The Twilight of the Bombs

by Richard Rhodes

  SUCH WERE THE PUBLIC EVENTS of the August coup. The Gorbachevs in the isolation of their house arrest lived through another, private reality at Zarya. Their seventy-two hours of uncertainty ramped up at times to intense anxiety and even terror, especially for Raisa, as they waited out an implicit threat of death that might consume not only their lives but also the lives of their daughter and son-in-law and their grandchildren.

  Gorbachev’s bodyguards remained loyal throughout the three-day ordeal. At his request that Monday, one of them passed a series of demands to the KGB officer in charge, a general named Generalov: restore the president’s telephones and television, deliver the mail and newspapers, and send a plane to return him to Moscow. Gorbachev got no response. Late in the afternoon he learned that the Cheget team had been removed.23 The order had come from Moscow, from the chief of the division of the general staff that controlled strategic communications. The team had left with its equipment for Belbek at two; at about eight that evening, a security expert writes, the three Cheget teams “left for Moscow24 in the president’s plane, taking with them his terminal, rendered useless by erasing its magnetic memory.” Without the unique code that only Gorbachev possessed, the presidential Cheget was inoperative; the teams erased its memory to protect its secrets.

  Midafternoon on Wednesday, 21 August, the day the coup collapsed, a BBC transmission that the Gorbachevs picked up on their Sony pocket radio, their only uncensored contact with the outside world, reported that Kryuchkov had sent a delegation to Foros to see for itself that Gorbachev was incapacitated. This was, in fact, the gang of panicked plotters the Russian police had chased to Vnukovo Airport, but the family had no way of assessing the ominous report. “We consider this a sign25 that the worst is to come,” Raisa wrote. “Within the next few hours actions may be carried out to translate the infamous lie into reality.” Gorbachev ordered his guards to block all the drives leading up to the dacha and to use force if necessary to prevent any unauthorized entry. Guards with Kalashnikovs stationed themselves at the entrance to the dacha and along the central staircase inside. The Gorbachev grandchildren were locked into their bedroom and the housekeeper assigned to take care of them. Raisa’s distress was extreme, so much so that she suffered a transient stroke, with numbness in her arms and garbled speech. There were doctors at hand to care for her; she was treated and put to bed.

  The desperate men of the coup arrived. Gorbachev’s bodyguards arrested them and herded them into the dacha to wait until the president chose to receive them. Gorbachev demanded that they restore his telephones before he would speak with them; when they did so, he kept them waiting while he reconnected himself to the world. “I talked on the telephone26 with Yeltsin, Nazarbayev, [Nikolai] Dementi [of Belarus] and leaders of the other republics. I said to them: ‘I’m holding the fort here with my garrison.’ I also got in touch with President Bush. I began issuing orders. Yazov was dismissed and his duties as Minister of Defense were entrusted to [Mikhail] Moiseyev, who was to ensure that the flight carrying Rutskoi and his comrades could land at Belbek. The chief of government communications was instructed to disconnect the telephone lines of all the plotters. The Kremlin commandant was to secure the buildings and to isolate all the conspirators who had stayed behind there.” By the time he was finished, says Chernyaev, “judging by their reaction27 … they were standing at attention.”

  For Gorbachev, when the Russian delegation arrived, “It was then28 that I really felt that I was free.” He and his family still had to negotiate the uncertain situation at Belbek, pretending to board the presidential plane that the plotters had commandeered, then ducking back into the limo and racing across the airfield to the secure plane that had brought the Russian leadership to the Crimea. They landed at Vnukovo at two a.m. on the morning of 22 August, Raisa stricken, Gorbachev looking haunted. As soon as their daughter found the privacy of the waiting limo, “she threw herself on the seat29 and broke down in wracking sobs,” Chernyaev reports. “We lived through30 those three August days,” Gorbachev said afterward, “on the brink of human endurance.” Walking to the Kremlin the next morning, Gorbachev assessed the change to his nation and himself. “I have come back from Foros31 to another country,” he told reporters, “and I myself am a different man now.”

  SAM NUNN, IN 1991 the fifty-three-year-old United States Democratic senator from Georgia and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, happened to be attending an Aspen Institute conference in Budapest when the August coup occurred. The conference was about America’s relationship with the Soviet Union, Nunn recalls, and among those attending was his Soviet friend Andrei Kokoshin, a political scientist and America specialist whom Nunn had known for more than a decade. “The conference was probably32 a third of the way through,” Nunn told me, “when the Soviet delegation got the call about Gorbachev and the coup taking place. Andrei immediately went back, and then when Gorbachev was released, he called me and said, ‘Sam, there are big things happening in Russia.’ He said ‘Russia’ about five times. I’d never heard him say ‘Russia’ before. He said, ‘You’ve got to come over here; big things are happening. You’ve got to meet some of these new people.’”

  Nunn didn’t have a Soviet visa, and he assumed that this would be a fatal impediment, since visas usually took weeks to work their way through the Soviet bureaucracy. Kokoshin said he’d have the resident Soviet ambassador there in an hour. Nunn didn’t believe him, but an hour later the ambassador showed up with a visa. Nunn alerted the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, which cautioned him to stay away—“Don’t come,” he was told. “This place is total confusion; we don’t even know who the players are.” Undeterred, he flew to Moscow the next morning, confident his Russian friends would take care of him. He visited the Russian White House on the afternoon of his arrival, in time to find “thousands of people still milling around” and to meet “all the new key players, the ones who were going to be in charge of Russia.”

  For the next two days Nunn attended the historic sessions of the Supreme Soviet convened in the wake of the coup attempt. Another Russian friend, Sergei Rogov, the deputy director of the Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, translated for him. “The leaders of the Soviet Union were sitting up there, including Gorbachev, and the leaders of the republics, and they were debating, with a lot of floor activity, the breakup of the Soviet Union. Rogov always spoke his mind. He’d say, ‘So-and-so said this and So-and-so said that,’ and then he’d mutter under his breath, ‘Lying son of a bitch.’ It was fascinating.”

  At the end of the second day’s session, Nunn walked out with the delegate Roald Sagdeev, a wry Tatar astrophysicist and Gorbachev adviser whose 1990 marriage to Susan Eisenhower, the former president’s granddaughter, had symbolized on a personal level the changed relationship between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Sagdeev, like Nunn, was deeply worried about the security of the Soviet nuclear arsenal during the coup. “You have to assume33 that the leaders of the coup had effective control over the nuclear weapons,” Sagdeev said publicly on the day after the coup collapsed. “This is what makes such a type of coup very dangerous. I think what happened—when they arrested Gorbachev, from that very moment, they switched all the electronic keys from him to somebody else, to someone who was declared commander-in-chief. From what we heard, they probably had a special technique to do it without Gorbachev’s consent.… The worst-case scenario, in deterrence planning, is the leaders could have committed suicide this way.” Nunn remembers noticing Sagdeev surreptitiously removing his delegate’s badge as they pushed through the noisy mob of demonstrators outside the building. “I thought the crowd was friendly,” he says. “I never felt threatened.” After they were clear he asked Sagdeev why he’d taken off his badge and what the crowd was chanting. “He said, ‘They were chanting “Down with the Soviet Union, down with the people’s delegates.”’”

  Nunn carried his concern with the Soviet nuclear arsenal into a meeting with Gorbachev himself:
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  I went to see Gorbachev and I thought I’d just go in and say hello, but I ended up spending about forty-five minutes with him. He’d been out of captivity for about three days by then, something like that. We had a good, friendly conversation. He was bewildered—I mean, you could just tell. He was trying to be candid, but he still was clinging to empire and clinging to the Soviet Union staying together and saying he was going to do everything he could to do that. But he did tell me he wasn’t going to shed blood. He made it clear that whatever they did they were going to do peacefully. That’s when I asked him about the security of the weapons. Because I’d heard from people during that trip—my friends as well as the military people I talked to—that one of their biggest concerns was how they were going to control the nuclear, chemical and biological stuff when the whole country was splitting up and this stuff was everywhere.

  I asked Gorbachev. I said, “Did you have control of the nuclear chain of command during your captivity, or who did?” He just turned—he didn’t answer the question. He said, “Good-bye, Senator Nunn.”

  It was not only his conversation with Gorbachev that late-August day in Moscow that made Nunn determined to find a way to help the fracturing Soviet Union secure its weapons of mass destruction. “That was one part of it,” he told me, “but the whole thing was so apparent to me: that we had to act and act quickly to help them, certainly, but also to focus them, to move the problem way up on their list of priorities.”

  AS LATER TESTIMONY REVEALED, the Soviet nuclear arsenal was never at risk during the coup, thanks partly to what the American command-and-control expert Bruce Blair called its “ingenious” design. Blair, a solid, handsome man who apprenticed in his field as a U.S. missile-control officer, told a Senate subcommittee a month after the coup that the Soviet system’s safeguards “are more stringent34 than those of any other nuclear power, including the United States. The overall design of Soviet nuclear command and control is ingenious and its designers were deservedly awarded Lenin prizes for their efforts.” Blair and his Soviet counterpart, command-and-control expert Gennadi Pavlov, explained to the subcommittee in some detail how the Soviet system worked.

  “We do not invest35 any authority to use nuclear weapons in a single individual,” Pavlov began, “in contrast with the United States.” In the American system, the president acting by himself can key the order to alert and launch nuclear weapons. The Soviet system was multileveled, with built-in checks and balances. At the leadership level it was a four-key system; the president, the minister of defense, and the chief of the general staff accounted for three Chegets, and any one of three commanders in chief of Soviet strategic forces (the strategic rocket forces, the Air Force, or the Navy) accounted for the fourth. The three top leaders, their Chegets linked through the Kavkaz national-leadership network, had to act together to generate one combined code. That code in turn had to be combined with a code keyed into the system down the line by at least one of the three commanders in chief (CICs). A concurring CIC could authorize the alerting of only his own forces in concert with the top leadership. If he decided not to do so, then no authorization code would be generated for those forces.

  “Under the conditions present36 during the coup,” Blair told the subcommittee, “the top leaders could not have bypassed these senior commanders.… I think it is fairly widely known that all three of the senior commanders decided among themselves to disobey any launch orders from the coup plotters.… And so this decision on the part of the three senior commanders categorically ruled out the possibility of a Soviet strategic attack.” Gennady Yanayev, the drunken vice president, could not have used Gorbachev’s Cheget, which required for its operation a personal identification code number that only Gorbachev knew. Nor did Yanayev seek a Cheget of his own on his presumed authority as Gorbachev’s successor; the coup was focused on politics internal to the Soviet Union, not on the wider world. Had Yanayev done so, Blair said, the officers of the general staff, who were loyal to Gorbachev, would probably not have provided him with one. Indeed, once Gorbachev’s37 Cheget was deactivated, the other two Chegets in the hands of Yazov and Moiseyev were useless, since all three were necessary to key a code; the general staff had therefore followed protocol and deactivated them as well.

  So the worldwide concern that the coup leaders had stolen Gorbachev’s codes and thus taken control of the Soviet nuclear arsenal was misinformed. Ironically, Gorbachev himself seems to have started the rumor when he complained to the Russian delegation that rescued him that the plotters had taken his Cheget. They hadn’t, of course. They had cut him off from communication with it, after which the teams that operated it on his behalf, following protocol, had shut it down and erased its memory. Pavlov, speaking of the coup, acknowledged “that the situation that occurred38 had not been simulated before the system was set up.” Nevertheless, he said, it prevented “an unauthorized use of nuclear weapons.”

  One other action, by the CIC of Soviet strategic rocket forces, General Y. P. Maksimov, served to alert U.S. intelligence that Soviet nuclear forces were under control during the coup: Maksimov ordered his SS-25 mobile ICBMs driven from their forest deployments back into their sheds, lowering their level of combat readiness. The Washington Post reported at the time, citing government sources, that the garrisoning of the SS-25s “was a significant source39 of reassurance to the Bush administration during the three-day Kremlin power struggle.” Bruce Blair told me he learned about the SS-25s “in virtually real time40 from a source at NSA”—the U.S. National Security Agency. “Together we surmised that returning the missiles to garrison was a normal security measure associated with any emergency situation that didn’t involve an external threat of imminent attack.” Blair believes the lowering of alert status “almost certainly” also applied to all Soviet strategic rocket forces, including silo-based missiles. That change, however, would not have been detectable from overhead as moving the SS-25s was.

  The Soviet nuclear command-and-control system incorporated much more security than the four-key protocol at the top. If it was designed to centralize control of the Soviet nuclear arsenal to a much greater degree than its American counterpart, it was also structured to limit control by any single individual or faction, reflecting the political reality that power in the old Soviet Union was distributed across the Politburo, the Party, the military, and the military-industrial complex, and was acquired and lost not by democratic process but by violence and coups d’état.

  For the Senate subcommittee, Pavlov reviewed how the several levels of the Soviet control system worked together:

  Let me describe41 … one possible scenario of attack under the conditions of the coup. The early warning system detects a missile attack and sends signals to the subsystems that assess the threat. It is a process that immediately involves the president of the country, the minister of defense, chief of the general staff and the commanders in chief of the three branches of strategic nuclear forces.

  Then the chief of the general staff and commanders in chief of strategic nuclear forces form a command and send it down to the subordinate units. In essence, this command is meant to inform troops and weapons systems about a possible nuclear attack, and this command is called a preliminary command.

  The preliminary command opens up access by the launch crews to the equipment directly controlling the use of nuclear weapons and also gives them access to the relevant special documentation. However, launch crews do not [yet] have the full right to use the equipment of direct control over the use of nuclear weapons.

  As a more accurate assessment of the situation is made, a message is received from the early warning systems confirming the fact of nuclear attack, and the decision to use nuclear weapons may be made at that point. It can be carried out according to a two-stage process.

  The first stage of this two-stage process, Pavlov continued, once again involved the top leadership in a political decision—whether or not to generate a “permission command” that would be sent to the CICs
. Then, during the second stage, the CICs and the chief of the general staff would decide as military leaders whether or not to generate a “direct command” ordering launch crews to fire their weapons. Even then, the direct command had to pass through an ordeal of what Pavlov called “special processing42 by technical and organizational means to verify its authenticity.” Each of these actions had time limits, and if the time for an action expired, the blocking system that normally prevented weapons from being launched automatically reactivated.

  Cumbersome as the Soviet system seemed from their descriptions, Blair pointed out, it was “actually devised … to streamline43 the command system to ensure that they could release nuclear weapons within the time frame of a ballistic missile attack launched by the United States, that is to say, within 15 to 30 minutes.” And despite its complexity, Blair added, a nuclear launch by the coup leaders might still have been possible had they persuaded the general staff to issue Yanayev a Cheget and had one or more of the CICs gone along. “There is an important lesson44 here,” Blair concluded. “No system of safeguards can reliably guard against misbehavior at the very apex of government, in any government. There is no adequate answer to the question, ‘Who guards the guards?’”

  THE SECURITY OF THE entire Soviet nuclear arsenal worried Nunn as he returned to Washington from Moscow in the days after the coup. The unguarded guards would multiply if the Soviet Union fractured into individual republics, which it appeared to be on the verge of doing, and if those governments took control of the nuclear weapons on their soil. Ukraine declared its independence on 24 August, Belarus the next day, Moldova two days after that. Other republics soon followed. Of some twenty-seven thousand total Soviet nuclear weapons—bombs, warheads, and artillery shells—the majority were bunkered in Russia. But in Ukraine, besides a small fleet of bombers with bombs and cruise missiles, there were 176 missile silos housing intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) loaded with a total of 1,240 half-megaton warheads, each capable of destroying a large city. Belarus deployed 81 mobile ICBMs with single half-megaton warheads—“sufficient to eradicate Europe45 and the United States,” the country’s first president, Stanislav Shushkevich, told me. In Kazakhstan 104 silo-based ICBMs carried 10 half-megaton warheads each; Kazakhstan also had forty bombers. Tactical nuclear weapons were stored in most of the Soviet Union’s republics—more than 2,000 in Belarus alone. Ukraine and Kazakhstan would each inherit more nuclear weapons than those in the arsenals of either Britain, France, or China. The Democratic senator from Georgia had work to do.46