The Dead Hand

by David Hoffman

  Weber and Lepyoshkin flew out together. They posed for a picture on the tarmac, both giving a thumbs-up. Lepyoshkin had nowhere to stay in Almaty; Weber invited him to be his houseguest in the mountains. By chance, there was a reception at the American Embassy for visiting officials from Washington. Among them was Carter, an assistant secretary of defense, who was an architect of the Nunn-Lugar legislation, and Starr, the principal director of the Pentagon’s threat reduction office, who led the “tiger team” for Project Sapphire. They met Lepyoshkin for the first time. Lepyoshkin seemed to have unmoored himself from the Soviet past. He was eager to meet the American officials. They talked in the leafy courtyard of the embassy. Lepyoshkin had only one request: he wanted them to help clean up Stepnogorsk and convert it to peaceful purposes. “I promise,” Carter told him, “we will.”

  In Russia, Weber discovered the footprints of Iranians—and they were reaching for the germs.

  In 1997, back from overseas, he was working at the Pentagon on the Nunn-Lugar programs, which had become known as Cooperative Threat Reduction. He was trying to find a new approach to dealing with the danger of biological weapons inside Russia. Weber’s first trip there came in June 1997, when he took a train fourteen hours from Moscow to Kirov, five hundred miles east, to attend a scientific conference, accompanied by several other American experts. In a stroke of good luck, Weber met researchers from both Obolensk and Vector, the laboratories at the heart of Biopreparat’s research on bacteria and viruses. Late one afternoon, after the formal conference sessions, a small group of scientists from Obolensk invited Weber to share some beers in the banya, a traditional Russian sauna. Joining the scientists in the steam room, with his Russian-language skills and knowledge of biological weapons and pathogens, Weber made a personal connection, as he had done earlier with Mette and Lepyoshkin. In these discussions, Weber learned that scientists from Obolensk and Vector had recently participated in an officially sponsored Russian trade fair in Tehran, and very quickly, the Iranians had shown up at the Russian institutes. The Iranians were somewhat rough-cut agents of influence, and the Russians found them off-putting, the scientists said. From this informal talk in the banya, Weber realized the Iranians were trying to scoop up know-how for biological weapons. What really alarmed him was a discussion with a senior scientist at Obolensk who had been on the trip to Tehran. “They talk about pharmaceuticals,” the scientist said, “but it’s clear their interest is in dual use equipment that can be used for biological weapons.” The scientist said the Iranians had offered him thousands of dollars to teach in Tehran. And then the scientist took a business card from his wallet, which had been given to him by the Iranians. He showed it to Weber, who immediately recognized the name and the office: a front for the military and intelligence services in their drive to procure Russia’s weapons.

  A few weeks later, Weber met Lev Sandakhchiev, the compact, intense, chain-smoking director of Vector, who had once pushed to create artificial viruses for biological weapons. Sandakhchiev had come to Washington for the first time. Weber took Sandakhchiev on an hour-long drive to Fort Detrick, Maryland, once the home of the American biowarfare effort, and now headquarters of the work on defense against dangerous pathogens. In the car, Sandakhchiev revealed to Weber the Iranians had come to Vector, hunting for technology and know-how. Weber sensed that Sandakhchiev wanted to cooperate with the United States, to open the Russian system to joint projects. He also realized that conditions at Vector were increasingly desperate, with salaries unpaid and subsidies drying up.

  Weber and Sandakhchiev met again in October 1997 at a NATO conference in Budapest, and this time, in a hotel room, they had a knockdown, drag-out argument over Iran, as Sandakhchiev ate sausage and drank vodka. Sandakhchiev wanted to know: why was Iran such a bugaboo to the Americans? Weber replied, “You have to understand, they kept our Embassy and our diplomats hostage for 444 days!” Sandakhchiev looked puzzled. When was that? Weber reminded him it was 1979. Sandakhchiev, sounding sincere, told Weber that, isolated in his laboratory in Siberia, he had never heard of the Iran hostage-taking. Weber thought to himself it was an astonishing example of how closed the world of biowarfare had been in Soviet times, apparently so tight that not even the news of the hostage crisis had penetrated. Weber implored Sandakhchiev to stop the cooperation with Iran. Sandakhchiev was reluctant to give up the big money the Iranians had offered, but the Iranians were also very unpleasant partners—they made promises up front, but delivered money late, and constantly tried to bargain for less. Weber and Sandakhchiev went back and forth, arguing for hours. Weber found that Sandakhchiev was open with him, and Weber learned that in addition to work at Vector, there was probably a large, separate stockpile of Variola major virus at the military laboratory at Zagorsk. Later, on a tour in Budapest, they walked past the confessional in an old church, and Sandakhchiev turned to Weber and joked, in Russian, “Andy, let’s go in there and I’ll confess all my sins about biological weapons!”

  Back in Washington, Weber searched for a way to act, to offer Sandakhchiev something to preempt the Iranians. But up to this point, the Nunn-Lugar program was largely devoted to nuclear materials and strategic weapons, and there was tremendous resistance in the U.S. government, especially in the intelligence agencies, to using any of it to stop the spread of biological weapons. The long history of Soviet and Russian deception about germ warfare had left a deep reservoir of mistrust in Washington. “There was this real fear of our funds being misused by these clearly dangerous, bad actors,” Weber recalled. At a meeting at the White House one day in late 1997, a decision was made to engage Vector, as Weber had urged. After the meeting, he walked to the State Department with Anne M. Harrington, who had helped establish the International Science and Technology Center in Moscow, and was now working on nonproliferation issues at the department. Harrington shared Weber’s goal of reaching out to the scientists at Vector. She knew they were in financial trouble; a few years earlier, the science center held workshops at Vector and Obolensk for possible grant recipients, and scientists at Obolensk said they hadn’t been paid for months. Many just stayed home to grow food or find other ways to support their families; to produce enough income to cover minimal salaries, Obolensk boasted a brewery and an assembly line for men’s suits, and was planning to start a vodka distillery. Harrington thought the beleaguered germ warfare scientists should get as much attention as had the nuclear engineers.5

  When they reached the office, Weber and Harrington decided to take a chance and reach out to Sandakhchiev on their own. They would not go through the usual bureaucratic channels: embassies, cables, government ministries. On Harrington’s office computer, they tapped out an e-mail to Sandakhchiev. It was brief, noncommittal, but inviting, suggesting closer cooperation and asking if Weber could visit Vector. They didn’t know what would happen. “What are your employment options if this doesn’t work?” Harrington asked Weber.

  But the gamble paid off. Sandakhchiev responded with an invitation. Weber made several visits to Vector, and on one of them, Weber asked to see Buildings 6 and 6A, where the research on smallpox had been done years earlier, and about which Sandakhchiev had earlier deceived the British and American visitors. This time, Weber was allowed a close look at the building, and to take photographs. “It was clear the place was just a wreck, crap all over the floors, the equipment was in terrible shape,” Weber recalled.

  He went to Frank Miller, then acting assistant secretary of defense for international security policy, a longtime civil servant working on threat reduction. “I think we can break Vector’s ties with Iran,” Weber said. “They’re desperate for limited cooperation and investment.” Miller asked him how much money it would take. “Three million dollars,” Weber replied. Miller went to work and eventually found the money. They persuaded Sandakhchiev to curtail the deals with the shady agents of Tehran.

  On each trip and with each passing year, it was more and more apparent to the Americans who visited the former Soviet Union
that the Cold War legacy of danger far exceeded what anyone had imagined at first. Years had gone by since the Soviet collapse, yet pathogens in flasks, unguarded fissile materials, idle weapons scientists and marooned defense factories were still being discovered for the first time in the late 1990s.

  In a lightly guarded building at the Anti-plague Institute in Almaty, Kazakhstan, Weber once discovered a clutch of test tubes, with plague strains, stored in an empty tin can of peas. In 1997, in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, Weber and another U.S. official were scouting out weapons specialists for the International Science and Technology Center. They explained to a group of institute directors at the Uzbek Academy of Sciences that grants were intended for those who had worked on Soviet weapons programs. How many in the room thought they might qualify? One by one, they stood up. Among them, Weber met the director of an institute that, in Soviet times, worked on plant pathogens intended to wipe out the entire American wheat supply. The director invited Weber to visit, and Weber found, to his amazement, they were also working on how to grow crops after a nuclear holocaust. Weber brought back to Washington a whole new list of dangerous pathogens to worry about.6

  In 1998, Weber made contacts at the Research Center for Molecular Diagnostics and Therapy in Moscow. The institute, which worked with dangerous pathogens in the Soviet years, had fallen on hard times in the 1990s. A scientist from the institute confided to Weber he had just received an e-mail from a postdoctoral student in Tehran who wanted to come work there. Weber told him: don’t reply. Within weeks, Weber helped arrange grants from the International Science and Technology Center for some of the hard-pressed researchers to begin working on civilian projects.

  Over the next few years, more secrets of Biopreparat spilled into the open. In 1998, Alibek published his memoir, describing his career in the germ warfare system. In May 2000, Nikolai Urakov, the director of Obolensk, hosted a conference cosponsored by the International Science and Technology Center. In an extraordinary day, journalists were shown around parts of Korpus No. 1, where Sergei Popov and Igor Domaradsky had worked on genetic engineering. Urakov complained the laboratory was receiving only 1 percent of the government budget of Soviet times—the rest they had to earn on their own. Urakov, director of the largest facility for developing bacteria for biological weapons in the old days, announced a new mission: “We have to protect humans from diseases.”7

  Over and over again, Weber found the key was forging relationships with scientists, respecting their dignity, their desire to carry out useful research, and building their trust. Governments and agreements had their purpose, but the real success started when they could look you in the eye and speak directly. The banya talks worked wonders.

  For Weber and many of those Westerners who went to the former Soviet Union to staunch the threats, there was also a frustrating unknown. They could tally up the success stories, measure the number of fences built and grants given, but could only guess at what had slipped through their fingers. It was the nature of threat reduction that it was always risky business, devilishly challenging, often defying a chance to declare absolute success. In trying to prevent something, the most consequential and terrifying metric was failure.

  ————— EPILOGUE —————

  When Mikhail Gorbachev shook hands for the first time with Ronald Reagan at Geneva on November 19, 1985, the two superpowers had amassed about sixty thousand nuclear warheads. The arms race was at its peak. “We looked at each other on the threshold, in front of the building where the negotiations were to take place, the first meeting,” Gorbachev recalled more than two decades later. “Somehow, we extended a hand to each other, and started talking. He speaks English, I speak Russian, he understands nothing, and I understand nothing. But it seems there is a kind of dialogue being connected, a dialogue of the eyes.” At the end of the summit, when they shook hands again on a statement that a nuclear war could not be won and must never be fought, Gorbachev was astonished. “Can you imagine what that meant?” Gorbachev told me. “It meant that everything we had been doing was an error.”

  “Both of us knew better than anyone else the kind of weapons that we had,” he said. “And those were really piles, mountains of nuclear weapons. A war could start not because of a political decision, but just because of some technical failure.” Gorbachev kept a sculpture of a goose in his Moscow office as a reminder that a flock of geese was once briefly mistaken for incoming missiles by the early-warning radars.

  At Reykjavik, Gorbachev and Reagan went further toward eliminating all nuclear weapons than anyone had gone before. But a generation later, the great promise of Reykjavik remains unfulfilled. The “absolute weapon” is still with us. While the total number of nuclear warheads has shrunk by about two-thirds, thousands are still poised for launch. The United States maintains at the ready about 2,200 strategic nuclear warheads, and 500 smaller, tactical nuclear weapons. Another 2,500 warheads are held in reserve, and an additional 4,200 are awaiting dismantlement. Russia still maintains 3,113 warheads on strategic weapons, 2,079 tactical warheads and more than 8,800 in reserve or awaiting dismantlement. That’s more than 23,000 nuclear warheads.

  Since the end of the Cold War, the world has changed dramatically. Amorphous and murky threats—failed states, terrorism and proliferation—have grown more ominous. Nuclear weapons will hardly deter militias such as the Taliban, or terrorists such as those who attacked New York, Washington, London, Madrid and Mumbai in recent years. The terrorists and militias seek to frighten and damage a more powerful foe. So far they have employed conventional weapons—bombs, grenades, assault rifles and hijacked airliners—but they also want to get their hands on more potent weapons of mass casualty. Driven by intense zeal, they are not intimidated by a nuclear arsenal, nor deterred by fear of death. A lone suicidal terrorist carrying anthrax bacteria or nerve agents in a plastic pouch is not an appropriate target for a nuclear-armed missile. And while nuclear weapons worked as a reliable deterrent for leaders in the Kremlin and the White House, two experienced adversaries, they may not work so well if one of the protagonists is an untested nuclear power, nervous and jittery.

  After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States twice reexamined its nuclear weapons policies and deployments in formal studies, known as the Nuclear Posture Review. Both times, in 1994 and 2002, the reviews acknowledged that the world had changed after the Cold War, but neither report was followed by radical change. The main reason was fear of the future; nuclear weapons were needed as a “hedge” against uncertainty. At first, the uncertainty was the chaos in the former Soviet Union, and later it was the prospect of some other nation or terrorist group obtaining nuclear weapons.

  But the arsenals of the last war seem a poor hedge against new threats. Four elder statesmen of the nuclear age issued an appeal in 2007 to take action toward “a world free of the nuclear threat.” They were Sam Nunn, Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee 1987–1994; George Shultz, Secretary of State 1982–1989; Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State 1973–1977; and William J. Perry, Secretary of Defense 1994–1997. Gorbachev soon joined them. All were intimately involved with decisions about the nuclear balance of terror. The time has come to listen to them.1

  One of their recommendations is to eliminate the short-range battlefield or tactical nuclear weapons left over from the Cold War. The United States has five hundred of these weapons deployed, including two hundred in Europe. They were originally intended to deter a Warsaw Pact invasion; the Warsaw Pact is history. Little is known about the disposition in Russia of the thousands of tactical nuclear weapons removed from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics after the 1991 Bush-Gorbachev initiative. They may be in storage or deployed; they have never been covered by any treaty, nor any verification regime, and the loss of just one could be catastrophic.2

  Another step would be to take the remaining strategic nuclear weapons off launch-ready alert. When Stanislav Petrov faced the false alarm in 1983, launch decisions had to be made i
n just minutes. Today, Russia is no longer the ideological or military threat the Soviet Union once was; nor does the United States pose such a threat to Russia. Americans invested much time and effort to assist Russia’s leap to capitalism in the 1990s—should we aim our missiles now at the very stock markets in Moscow we helped design? Bruce Blair has estimated that both the United States and Russia maintain about one-third of their total arsenals on launch-ready alert. It would take one to two minutes to execute the launch codes and fire Minuteman missiles in the central plains of the United States, and about twelve minutes to launch submarine-based missiles. The combined firepower that could be unleashed in this time frame by both countries is approximately 2,654 high-yield nuclear warheads, or 100,000 Hiroshimas. Procedures could easily be put in place that would de-alert the missiles and create deliberate launch delays of hours, days or weeks to prevent a terrible mistake. And it would be wise for Russia to disconnect and decommission Perimeter, the semiautomatic command system for nuclear retaliation. The Doomsday Machine was built for another epoch.3

  After these steps, the United States and Russia could begin working—ideally in a renewed partnership—toward the goal of total, verified elimination of nuclear weapons around the globe. The United States and Russia together hold 95 percent of the world’s warheads. The Moscow Treaty of 2002, signed by President George W. Bush and President Vladimir Putin, called for between 2,200 and 1,700 warheads “operationally deployed” on each side by the year 2012. Neither nation would suffer from radical reductions from this level. In today’s world, thousands of nuclear warheads on each side do not provide thousands of times more deterrence or safety than a small number of warheads. A drive toward liquidation of the arsenals would be a fitting way to bury the Cold War. So would a determined effort to halt the spread of nuclear weapons and fissile materials elsewhere, as well as ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. We should remember the wisdom of Bernard Brodie, the pioneering early thinker about atomic weapons, who wrote that they are “truly cosmic forces harnessed to the machines of war.” The war is over. It is long past time to scrap the machines.