent on stealing such rare and valuable machines.

  Whatever the other delegates thought of Cochran’s presentations, the general in charge of maintaining and securing what was still formally the Soviet nuclear arsenal, Sergei Zelentsov, insisted adamantly that only designated Soviet military personnel would be allowed near his nuclear weapons. The Ukrainians, including the deputy chairman of the Ukrainian parliament, were willing to consider tagging and sealing the soon-to-be Ukrainian weapons they would ship to Russia for dismantling, but only if the United States was prepared to reciprocate by allowing U.S. weapons designated for dismantling under the START agreement and the Bush-Gorbachev unilateral agreements to be tagged and sealed in the presence of Ukrainian inspectors. The executive summary of the report the NRDC subsequently issued berated the Bush administration for choosing secrecy over arms control:

  Throughout its first three years,44 the Bush Administration has sought to shield the U.S. nuclear establishment from rigorous inspection by adopting a posture approaching benign neglect toward the disposition of the Soviet Union’s nuclear stockpile and production complex. We are paying for that posture today, as one need only reflect on how different the current situation would be if the Reagan-Bush administrations had heeded the congressional call, beginning in 1983, for a verified fissile material production cutoff followed by verified warhead dismantlement and demilitarization of the removed fissile materials under international safeguards.

  Today there would be hundreds of U.S. and international inspectors all over the republics of the FSU; Soviet plutonium production reactors would be shut down; tritium* production reactors would be closed under bilateral safeguards; fissile material components of weapons retired without replacement would be stored under bilateral safeguards; and all civil reactors, nuclear fuel cycle facilities and civil stocks of fissile material would be under international safeguards.

  Throughout the 1990s, as post–Cold War states moved toward reducing and eliminating their nuclear arsenals, the resistance of the U.S. government to submitting its nuclear-weapons complex to the same transparency standards that it demanded of other states complicated and delayed the great disarming that ought to have followed the resolution of the superpower conflict.

  When the American delegation had arrived in Moscow, its members had learned to their embarrassment that their in-country expenses had been covered by the International CHETEK Corporation, “a private venture45 set up to market nuclear explosions for waste disposal,” in the words of the NRDC report. It had been too late to change the arrangements, but the Americans had resented being put in the position of seeming to endorse a private organization that was linked to senior officials of the Soviet Ministry of Atomic Power and Industry (MAPI) and senior weapons scientists at one of the U.S.S.R.’s two major weapons-design laboratories, Arzamas-16.

  The notion of nuclear explosives and weapons-design knowledge in private corporate hands, whatever their program, was abhorrent to the Americans. They listened skeptically as Yuri Trutnev, the deputy scientific director of Arzamas-16, described a CHETEK-sponsored scheme to dispose of the three-kilogram plutonium cores that would be removed from the FSU’s thousands of nuclear weapons:

  Trutnev … presented a plan for using a 100-kiloton deep-underground nuclear explosion to vaporize 20,000 nuclear weapons cores (“pits”), thereby distributing some 62 tons of plutonium in a much larger volume of molten rock. This rock would then vitrify as it cools, immobilizing the plutonium (in theory at least) 2,000 feet below the surface for many thousands of years. Regarding the disposition of the commercially valuable highly-enriched uranium (HEU) components of these “destroyed” warheads, a Russian weapons scientist stated that it would be “a simple matter” to “unscrew” the uranium secondary stage of the weapons from the plutonium primary stage before blowing up the latter.

  Undetermined in Trutnev’s scheme was whether or not so much vaporized plutonium might solidify in supercritical configurations that would then fission to produce further uncontrolled nuclear explosions, possibly breaching its underground confinement. The Trutnev proposal was shaped in the old heroic Soviet mold, except that its main purpose appeared to be to enrich CHETEK and the government officials allied with it.

  Sam Nunn, on the occasion of his visit to Moscow immediately after the August coup, had been invited by his friend Andrei Kokoshin to meet with what Kokoshin called the “chambers of commerce” of the various new republics. According to Nunn, Kokoshin drove him, “in his little tiny car,” to a dacha “way back in the woods” on the outskirts of Moscow: “I looked out and all these limousines are pulled up outside. So I go in there and it looked like something out of Damon Runyon. I mean cigar smoke everywhere, whiskey bottles everywhere, long-legged women everywhere, and these guys were all in there negotiating. It was the people who were conducting private enterprise and illegal activities all over the Soviet Union—technically illegal. Illicit and illegal. This was the beginnings of the business community in Moscow. The people who knew about business were the people who had been doing it, and all of a sudden they could do it legally. We spent about two hours out there. They wanted to hear from me, but we mainly listened to them. It was an uneasy meeting, because all these guys had armed security around them.” I asked Nunn what they told him. “That they were going to do business,” he said. “The shackles were off. They said, ‘We’re going to be unbridled, we’re going to do business.’ This was, in effect, the Mob. Kokoshin realized it as the meeting went along. We were both ready to get the heck out of there.” Like Nunn, the American delegation on verification had been offered a glimpse of the rowdy new Russia that would tumble out of the ruins of the old Soviet Union.

  MORE INTERESTING THAN Trutnev’s plutonium-disposal nightmare was the question of what to do with the leftover HEU in the thermonuclear weapons, some fifteen kilograms per weapon. Diluted from its weapons-grade enrichment of greater than 90 percent uranium-235 to the enrichment appropriate for commercial power reactors, from 3 to 5 percent, the estimated four thousand thermonuclear warheads that would soon come under Ukraine’s ownership and control would be worth about fifteen thousand dollars per kilogram of HEU, or nearly a billion dollars.

  The Ukrainians, the American delegation was shocked to learn, were unaware of the treasure of tritium and HEU in their weapons; according to the NRDC report, “one senior official46 said he had been told that the warheads being removed from Ukraine contained no materials of commercial value.” At the Commonwealth of Independent States meeting in Alma-Ata on 21 December, Ukraine, like Belarus and Kazakhstan, had agreed to allow its tactical nuclear weapons to be shipped to Russia for dismantling; Ukraine’s 2,200 were supposed to be removed by 1 July 1992, and the Russian Army began removing them before the end of 1991. Five years previously, in April 1986, Ukraine had been the victim of the worst nuclear-reactor explosion in history. The nation was still suffering from the immense burden of cleaning up the Chernobyl disaster, which had strongly influenced Ukrainian public opinion against remaining a nuclear power. When the Ukrainian parliament had first declared its sovereignty, in July 1990, the declaration included a pledge “not to accept,47 not to produce and not to ac
quire nuclear weapons.” Kravchuk went further at a CIS summit on 30 December 1991 and agreed also to allow the strategic nuclear weapons on Ukrainian territory to be removed to Russia by 31 December 1994, a date the Russian military determined48 based on its capacity for moving and storing the weapons.

  At no time during these various discussions did anyone mention compensating Ukraine for the value of the special materials in the weapons, and Kravchuk and his advisers knew so little about nuclear weapons that they never raised the issue. As the members of the Rada—the Ukrainian parliament—came to learn how valuable the weapons actually were, they realized that the Russians had already swindled Ukraine out of the seven tons of plutonium in the tactical nuclear weapons that Kravchuk had essentially given away (assuming that the plutonium would not be destroyed but would be reserved for eventual civilian use in commercial power reactors). That realization in turn raised parliamentary hackles at the thought of also giving away Ukraine’s strategic arsenal with its more immediately marketable HEU. Which may explain Ukraine’s rapid turn, across the first months of the new year, from enthusiasm for abandoning its nuclear arsenal to determination to keep it—or, at least, to bargain for its value before allowing it to leave Ukrainian control.

  One of the Americans invited to the verification meetings in Moscow and Kiev in mid-December was Thomas L. Neff, a blond, somber MIT physicist who was a specialist in nuclear fuel markets. Neff had watched the Soviet Union’s downward spiral with increasing concern for the security of the Soviet nuclear arsenal. “It was immediately apparent,”49 he said later, “that a potential outcome was that the weapons and personnel could be transformed in short order from a well-controlled force to a major weapons-proliferation threat to the world.” Sam Nunn had characteristically responded to the crisis by pursuing legislation; Neff responded, he recalled, by looking for a way “to motivate and finance post-Soviet control of nuclear weapons, fissile material and personnel in a country where central authorities might not have the power to do so. It occurred to me that the HEU in surplus weapons has a high value when blended down to enrichment levels usable in civil power reactors. The destruction of weapons and fissile material could be a self-financing process, without cost to the U.S. taxpayer.” The U.S. officials he briefed on the idea showed little interest. Frustrated by the lack of response, Neff went public in October 1991 in an op-ed essay50 in The New York Times, proposing an exchange: trade former Soviet HEU, diluted down to fuel grade before shipping, for U.S. food and other essential goods. Fissioned in U.S. commercial power reactors, the former Soviet warhead material would never again be available to make weapons. “If the material in each51 nuclear weapon had commercial value on the order of a half million dollars,” Neff explained, “not only would it be watched carefully, but the destruction of it and the uranium fissile material would be expedited. The highly capable scientists and engineers would continue to be supported, reducing the likelihood that they would be forced to sell their talents to other national or sub-national groups.”

  The MAPI deputy minister Viktor N. Mikhailov, the heavyweight among the various Soviet officials who met with the American delegation in Moscow, had noticed Neff’s proposal and explored it with the MIT physicist on a previous visit to Washington. A sardonic, chain-smoking theoretical physicist and imperious Russian nationalist, Mikhailov had come to Washington primarily to sell the idea of U.S. support for a large-scale plutonium-pit storage facility. “We have spent too much52 just to throw this plutonium away,” Mikhailov told the delegation in Moscow in December, dismissing the CHETEK/Trutnev explosive-disposal scheme. “Mikhailov said that the weapons53 storage depots in Russia were filled to capacity,” the NRDC report notes, “and that trains carrying weapons to the depots had been stopped en route.” He wanted the entire first Nunn-Lugar appropriation of $400 million for pit storage. Between $10 million and $100 million dollars of the appropriation “would probably be needed for local authorities to spend on civic improvement to ensure acceptance of the plutonium storage facility by the affected population. In contrast to the facility construction itself, a strict accounting of these local funds would be more difficult to maintain, he suggested.” Building millions of dollars of bribes and possible kickbacks into his proposal was characteristic of Mikhailov’s boldness. Cochran is blunt about Mikhailov. He calls him a crook. Others who came to know the Russian science bureaucrat in the following years believe he saved the Soviet nuclear complex from dangerous and proliferative breakdown. The two characterizations are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

  THE FORMER SOVIET UNION was not the only superpower facing the obsolescence of its nuclear-production complex at the end of the Cold War. U.S. Secretary of Energy James Watkins, an admiral and a protégé of the legendary nuclear-submarine pioneer Hyman Rickover, had assumed responsibility for the U.S. production complex in 1989 after Bush recruited him with the blunt question, “Jim, can you clean54 up this mess?” At a press conference in Washington in December, a policy scholar reported, “Watkins finalized decisions55 to consolidate the [U.S.] nuclear weapons complex from what was now fifteen production facilities in ten states (itself a diminution from the seventeen sites in twelve states Watkins had inherited) to four production plants in four states (South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Missouri) and a test site in Nevada.… ‘Nobody likes nuclear bombs,’ Watkins told [the] press conference in discussing the post–Cold War DOE. ‘We want to get rid of the nuclear complex to the extent we can.’” The statement shocked the U.S. military, the defense industry, and conservative congressmen, who were committed to continuing U.S. nuclear-weapons production. As it turned out, getting rid of the nuclear complex would be easier said than done.

  MIKHAIL GORBACHEV DISSOLVED the Soviet Union on Christmas Day 1991, resigning as its president on national television and giving up control of the Cheget to Boris Yeltsin. “When I became head of state,”56 the exhausted reformer told the Soviet people, “it was already obvious that there was something wrong in this country.” He continued:

  We had plenty of everything: land, oil, gas and other natural resources, and God had also endowed us with intellect and talent—yet we lived much worse than people in other industrialized countries and the gap was constantly widening. The reason was apparent even then—our society was stifled in the grip of a bureaucratic command system. Doomed to serve ideology and bear the heavy burden of the arms race, it was strained to the utmost.… The country was losing hope. We could not go on living like this. We had to change everything radically.

  He had shepherded radical change, he said, dismantling the totalitarian system, breaking through to democratic reforms, introducing a pluralistic economy and land reform, moving toward a free market. Most of all, he reminded the millions who watched him, “An end has been put to the ‘Cold War,’ the arms race and the insane militarization of our country, which crippled our economy, distorted our thinking and undermined our morals. The threat of a world war is no more.”

  After his speech Gorbachev called Bush, who described the conversation in his diary:

  A second call confirmed57 that the former Soviet Union would disappear. Mikhail Gorbachev contacted me at Camp David on Christmas morning of 1991. He wished Barbara and me a Merry Christmas, and then he went on to sum up what had happened in his country: the Soviet Union had ceased to exist. He had just been on national TV to confirm the fact, and he had transferred control of Soviet nuclear weapons to the President of Russia. “You can have a very quiet Christmas evening,” he said. And so it was over.

  The Cold War at least was over. The aftermath—chasing down and securing the weapons and fissile materials left behind, scattered across the eleven time zones of a vast former empire—would demand a long commitment of labor and treasure.

  * Multistage thermonuclear weapons (“hydrogen bombs”) use plutonium, highly enriched uranium (HEU), tritium, and solid lithium deuteride-tritide (LiDT) as their nuclear fuel. Plutonium fuels and tritium boosts the yield of the primary stage,
which is essentially a small atomic bomb; HEU and LiDT fuel the secondary stage—the hydrogen fusion component.

  SEVEN WAITING FOR FORTY YEARS

  WHEN THE SOVIET UNION broke up into fifteen new states, one nuclear power fragmented into four nuclear powers, each with formidable numbers of strategic nuclear weapons. Russian forces continued to guard and control the weapons, but their legal ownership devolved to the new countries where they were based: Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. Each could keep them or give them up to Russia—or sell them elsewhere. In December 1991, a Kazakh journalist reports,

  Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestine1 Liberation Organization, suddenly appeared in Alma-Ata to test the leader of the world’s first “nuclear Muslim country.” He offered [President] Nazarbayev the role of leading arbiter in the Middle East. Arafat also told Nazarbayev that the war in the Middle East could spread to new countries at any moment, and that Israel’s bombs would then fall on the Middle East and Kazakhstan.

  Arafat’s ambition was transparent: Nazarbayev would gain control of the nuclear arsenal and aim it in whatever direction Arafat desired. But Nazarbayev was not buying; he stressed that although he supported the Palestinians in their struggle to create an independent state, he did not approve of the use of force.

  The following month, Iraq also made overtures to Kazakhstan, requesting permission to send an Iraqi parliamentary leader to meet with the Kazakh parliament. The new government pointedly ignored the request. Nazarbayev told an American diplomat as well that several Middle Eastern countries had offered to buy the 1,040 half-megaton warheads on the 104 SS-18 ICBMs that Kazakhstan had inherited. Nazarbayev had turned down the offers, but they added to his second thoughts about his earlier decision to give up Kazakhstan’s share of the former Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal without compensation.