The Twilight of the Bombs

by Richard Rhodes

  SAM NUNN LED A Senate delegation57 to Russia and Ukraine in mid-March 1992, including Republicans Richard Lugar of Indiana and John Warner of Virginia and Democrat Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico. Besides Senate staff three independent experts accompanied the senators: Ashton Carter, David Hamburg, and Bill Perry, the former under secretary of defense for research and engineering who had sponsored the development of the first Stealth aircraft. Perry was a professor at Stanford at that time and codirector of its Center for International Security and Arms Control (CISAC). Bad weather at the Minsk Airport prevented a planned stop in Belarus. The delegation met with high-level Russian and Ukrainian officials and toured a nuclear risk-reduction center and a defense plant undergoing conversion.

  Defense conversion—converting industries dedicated to military production into industries producing consumer goods—was one of the delegation’s central concerns. It was also Perry’s specialty at that time, the subject area in which he worked and taught at Stanford. “The success of these countries58 in moving from totalitarianism to democracy,” the trip report observed, “is squarely in our national interests, as is their success in demilitarizing the large portion of the military-industrial complex that is excessive to their legitimate defense requirements.” The scale of the challenge was staggering; the Soviet military-industrial complex had employed more than ten million people, directly or indirectly supporting about one-fourth of the Soviet population. So far, very little in the way of defense conversion had been accomplished, largely because the Russian government’s approach to the problem was “to generate funds59 for the later conversion of their defense industry by first promoting sales of arms to other countries.” The senators offered a long list of recommendations, but they acknowledged in their trip report that conversion in the FSU “will be very difficult at best.”60

  In the meantime, no Nunn-Lugar funds had yet been expended,61 because Bush had not yet certified to Congress that the new states had met the act’s conditions. Evidently Mikhailov’s and Belugin’s impatience with American talk was justified.

  In Kiev the four senators received “strong hints that Ukraine62 might assert a claim to the strategic nuclear missiles and warheads remaining on its soil.” Two days after the delegation returned to the United States, on 12 March 1992, Kravchuk announced that he was suspending shipments of tactical nuclear weapons to Russia, though he still supported ridding Ukraine of nuclear arms. He was being “assailed by nationalists63 in the Rada,” writes the foreign-policy analyst Leon Sigal, “who realized that Ukraine was getting nothing in return for handing over the nuclear arms to Russia.… Kiev began demanding compensation for giving up the warheads. Some in the Rada wanted this as a ploy to get Ukraine’s share of Nunn-Lugar aid for dismantling. Russia had been promised $400 million; Ukraine as yet had none. It was receiving some U.S. humanitarian assistance, and it had high hopes for more. Others wanted compensation for the highly enriched uranium Russia could extract from the warheads. Still others … feared that, bereft of its nuclear inheritance, Ukraine would be left alone with its collapsing economy to fend off its overbearing neighbor.” Ironically, unknown to Kravchuk and the Rada nationalists, the Russian military quietly continued shipping tactical nuclear weapons from Ukraine back to Russia. By 6 May all the weapons had been transferred.

  Nunn and his colleagues thought a large part of the problem was “an almost exclusive [Bush] administration focus64 on Russia to the exclusion of other new countries.” Their concerns found support in what Nunn and Lugar would call “a potent memo”65 from former president Richard Nixon to Bush that was leaked to the media on 10 March after circulating privately around Washington for a week. The memo, titled “How to Lose the Cold War,” caused a sensation. It was all the more potent for appearing in the midst of a presidential campaign, with Bush courting conservatives and preparing for a fight against Arkansas’s governor, Bill Clinton. Nixon’s primary focus (besides reestablishing his foreign-policy credentials at Bush’s expense) was supporting Boris Yeltsin, but he excoriated U.S. and Western aid to the FSU as “a pathetically inadequate response.”66 The “hot-button issue67 in the 1950s,” Nixon wrote bluntly, “was, ‘Who lost China?’ If Yeltsin goes down, the question of ‘who lost Russia’ will be an infinitely more devastating issue in the 1990s.” Though Bush pretended he and Nixon were in agreement, he was stung.

  Nunn recognized the value of the Nixon memo to his cause and alluded to it indirectly in one of his first interviews after he returned from Russia. “The place in history68 of President Bush will be judged by what happens in our own government in treating this as a priority over the next several months,” he said. When the senators met with James Baker on their way up the ladder to Bush himself, Nunn and Lugar write, “Baker indicated that he69 had asked his staff to pull together the basic elements of a Russian assistance package.” Bush feigned detachment at the outset of his meeting, but soon came around:

  The president opened the meeting70 by noting that he was lukewarm about the idea of trying to get a major assistance package for Russia through the Congress in an election year. After a thorough vetting of the [trip] report’s findings and recommendations and Secretary Baker’s comments on the State Department’s review of basic components of an assistance package, however, the president decided that this opportunity to assist the reform process in the states of the former Soviet Union should not be missed. He asked the secretary to put together a comprehensive legislative aid proposal for consideration by the Congress. The president also said he would give strong personal support to the proposal.

  Out of this political jockeying came the Freedom Support Act, passed in April, which incorporated many of the recommendations the four senators had formulated, particularly military-to-military contacts and aid for defense conversion. To support these purposes the act provided another $400 million in aid. The appropriation was hardly adequate, but how much might be enough for the United States’ shattered and corrupted former enemy was a hard question; the FSU had swallowed up $44 billion in world aid in 1990 and 1991, an NSC staffer reported in mid-March, adding, “And no one is sure71 where it went.”

  Determined to wring binding commitments to nuclear disarmament from the three FSU states other than Russia that had inherited portions of the Soviet nuclear arsenal, James Baker set to work in April to sell the idea of a protocol to the START agreement to Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. Belarus’s Shushkevich was cooperative as always. Nazarbayev, Baker wrote, “was rather cagey,72 thanking me and noting that he hoped our ‘special relationship’ would continue.” The Kazakh president was angling to become at least a temporary nuclear power under the NPT, whatever that meant—the treaty recognized no such entity. Baker understood that the United States needed to supply recognition and endorsement to Kazakhstan as well as Ukraine to win both states to his protocol, and he arranged for Nazarbayev and Kravchuk to meet with Bush in Washington in May, before Yeltsin arrived for a summit in June.

  Ukraine dug in its heels. With Kravchuk’s foreign minister, Anatoliy Zlenko, Baker “haggled over the protocol73 and the side letter of assurances that would go along with it” in eight phone conversations between late April and early May. Zlenko wanted international supervision of the disarming process, something the START agreement didn’t provide, and Baker refused, pressing Zlenko by reading him a New York Times editorial that recommended withholding political and economic support from Ukraine until it signed. “Finally Zlenko got the message,”74 Baker writes, just in time for Kravchuk’s visit to Washington on 5 May.

  Kravchuk played good cop during his visit, agreeing to Baker’s terms. That agreement in turn put pressure on Nazarbayev, who on his visit to Washington on 18 May agreed to Baker’s protocol and his plan that the three countries would sign “side letters” specifying that they would give up their nuclear arms. “The START protocol was done,”75 Baker writes, “and we would sign it that weekend in Lisbon, where all the states involved were meeting for the conference on assistan
ce to the former Soviet Union. I breathed a sigh of relief. Three months of negotiating were over—or so I thought.”

  Tom Graham went ahead to Lisbon to organize the conference, taking with him one of only two known U.S. Kazakh linguists to translate the texts of the START protocol and the side letters. “In Lisbon I made the rounds76 of the delegations,” Graham recalled. “Belarus was no problem. When I finally found the Kazakhs, they were not a problem either.… The Ukrainians were another matter. I had three meetings with them on Thursday and Friday, and they said that maybe they could sign, maybe they could not, and they were unsure about providing a signed copy of the Kravchuk letter.”

  Frustrated, Graham finally called London, where Baker was staying overnight, and spoke with Baker’s assistant James Timbie. “Early the next morning,”77 Graham wrote, “Jim [Timbie] called me at my hotel in Lisbon. He said Ukraine was going to be all right. The previous night he had relayed my message to Baker in his hotel room. Baker was sitting there in athletic attire, having just come from the exercise room. He promptly telephoned Ukrainian Foreign Minister Zlenko and Jim said, ‘I will tell you later what he said, but suffice it to say that I have never heard one man speak to another in quite that way.’”

  Baker didn’t characterize his speech, except to say he was “infuriated” and had slammed down the phone. “There’s nothing worse78 in a negotiation,” he wrote later, “than to have an interlocutor who you begin to feel can’t be trusted.”

  Graham, delegated to brief the participants, including Baker, on the protocol of the signing ceremony, gathered them together in a small holding room off the hall where the documents were waiting, “explained how each was to enter79 the room, where to sit, what documents would be passed for signature in what order, and finally what would indicate the conclusion of the ceremony. Baker interjected at that point ‘and then you will all leave’; he did not want any Ukrainian or Russian speeches.” Baker had locked Zlenko and the Russian foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, into a room and refused to let them out in order to force their last-minute agreement. “Finally,” wrote the secretary of state, “at 8:10 p.m.,80 I filed into the Winter Garden Room of the Ritz Hotel with representatives from Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia and Ukraine. In an austere, wordless ceremony—we didn’t want a shouting match—the protocol was signed, the letters were exchanged and six minutes later, we had reached our goal: there would only be one nuclear power on the territory of the former Soviet Union.”

  Baker’s optimism notwithstanding, Ukraine had not yet finished bargaining, but the burden of persuading the Ukrainians to disarm would fall next to the Clinton administration and to Bill Perry. A happier outcome that summer of 1992 was a joint understanding between Bush and Yeltsin to reduce their two nations’ strategic arsenals by a further 50 percent, from six thousand warheads and bombs down to between three thousand and thirty-five hundred, and to eliminate multiple warheads on strategic missiles. They might have gone lower; the Russians were willing to cut their arsenal to twenty-five hundred, and so were the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. Dick Cheney balked81 and the levels stayed at between three thousand and thirty-five hundred, more than the Russians could afford to maintain. The agreement, which became START II, would meet years of resistance in the legislatures of both nations.

  Everyone has his own marker of when the Cold War ended. For Tom Graham it was the signing of the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty in 1990, reducing the forces of NATO and the Warsaw Pact so that neither side could sustain an offensive war. For some of the Los Alamos and Livermore scientists who traveled to Russia to meet their long-hidden counterparts it was entering the gates of secret cities that had been black boxes for forty years. For millions around the world who watched the events on television it was the opening of the Berlin Wall, East Germans crowding through narrow checkpoints into West Berlin like prisoners released from their cells by a siege. The breakdown of the Soviet Union and its re-formation into a swarm of new states ended the long, ill-considered, profoundly dangerous nuclear-arms race between two nations that shared no common borders and ought to have found less hazardous ways to compete. Fortunately or unfortunately, the end of the Cold War also cast loose a crowd of client nations from the security of their alliances with the superpowers. Some would relinquish their nuclear ambitions across the next decade; some would renew them. And even as moderates moved to restrain nuclear arsenals further, the ideologues and warhorses of the Cold War cast about for new enemies to justify continuing the politics of threat inflation into the new age.

  * See chapters one and two of my book Arsenals of Folly for a description of the Chernobyl disaster and its effect on Belarus.

  * CORRTEX is an acronym for “Continuous Reflectometry for Radius versus Time Experiments.” The system involves stringing a coaxial cable down the test-weapon borehole or down a nearby borehole, where the expanding shock wave from the explosion progressively crushes and shorts out the cable, giving a direct readout of shock-wave radius as a function of time, which can then be converted to a yield. The Soviets had two comparable systems, Miz and Contactor.22

  PART THREE

  COMING IN FROM THE COLD

  EIGHT PREVENTIVE DEFENSE

  NUCLEAR WEAPONS, which men and nations had sworn were guardians of their survival during the Cold War, depleted to commodities in its aftermath. Ukraine and Kazakhstan were prepared to trade their plentiful inventories back to Russia if the United States paid them for their trouble and promised to protect them. “Our deputies don’t care1 where these things are aimed,” a member of the Ukrainian parliament declared cynically in January 1992. “They know that they must get something for them.” By that summer, having returned more than two thousand tactical nuclear weapons to Russia without compensation, Ukraine at least was feeling sufficiently mistreated to reconsider the bargain it had struck in Lisbon in May. But since the Soviet successor states outside Russia had not developed the weapons in the first place and lacked the codes necessary to launch them, the determined American pressure to see them consolidated under one nation’s command eventually overcame any residual prestige or deterrent value they might have had.

  One leader who never perceived his nation’s nuclear arsenal as munitions to be sold was Stanislav Shushkevich of Belarus, chairman of the Belarusian Supreme Soviet, the nuclear physicist and university provost whose disgust at Moscow’s mishandling of the Chernobyl reactor disaster had led him into politics in the years of the Gorbachev reforms and who became his country’s first head of state when Belarus declared its independence in August 1991. I met Shushkevich a decade later, after his efforts at reform had earned him a vote of no confidence from the reactionary Belarusian parliament and he had retired to private life. He was my host on a visit to Belarus when I was researching the mass killings of Jews there by special forces of the Nazi S.S.; he made a special point of taking me as well to visit the site on the Minsk ring road where in 1988 the archeologist Zyanon Paznyak had uncovered the mass graves of tens of thousands of Byelorussian victims of prewar Stalinist repression. He and his physicist wife, Irina, were my houseguests in turn when they visited Northern California in 2004.

  “I was active in denuclearizing Belarus,” Shushkevich told me proudly. “I consider it my greatest achievement. We have a population of ten million, living on two hundred two thousand square kilometers of land. The nuclear weapons in place there were a danger. Belarus had more than two thousand tactical nuclear weapons. We had eighty-one mobile missiles, of which nine were MIRVed—sufficient to eradicate Europe and the United States. But whom were we defending ourselves from? So I thought that the sooner they were out of the country, the happier we would be.” I asked him if the Belarusian military had agreed. “Who asked them?” he answered sharply. “Our military was the Soviet military, and they were happy to have their missiles returned. We saved money as well.”

  Alyaksandr Lukashenka, who followed the liberal Shushkevich as the president of Belarus and turned the country into a Stalinist-sty
le dictatorship, allied himself closely with Moscow. Shushkevich’s loyalty lay with Belarus first of all. When I arranged for him to speak at Yale University on one of his visits to the United States, he apologized to his audience for speaking in Russian. “But this is the result of the old Soviet system,” he said, “that I speak Russian but not English.” In 1918, he wrote me once, “Byelorussian patriots resolved that Belarus should be an independent state. At about the same time, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland also announced the formation of independent states. This actually worked for some of them (Finland, for example), but not for others. Later on, people who had had these sorts of impulses were relentlessly destroyed by the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks exterminated almost the entire Belarusian intelligentsia. We came back to the idea [of independence] only in 1990.” From Shushkevich’s perspective, nuclear weapons were a burden and a curse for a small independent state, especially if it hoped to turn westward to Europe and America. He signed the Lisbon Protocol enthusiastically, pledging in an accompanying letter to George H. W. Bush to eliminate “all nuclear strategic offensive arms2 located on [Belarusian] territory … during the seven-year period as provided by the START Treaty.”

  Like Gorbachev but even more directly, Shushkevich had been powerfully affected by Chernobyl. At the United Nations’ Earth Summit in Rio in June 1992 he estimated the disaster’s monetary damage to his country at 206 billion rubles, sixteen times Belarus’s annual budget.3 And the cost in rubles did not include the moral and social costs, he said. When Belarus signed a Nunn-Lugar agreement4 with the United States in October 1992, the largest single item on the list was a provision of $25 million for environmental cleanup. Returning Belarus’s eighty-one SS-25s to Russia was agreed at the same time. In January 1993, while expressing his approval of the signing of the START II treaty in Moscow earlier that month by Bush and Boris Yeltsin, Shushkevich confirmed publicly, “We want to get rid5 of the nuclear arsenals on our territory as soon as possible.” Belarus, he added, wasn’t looking for any special benefits in return. In that it was different from Ukraine and Kazakhstan, both of which expected substantial payments for nuclear disarming, although Kazakhstan’s leader, Nursultan Nazarbayev, pursued funding more subtly than the unruly Ukrainians, by feigning indecision and delaying.