The Twilight of the Bombs

by Richard Rhodes

  He had announced that decision on 29 August 1991, following a debate in the Kazakh parliament about closing down the main Soviet nuclear test site near Semipalatinsk in northeastern Kazakhstan, where 456 nuclear tests, 116 of them above ground, had severely polluted a large area of the steppe lands. (The test site itself covered seven thousand square miles, an area about the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island together.) “With the support of the nation,”2 Nazarbayev would write of his decision, “we proclaimed a unilateral ban on the inhuman testing of nuclear weapons … and declared that our country would always be a territory free of nuclear arms and their testing.… It was one of the first independent steps of an independent Kazakhstan.” But Kazakhstan, a big country with a small population, lay between Russia on the north and China on the east, a potentially dangerous neighborhood that it was possible to believe a nuclear arsenal might make more secure. And who would pay the millions it would cost to ship all those warheads to Russia and clean up Semipalatinsk? There was even one unexploded warhead lodged in a borehole deep underground at the test site where it had been positioned for a test when Gorbachev declared a moratorium; who would dig the thing out and cart it away?

  Of the four new nuclear republics that the dissolution of the Soviet Union had created, only Belarus under Stanislav Shushkevich was fully committed at the outset to nuclear disarmament. All four needed financial help to secure their nuclear arsenals. In mid-December 1991, U.S. Secretary of State James Baker had flown from Moscow to Alma-Ata to swap U.S. assistance for Kazakhstan’s accession to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. “If the international community3 recognizes and accepts Kazakhstan,” Nazarbayev had assured him, “we will declare ourselves a non-nuclear state.” Baker would learn later, he writes, “that Nazarbayev could … string out negotiations for any and every advantage he could find.” Next Baker flew to Minsk, where “Shushkevich was at pains4 to emphasize that Belarus would accept anything we wanted on nuclear weapons. Having lived through the trauma of Chernobyl, Shushkevich felt it was essential to get all nuclear weapons off Belarus territory.* He eagerly sought U.S. expertise for disabling and dismantling purposes, and I pledged that we would supply such.” On to Kiev, where, Baker says, “Kravchuk was similarly cooperative.”5 He may have been, but privately the Ukrainians were hatching other plans.

  Baker, a shrewd man, grew up with his lawyer father’s favorite saying drummed into his head: “Prior preparation prevents6 poor performance.” In mid-January 1992 he sent an interagency delegation led by his under secretary of state for international security, Reginald Bartholomew, on a round-robin mission from one capital to the next, Moscow to Kiev to Minsk to Alma-Ata and back to Moscow, to negotiate with the new governments. Among about twenty participants, general counsel and ambassador Thomas Graham, Jr., a tall, soft-spoken Kentuckian experienced in arms negotiations, represented the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. “Our mission,” Graham told me, “was to tell7 these governments that President Bush meant what he said when he said that American recognition depended upon them accepting their international obligations, particularly in the arms-control field, particularly in the nuclear-weapons field.” General John Shalikashvili, who held the disarmament portfolio at the Pentagon, represented the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The office of the secretary of defense sent Stephen Hadley, then assistant secretary of defense for international security. Douglas MacEachin, a senior official at the CIA, spoke for that agency.

  It was frigid midwinter across the FSU, the new states were barely fledged, and triple-digit inflation had impoverished them. (In Moscow a few months later I would find the apartments of retired senior weapons scientists, the men who gave the Soviet Union the atomic and hydrogen bombs, stocked with half-empty gunny sacks of moldy potatoes because the scientists’ fixed pensions had become nearly worthless; during that brutal inflation a dollar would flag down a driver and private car—or even a government limo—for a trip across the city.) At the Bartholomew delegation’s first stop, in Moscow, Graham writes, “There was not much disagreement8 between the sides.” While Russia would be the legal successor to the Soviet Union for the NPT, the United States wanted the other three new nations to sign the treaty as well. Which country or countries would take on the START agreement would have to be negotiated, as would succession to the 1990 Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty (CFE), which had established equal limits to NATO and Warsaw Pact tanks and other heavy arms.

  The Ukrainians balked at the U.S. delegation’s terms, Graham recalls, despite Kravchuk’s representations to Baker:

  Early on they indicated9 their ambition to be considered a nuclear power; they wanted to be a START nuclear state and they had problems with joining the NPT as a non-nuclear weapons state. One Ukrainian official said that Ukraine wanted to be the France of the East and France has nuclear weapons. It was clear to me that we would have a long road to travel with Ukraine.

  Minsk was easier, and Shushkevich put up the delegation in Leonid Brezhnev’s old hunting lodge outside the city—“deep snow everywhere,”10 Graham remembers, “very beautiful.” While Bartholomew’s flying squad was meeting with Belarusian officials, Bartholomew heard from his advance man in Alma-Ata that the Kazakhs would not refuel the State Department jet unless he arrived with twenty thousand dollars in small bills to pay for the jet fuel. Moscow banks, it seemed, took a 10 percent cut of any credit-card charges, and the Kazakhs weren’t prepared to pay it. “They were very desperate,”11 Graham recalls. “They said they’d allowed Secretary Baker to give them a check but they weren’t going to let us do that.” A few nights later Graham was standing beside the delegation’s plane on the tarmac at the Minsk airport next to Bartholomew, waiting to do a red-eye to Alma-Ata. “All of a sudden I see this small plane land and taxi over and a man gets out with a black satchel. I recognized him as one of our ambassadors. He walked up to Reg and without comment handed him the satchel. That’s the twenty thousand dollars. For a moment I wasn’t sure if I was doing disarmament or running drugs.”

  In Alma-Ata, having surrendered the satchel, Bartholomew went off to confer with the prime minister before meeting with Nazarbayev. Graham and the others called the foreign ministry to arrange to discuss the treaties they wanted the Kazakhs to sign. No one at the ministry was prepared to conduct discussions, they were told; such authority was the province of only the president and the prime minister. “Kazakhstan, of course,12 had never been an independent state,” Graham noted, “and was then about two weeks old.” Eventually the flying squad held substantive talks. At a traditional banquet to mark that first visit, the foreign minister accorded Bartholomew the honor of distributing the eyeballs, ears, tongue, and other delicacies of the celebratory roasted sheep. Appropriately, one eyeball went to the spy among them—MacEachin of the CIA—who then gallantly accepted the other from a member of the group who lacked the stomach even to sample hers.13

  The large questions of treaty commitments with the four new states that the Baker flying squad had explored depended in turn on mutually agreed solutions to practical problems, Bartholomew told the Senate Armed Services Committee not long after the squad’s return. Inevitably, Viktor Mikhailov’s proposed “new and very expensive14 facility” for storing plutonium had come up in the discussions; Bartholomew told the committee chairman, Sam Nunn, that his experts had “real questions about [it].” More mundane proposals looked more promising:

  Let me describe some15 of the potential projects we are looking at. One would be to send to Russia a set of United States containers, nuclear weapons containers, for the safe transport and storage of nuclear weapons and materials for their examination. This could lead to production of containers based on U.S. technology for Soviet weapons and materials.

  We are also considering provision of U.S. safe, secure rail cars that we no longer use and have in storage, together with assistance from the United States in converting these rail cars to Russian track gauge. We are looking at the provision of Kevlar blankets, a large
number of Kevlar blankets, to protect weapons in transit from small arms fire.

  The need for refurbished weapons containers and railcars and Kevlar blankets to shield Russian nuclear warheads from the potshots of disgruntled citizens underscores the former Soviet Union’s economic collapse in the first year after its breakup.

  SEPARATELY AND INDEPENDENTLY, a small delegation from the two primary United States nuclear weapons laboratories, Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore, traveled to Russia in late February 1992 to initiate a program of support for the FSU scientists and engineers isolated in their counterpart secret nuclear cities. Arzamas-16 (in Sarov), 250 miles southeast of Moscow, and Chelyabinsk-70 (in Snezhinsk), in the southern Urals another 550 miles farther along, were effectively company towns with no employers other than the Russian government, which had all but ceased paying salaries. Their triple barbed-wire fences enclosed several hundred thousand people whose working lives had been spent almost entirely within the Soviet military-industrial complex. The CIA director, Robert Gates, told a Senate committee in mid-January that at least one or two thousand of those people had the skills necessary to design nuclear weapons; across Russia, another three to five thousand had worked in uranium enrichment or plutonium production. “The brain drain problem16 is the area that causes us the greatest concern,” Gates specified, “more than the loss of materials or weapons.” He said that the breakdown of food networks supplying the secret cities had aggravated the problem, which the U.S. labs hoped to address.

  The route that led the directors of two U.S. weapons laboratories to the gates of two secret cities that had only recently been restored to the Russian map was circuitous, but like so many transformations in the final years of the Cold War, it began with Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan.

  In the slow, frustrating process of forcing the nuclear genie back into its bottle, one approach that the United States arms-control community had pursued since the 1950s was limiting nuclear testing. Because new designs for smaller, more powerful, more deliverable nuclear weapons required testing at full yield in those days to demonstrate if they worked, limiting nuclear testing slowed the development of new weapons systems and encouraged doubts about the reliability of old ones. An early success had been the Limited Test Ban Treaty (LTBT) signed by the United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom in 1963. The LTBT prohibited testing nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, in outer space, or underwater, essentially eliminating the radioactive fallout from atmospheric and underwater testing that had roused the fears of ordinary people everywhere during the 1950s. While the treaty was an environmental and public-health triumph, it was also at least a partial victory for its signatories’ nuclear-weapons establishments, which were allowed to continue unlimited nuclear testing underground, out of the public eye. Of a U.S. total of 1,054 nuclear tests conducted between 1945 and 1992, for example, 70 percent were fired underground.

  The next step in confining the nuclear genie was to limit the yield of the underground tests allowed by the LTBT. In negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union in 1974, the United States proposed that such tests be limited to yields of no more than 150 kilotons, about ten times the yield of the Hiroshima bomb. “The United States judged17 that such a limit would not hinder its basic program to support nuclear deterrence,” Tom Graham writes, “and would limit the Soviet Union’s high-yield programs [of testing] associated with their very large, or ‘heavy,’ ICBMs.” Limited or not, the Soviets promptly signed the Threshold Test Ban Treaty (TTBT) and began observing its restrictions.

  The TTBT provided for exchanges of information about test yields, to allow each side to calibrate its long-range seismic measurements so that treaty compliance could be determined without intrusive on-site inspections, which neither side wanted. U.S. neoconservatives, however, always on the lookout for ways to defeat arms-control treaties, seized on purported Soviet cheating on yield limits to justify Senate resistance to treaty ratification. (There were never more than ten tests in question, and a thorough 1988 U.S. Office of Technology Assessment study18 exonerated the Soviet program, but the cheating issue served to delay TTBT ratification until 1990.)

  In 1984, speaking in New York at the annual opening of the United Nations General Assembly, Ronald Reagan offered to break the TTBT impasse by turning the problem over to the scientists. “I propose that we find19 a way for Soviet experts to come to the United States nuclear test site,” he said, “and for ours to go to theirs, to measure directly the yields of tests of nuclear weapons. We should work toward having such arrangements in place by next spring. I hope that the Soviet Union will cooperate in this undertaking and reciprocate in a manner that will enable the two countries to establish the basis for verification for effective limits on underground nuclear testing.” Reagan’s proposal was not as generous as it seemed, since the Soviet Union was traditionally opposed to on-site inspection of its nuclear facilities. The proposal languished until September 1987, when the U.S. secretary of state, George Shultz, and the Soviet foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, revived it. Reagan and Gorbachev formally endorsed it at their June 1988 Moscow summit meeting; the two sides agreed to pursue a program of joint verification experiments (JVEs) with “the ultimate objective of the complete cessation of nuclear testing as part of an effective disarmament process.”20

  Preliminary visits had already taken place by then, with Soviet and American scientists touring installations they had known previously only from intelligence briefings. Donald Eilers, an associate group leader at Los Alamos, recalls landing at Semipalatinsk in January 1988 in “a rip-roaring snowstorm”21 after flying down from Moscow with his team. They were the first Americans ever to set foot on the site. A big man, calm and thorough, Eilers was a coinventor of the CORRTEX verification system, which the U.S. planned to use.* The hotel where the U.S. delegation stayed on the test site was surrounded with armed guards, he remembers; it took the intervention of the Soviet general who commanded the site to allow the visitors to walk more than fifty yards along the Irtysh River for exercise. “The nights were cold, about thirty degrees below zero, and the days were filled with trips to the test site where we and our equipment would be housed. It was out there in the middle of nowhere, on a very cold day with the wind howling at fifty miles per hour, when they brought us into a double-walled tent and hosted a great feast for us. We were very impressed.”

  Eilers vividly recalled meeting Mikhailov for the first time on that trip. “He was then the director23 of the Scientific Research Institute of Impulse Engineering in Moscow, the institute responsible for many types of nuclear testing diagnostics. He certainly appeared to be leading their technical group, and I thought, ‘Boy, what an intense guy.’ He exuded self-confidence and pride. It was quite obvious that he was well-respected, and everybody and his brother listened to him.” Later, when Eilers had worked with the Soviet physicist long enough for a friendship to develop, Mikhailov revealed that he sat on a committee for targeting U.S. cities. “Then he said, ‘Don, it makes a big difference now that I can place faces at those targets.’ He meant the job would be much more difficult.”24 The Soviets had treated the Los Alamos delegation to an evening at the Bolshoi Ballet before it flew out to Semipalatinsk; when the counterpart Soviet delegation arrived to tour the Nevada Test Site sixty-five miles northwest of Las Vegas, the Americans introduced them to a typical shopping mall. “They were absolutely25 flabbergasted,” Eilers says, laughing. “They thought it was all put up just for them, to fool them.”

  Mikhailov brooded more than once on the ironies of nuclear targeting as he crossed the United States in the summer of 1988 to lead the team that would observe the first JVE. “When we walked around26 Washington, New York and Las Vegas,” he wrote in a memoir, “I could not imagine, even in a flight of scientific and technical fancy, those wondrous cities as ‘military targets.’ Sometimes those thoughts simply terrified me and made me shudder.” The two months Mikhailov spent at the Nevada Test Site that summer add
ed history to his rich impression of America:

  In contrast to our test site27 … the Nevada Test Site has a marvelous swimming pool and a restaurant. Frankly, it would be very difficult to compare our living conditions.… We adapted quickly to the harsh climate of Nevada, and our American colleagues enlivened our stay with weekend trips to Las Vegas. The city makes an indelible impression in the daytime and at night. I think of it as a pearl in the State of Nevada. The temperature sometimes rose as high as 50 degrees Celsius [122° F.] in the shade, and the blue sky was absolutely cloudless. In my heart I had the greatest admiration for the pioneers who tamed the “Wild West” two hundred years ago. That took real courage!

  In mid-August at the test site, after two months of preparations, the Soviet scientists closely inspected a steel canister containing an American nuclear weapon before the cabled assembly was lowered into its borehole, a two-thousand-foot hole ten feet in diameter that was then filled with rock and plaster of Paris. The canister had been painted red, white, and blue, which someone from the Soviet delegation pointed out drily were the colors of the deceased Russian royal family.28 At ten a.m. on 17 August 1988, with Mikhailov and his team in the control room and the Americans holding their breath—a dud would have been a great embarrassment—the United States exploded the weapon buried below the Nevada desert. The soil bulged around the borehole plug, but there was little ground shock in the soft rock. A Soviet seismic station set up near the Nevada-California border nevertheless picked up a signal from the blast, as had the U.S. and Soviet instrument cables at the site. Both verification systems agreed that the Kearsarge test achieved its design yield of 150 kilotons. The Soviet Shagan test recorded similar results using comparable instruments less than one month later at Semipalatinsk.