The Dead Hand

by David Hoffman

  Russia was a leaking sieve in these years. Iraq, seeking to build a more accurate long-range missile in defiance of the United Nations arms embargo, dispatched a thirty-two-year-old Palestinian-Jordanian hustler and middleman, Wiam Gharbiyeh, to Moscow.17 He managed to pass easily in and out of the secret military institutes, signing deals for a wide array of missile goods, technology and services. Gharbiyeh’s biggest triumph came in 1995 with the purchase of gyroscopes and missile guidance components extracted from SS-N-18 submarine-launched intercontinental ballistic missiles under the strategic arms control treaty. Gharbiyeh took ten of them as samples back to Baghdad, and had about eight hundred more packed up and delivered to Sheremetyevo, the main international airport in Moscow. The gyroscopes were then flown out of Russia on two Royal Jordanian flights to Amman. From there, at least half the gyroscopes made their way to Baghdad.18

  On Wednesday evening, October 30, 1996, Vladimir Nechai returned to his office on the third floor at Chelyabinsk-70. He opened the door and locked it behind him. A square-jawed man who wore V-neck sweaters under his sport coat, Nechai was a theoretical physicist who arrived at the institute in 1959, just four years after it was founded, and became director three decades later. It had now been four years since Baker had visited the institute.

  The mood inside was dark, and conditions were grim. Nechai kept notebooks on his desk with details of a desperate search for money to pay the nuclear weapons designers and keep the laboratory from falling apart. On September 9, 1996, Nechai wrote an appeal to Viktor Chernomyrdin, the Russian prime minister, saying, “At the present time, the state of the institute is catastrophic.” The government owed the facility the equivalent of $23 million for work it had already done, including $7 million for salaries, which had not been paid since May. The institute was saddled with $36 million in debts for utilities and other needs. The nuclear bomb-builders were unable to carry out orders for the government, or convert to projects for peaceful purposes, Nechai wrote. Long-Distance phone lines were cut off for failure to pay the bills. Parents could not buy basic school supplies for their children. “There isn’t even enough money to buy food,” he said. In some of the smaller departments, he added, “Lists are being put together for the distribution of bread on credit, and the enterprise isn’t in a condition to provide even this for everyone.”19

  Nechai informed Chernomyrdin that he had taken matters into his own hands. He could not bear to see what was happening to a laboratory that had once been among the most prestigious in the country. In a gamble, he started borrowing money from private banks. The laboratory owed $4.6 million on these loans but could not pay them back. Boris Murashkin, a colleague who had known Nechai since they both arrived at Chelyabinsk-70, said that Nechai’s appeal for help was met with silence by Chernomyrdin. On October 3, Murashkin and other employees of the Russian nuclear complex joined a protest for back wages in Moscow outside the Ministry of Finance. “Pay the Nuclear Center of Russia!” said one of their placards. “Don’t Trifle with Nuclear Weapons!” said another. The ministry agreed to pay some of the back wages later in the month, but by the end of October, far less than promised had trickled out. Nechai told Murashkin he was sympathetic, although as director he could not join the workers in street protests.

  On that Wednesday night, Nechai went to a small study off to the side of his office, with chairs, a tea table and television. He wrote that he could no longer look his people in the eye, that he could no longer bear the strain. The last thing that Nechai wrote in his notes was that he wanted to be buried on Friday.

  Then he shot himself with a pistol.

  Nechai was remembered at a subdued funeral service two days later. Grigory Yavlinsky, leader of the Yabloko Party, one of the pioneers of Russian democracy whose bloc included many scientists and professionals, recalled the mourners had gathered in a cafeteria that looked more like a railroad station waiting room. Not a single official of the government came, not one sent telegrams or wreaths for a man who led the designers of the nuclear shield. On the tables were boiled potatoes, blini, as well as kutiya, a traditional funeral dish of raisins and nuts, and a half-glass of vodka for each person. The scientists spoke softly, in bitterness at the hardships and the loss. “Someone else might take another way,” Yavlinsky recalled the scientists saying. “Everyone knew what that meant. It was clear to everyone what ‘another way’ could be. They were nuclear scientists, after all. Didn’t Moscow understand, they asked, how dangerous it is to drive people who hold the nuclear arsenal in their hands to this state?”

  ————— 19 —————

  REVELATIONS

  In the dawn of a new Russia, people stood up without fear to confront the lies and disinformation of the past. In acts of conscience, curiosity and determination, they began to expose secrets of the arms race. It was a haphazard process of discovery, and often did not attract the public attention of the earlier years, when Gorbachev began to fill in the “blank spots” of history, admitting the truth about Stalin’s mass repressions. But the stories that surfaced in the early 1990s were no less startling to those who heard them: nuclear reactors dumped at sea, exotic nerve gas cocktails and a mysterious machine for retaliation in the event of nuclear attack.

  These were exhilarating moments that no one ever expected to see in a lifetime. Siegfried S. Hecker, the director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, flew to Arzamas-16 in late February 1992 for his first trip ever to the Soviet Union.1 When he landed on the tarmac, a short, elderly man approached him. It was Yuli Khariton, who had designed the first Soviet atomic bomb under Igor Kurchatov, and who later became the first scientific director of Arzamas-16. Khariton extended his hand and said, “I’ve been waiting forty years for this.”

  That night, at a dinner, Khariton delivered a remarkable lecture on the early days of the Soviet atom bomb. These were the deepest secrets of the Cold War, long protected by fear and hidden in vaults, now spilling out over the banquet table. Speaking in his British-accented English, which he had learned while studying at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University before World War II, Khariton recounted in detail the story of how physicists had designed and built the weapon. He recalled how they worked on their own design but kept a stolen American blueprint in their safe, which they had been given by the spy Klaus Fuchs. Khariton claimed the Soviet scientists designed a device that was half the weight and twice the yield of the American bomb. Hecker asked Khariton—sitting directly across from him—why did they use the American design instead of their own? Khariton reminded Hecker that the Soviet program was run by Stalin’s ruthless security chief, Lavrenti Beria. “The reason we tested yours,” he said, “is that we knew yours worked—and we wanted to live.”2

  The next morning, Hecker went for a jog through the gray apartment blocks of the once-secret city. He marveled at how American and Russian weapons scientists had swapped stories and experiences, and he wondered how many billions of dollars were spent for intelligence during the Cold War to get the kind of details that were casually being exchanged now. “We were received with open arms,” Hecker said. “It was just mind-boggling to sit there and have the Russians explain their nuclear weapons program, how they actually put the pieces together, between the physics and the computational capabilities.”

  The Russian scientists told Hecker they saw themselves as exact equals of the Americans and only wanted to take part in scientific cooperation on that basis. Hecker could not solve their financial plight, but he established a vital line of communications to the Soviet weaponeers, a lab-to-lab program of joint projects and an early bridge over the Cold War mistrust.

  From 1959 until 1992, the Soviet Union dumped nuclear waste and reactors into the Arctic Ocean. Twelve submarine reactors, six of them containing fuel, were discarded, even though the Soviet Union had signed an international treaty that prohibited dumping waste in the oceans.3 The nuclear dumping might have remained forever concealed were it not for Alexander Zolotkov, a radiation engineer in Mu
rmansk, the largest city on the Kola Peninsula in the Russian Far North. The rocky ice-free coastline of the peninsula harbored the Northern Fleet, with two-thirds of the Soviet navy’s nuclear-powered vessels, including 120 submarines. Zolotkov also represented Murmansk in the Congress of People’s Deputies, the parliament in Moscow.

  In 1987, the environmental group Greenpeace had launched the Nuclear Free Seas campaign to challenge the arms race at sea. When the Greenpeace activists came to Murmansk and met Zolotkov, they invited him to join one of their voyages. On board the boat, he read a report from the International Atomic Energy Agency in which the Soviet Union declared it had never dumped, was not dumping and had no intention to dump nuclear wastes into the ocean. “This came as a big surprise to me,” Zolotkov said, “because I knew for sure that this had been going on for a prolonged period of time.”

  He participated in one dumping shortly after he got a job in 1974 at the Murmansk Shipping Company, which operated nuclear-powered icebreakers in the Arctic. On the Lepse, an auxiliary maintenance vessel, he heaved liquid nuclear wastes into the Barents Sea. Later, he worked on two atom-powered icebreakers, the Lenin and Artika, and was working on the Imandra, a vessel that serves icebreakers, when he met the Greenpeace team.

  As a member of parliament, he could ask probing questions. Zolotkov learned there were secret orders and instructions to carry out dumping of radioactive wastes in the Barents and Kara Seas, and that no one in the shipping company was bothering to monitor or control the wastes. He also talked to company workers. Then Zolotkov discovered the records of radioactive waste dumping kept aboard the Lepse. He made a map and a small graph, showing the coordinates in the sea where the dumping occurred, the number of containers and the volume of wastes.

  Zolotkov was asked to speak at a seminar being set up by Greenpeace in Moscow. John Sprange, one of the Greenpeace activists, recalled being uncertain whether Zolotkov would dare to take such a step, which could wreck his career, get him arrested or worse. All the documents Zolotkov had examined were labeled secret—he was taking a big risk. The night before the seminar, Zolotkov and the Greenpeace people gathered in the kitchen of a Moscow apartment and drank a lot of vodka. Zolotkov hesitated. He was deeply worried about going public. But the next day, September 23, 1991, he did not disappoint. The seminar, held in a long and narrow conference room that Greenpeace had rented, was packed with journalists, environmentalists and more than a few military and defense people. Zolotkov showed them a map of harbors and marine regions where dumping took place between 1964 and 1986. He revealed that when the waste barrels sometimes floated to the surface, workers shot holes in them. They sank, unprotected. Zolotkov spoke out against the secrecy that hid the reckless dumping for so many years. “The Chernobyl experience shows that all attempts to hide the truth are doomed to failure,” he said.4

  Yeltsin appointed a commission to investigate, chaired by Alexei Yablokov, a prominent environmentalist who had become one of Yeltsin’s advisers. The commission, digging into the official records, confirmed there had been decades of dumping, and found the greatest hazards were the reactor cores, tossed overboard into the shallow inlets of Novaya Zemlya in the Kara Sea. No monitoring had been done in the disposal areas for twenty-five years.5 When the report was finished, the commission members assumed it would be labeled “top secret,” locked up and forgotten, as was the practice in earlier times. Yablokov appealed to Yeltsin. “I said, let’s disclose all the data. It is not Russia’s fault. This is a dirty practice typical of the Soviet Union, this is a convenient time to say, our hands are clean, we are not going to do it any longer.” Yeltsin agreed. The report was published in 1993. The military was furious, Yablokov recalled.

  One day not long afterward, Josh Handler, research director for the Greenpeace campaign, came by Yablokov’s office to see if he could obtain the report. Yablokov said yes—but he had no photocopier.

  Could Handler make him five more copies?6

  On Friday, March 1, 1992, William Burns, the retired major general who had inspected the bicycle factory in Perm a few months earlier, took a phone call at home in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where he was teaching at the Army War College. The caller, from the State Department, asked Burns to drop everything and take charge of the faltering American efforts to help Russia with the dismantlement of nuclear weapons. He was told he would have to leave for Moscow in just a few days.

  Burns agreed, but his task was formidable. The Russians were swamped with nuclear warheads and wanted financial help, but suspicion and hostility ran strong through the military, bureaucracy and nuclear weapons establishment, where officials had been conditioned by decades of service to the secretive Soviet state. Whenever the discussion turned to the most basic details about nuclear weapons—such as how many and how quickly they would be dismantled—the Russians went silent.7 After eight days of meetings in January 1992, one U.S. official cabled back to the State Department and the White House: “The Russians refused to tell us the locations of their dismantlement facilities or their rates of dismantlement. They said everything was fine with these plants and no help was needed.” The official quoted a Russian proverb, “We have been talking about how to share the skin of a bear that is still loose in the forest.”8

  At the State Department, Burns was handed seven short memos describing areas where the Russians needed assistance. One said the Russians wanted one hundred secure rail cars for transporting nuclear warheads. The Soviet Union had always used rail to move their nuclear bombs, but now the pace was quickening as the warheads were returned to Russia from the periphery. The United States had twenty-five surplus secure cars in storage, but no one knew whether they could operate on Russian rails, or how quickly. Russia had pledged to complete the pullout of tactical nuclear warheads from other republics by July 1. There wasn’t much time left.9

  As soon as Burns arrived in Moscow, he ran headlong into the wall of mistrust. Across the table sat Lieutenant General Sergei A. Zelentsov, who commanded the 12th Main Directorate of the Ministry of Defense, custodian of the nuclear weapons. Zelentsov told Burns he believed the Americans had come to spy and learn secrets about Russian weapons. “All you want to do is get out and see our stuff. I’m not sure you really want to help us at all,” Burns recalled the general told him. In fact, what Zelentsov suspected was partially true. The American delegation of sixty-four people included a fair number from the intelligence agencies. The Russian side had their share of security people, too. “We met for a period of about two and a half weeks, and got nowhere,” Burns recalled.

  In an attempt to break through the mistrust, Burns arranged for a Russian delegation to visit Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, New Mexico, from April 28 to May 1, 1992. The visitors were given two briefings that described how the United States had reacted to nuclear weapons emergencies, including a 1966 accident over Spain in which a B-52 lost four nuclear bombs. “They were really taken aback that we were so frank and open in explaining how we screwed up, and here are the lessons learned,” Burns said.10 Zelentsov softened. The Russians were impressed at how motivated the Americans were, and how dispirited their own people were.11

  A few weeks later, Burns brought U.S. railroad experts to Moscow to examine one of the Russian nuclear weapons rail cars, under control of the Ministry of Defense. When the American experts arrived at a remote siding outside of Moscow, the nuclear transport car, model VG-124, was surrounded by a platoon of infantry, raising fixed bayonets. The Americans were told: not one step closer! Burns placed a phone call, and when the Americans returned the next day, the bayonets were down. Inside, the experts saw the rail cars were vulnerable. There was flammable insulation that might burn and threaten the weapons; the bombs were mounted on a movable platform that might come loose; the rail car had no structural reinforcement and would provide little protection. The warheads were being moved in what was essentially a modified but basic cargo boxcar, with only primitive communications. Burns realized it would take too long to a
dapt the American rail cars. With approval from Moscow, the United States quietly grabbed a single Russian nuclear weapon transport car, without the wheel sets, and shipped it by sea from St. Petersburg to Houston, and then overland to Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico. There, specialists built an upgrade to improve the security of the rail car and shipped it back to Russia.

  Given the mistrust that Burns had faced, and the deep secrecy about nuclear weapons, it was another extraordinary moment of cooperation.12

  Vil Mirzayanov had witnessed the suffering of his colleague, Andrei Zheleznyakov, who was poisoned by nerve gas in an accident in 1987 at the chemical weapons research institute in Moscow. Mirzayanov had worked at the institute for many years. Behind the high walls, the Soviet Union and later Russia secretly developed and tested a new binary nerve gas known as novichok, or the “new guy.” Binary weapons are those in which two nonlethal chemicals are mixed together at the last minute to become a deadly agent.