An important influence on Congress’s awareness of nuclear-proliferation challenges was a psychiatrist, David Hamburg, who at that time was the president of the Carnegie Corporation, one of the preeminent American private foundations. Hamburg’s father, the son of Latvian Jews, had forgone pursuing a career in medicine to work at bringing other family members to America. He was horrified by the Holocaust, which manifested itself in Latvia in mass shootings by S.S. killing squads. Such childhood exposure to violence and rescue motivated Hamburg to study the biology and psychology of stress during his years of research and teaching at Stanford University; when he moved to the Carnegie Corporation, in 1983, he directed its work particularly toward programs for conflict resolution, arms control, and nuclear nonproliferation. It was Carnegie that had sponsored the Aspen Institute conference in Budapest that Sam Nunn had been attending during the August coup.
One day shortly after Nunn and Aspin withdrew their amendment to the defense budget, Senator Richard Lugar, an Indiana Republican interested in arms control, invited Nunn to an informal briefing that Hamburg had arranged.26 Among those attending were William Perry, a Stanford mathematician and former under secretary of defense for research and engineering, and Ashton Carter, a physicist, Rhodes Scholar, and government adviser who was then the director of the Center for Science and International Affairs (CSIA) at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Carter and three of his CSIA colleagues had just completed a study for Carnegie, titled “Soviet Nuclear Fission,” about controlling the Soviet nuclear arsenal as the country disintegrated. Carter led the briefing. Both senators were impressed with the CSIA’s findings. “My response to the Soviet crisis had been a gut instinct,” Nunn says. “I hadn’t done an analytical product, and Ash had actually done an analytical product. That was enormously helpful.”
The great virtue of the CSIA report—Nunn’s “analytical product”—was its comprehensiveness. It answered questions about Soviet nuclear command and control—Blair had been a consultant to the study—and proposed approaches to increasing nuclear security, but it also explored which nascent republics would inherit strategic weapons (Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan) and explained why only Russia would be prepared to secure them (because “none of the other three27 republics … would alone possess anything like the [Russian] complement of warning systems, command centers and communications systems to perform the key functions of warning, attack assessment and survivable control considered necessary for ‘strategic stability’ … during the Cold War”). It dealt as well with the probable dilemma of nuclear scientists and engineers, of which the Soviet Union had thousands, going unpaid in their isolated secret cities, who might be tempted to sell their services to would-be nuclear powers such as Libya or Iran: “Like the German rocket scientists28 who moved west to the United States or east to the Soviet Union [after the Second World War] to staff the new superpower missile programs, technical personnel associated with the Soviet nuclear weapons program may look outside the Soviet Union’s territories for the money, status and reputation to which they are accustomed.” It even answered a cynical question that Scowcroft and Cheney both had raised: why allowing one large nuclear power to fracture into multiple small nuclear powers would not be to the United States’s advantage (because multiple nuclear powers would be a danger to global peace and stability, in which the U.S. had a strong interest; they would increase the risk of nuclear use spilling over into Europe; individual countries might be willing to transfer weapons to other settings “such as the Middle East”;29 and they might directly challenge the U.S. itself). In Soviet Nuclear Fission, Carter and his colleagues at Harvard had provided Nunn and Lugar with a detailed guide to containing the nuclear arsenal of a failing superpower.
“I told Lugar, ‘I’ve got to have a strong Republican horse here,’” Nunn recalled of that first meeting. “There had been protests against the earlier effort on both sides, but seventy-five percent of it was Republican. So Lugar and I joined together and said, ‘How can we reconstruct this? How can we put this back together?’” They agreed to work together to revive the program of support that had failed to pass muster as a conference amendment. Aspin agreed to work toward legislation on the House side as well.
The two senators decided to expose their colleagues to Carter’s authoritative presentation. Invitations went out to twenty senators for a breakfast meeting with Carter on Thursday, 21 November, one week before Thanksgiving. Sixteen senators showed up. “There was a remarkable consensus,”30 Lugar told the Senate the following Monday, “that we needed to rise above the so-called thirty-second sound bite mentality and work to initiate emergency legislation to deal with the nuclear dangers associated with the disintegration of the Soviet Union.” Twenty senators had collaborated through the weekend to write the legislation; Nunn and Lugar introduced it that morning as an amendment to an unrelated bill. The senators had scaled down their funding request to $500 million and had made the funding discretionary: Bush could authorize spending it as he saw fit.
Aspin in the meantime collaborated in the House with Missouri Democrat Richard Gephardt and Indiana Democrat Lee Hamilton to move a similar measure through to timely passage. Aspin’s primary concern continued to be humanitarian aid, he told a press conference:
Basically, what we’re looking for is to transport food. We’ve got some food. The U.S. military’s got some food. You ought to know what the U.S. military’s got in food. The U.S. military, in preparation for Operation Desert Storm, bought six months’ worth of food and medicine. The war lasted five weeks. I mean, have we got food and medicine available. All we need is the authority to move it.… MREs [meals ready to eat]. MREs. This will be the real test of how hungry they are. The real test of how severe the winter is in the Soviet Union will be to see whether they eat those damn MREs.
The Senate passed the Soviet Nuclear Threat Reduction Act late on Tuesday afternoon, 26 November, by a vote of 88 to 8. Compared to the defeat of his earlier effort, Nunn told me proudly, he’d never seen so many Senate votes reversed so quickly. The House passed a similar measure the same day, and the two versions were reconciled on Wednesday, just before the Thanksgiving recess. The act provided for allotting $400 million from the fiscal year 1992 defense budget for dismantling nuclear and chemical weapons and $100 million for humanitarian relief, primarily military transportation of food and medicine. It was “a start,”31 Aspin faintly praised the commitment in a speech on 16 December, “a lot better than nothing,” but he worried that it fell far short of the Soviet Union’s needs in both areas.
ONE BUSH ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL who did not share the prevailing executive branch reluctance to provide hospice care to the Soviet Union in its final days and support to its disoriented survivors was Secretary of State James Baker. At the Middle East Peace Conference in Madrid in late October 1991, Baker had taken the measure of the Soviet Union’s terminal condition in Gorbachev’s uncharacteristic disorganization. The Soviet leader, Baker thought, “was as unfocused32 as I had ever seen him. It wasn’t his mind; that was as sharp as ever. Rather, it was the overwhelming complexity of the multiple challenges beating down on him. Gorbachev would begin discussing the Middle East, but then would quite naturally become distracted by his own internal problems and veer off to talk about them.… He seemed like a drowning man, looking for a life preserver. It was hard not to feel sorry for him.”
A key test of the impending breakup was a popular referendum endorsing Ukrainian independence scheduled for 1 December. In a controversial speech to the Ukrainian Supreme Soviet on 1 August, before the coup, Bush had warned the legislators about breaking away from Moscow. “We will maintain the strongest possible relationship with the Soviet government of President Gorbachev,”33 Bush had said. “Freedom is not the same as independence. Americans will not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local despotism. They will not aid those who promote a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic
hatred.” The columnist William Safire had dubbed it the “Chicken Kiev speech,” much to Bush’s annoyance. Later, when I came to know one of the key players in the Soviet Union’s final days, Stanislav Shushkevich, the chairman of the Belarusian Supreme Soviet, I asked him about it. “I think Bush was realizing34 that the nuclear monster could split up into many little monsters,” Shushkevich told me. “I also was an admirer of Gorbachev, but he had done everything he could do by then.”
By late November a vote endorsing Ukrainian independence was considered a near certainty. In meetings to discuss whether and when to award the new nation U.S. diplomatic recognition, Baker wrote, Cheney pushed for immediate recognition, because “Dick wanted to see35 the Soviet Union dismantled, felt Ukraine was the key and, moreover, believed that [if the United States got in] ‘on the ground floor’ with recognition, the Ukrainian leadership would be more inclined to a positive relationship with us.” Baker’s position was more nuanced. “I wanted to be sure the Soviet Union was dismantled peacefully, and that meant, above all, preventing a Russian-Ukrainian clash.” Recognition was also a powerful card to play, Baker thought, “and I wanted to play this card only when we had received specific assurances from each republic on issues such as nuclear command and control.” Baker’s nightmare, frequently expressed, was what he called “Yugoslavia with nukes,”36 referring to the messy and ultimately bloody breakup of the Yugoslavian composite state into warring components.
The Ukrainian referendum went as expected; more than 90 percent of Ukrainian voters chose independence. By then Bush had decided on delayed recognition, Baker writes, “though we all agreed37 that meant weeks, not months.” As the end neared, events accelerated. At a hunting lodge near Brest in western Belarus on 8 December, Shushkevich, Boris Yeltsin, and the newly elected Ukrainian president, Leonid Kravchuk, met and decided without Gorbachev’s knowledge to dissolve the Soviet Union and replace it with a new entity called the Commonwealth of Independent States. Kazakhstan’s leader, Nursultan Nazarbayev, was insulted when he learned he’d been left out of the discussion, but after appropriate apologies he joined the new commonwealth. To Gorbachev it felt like another coup. By then Shevardnadze and Gorbachev’s close adviser Alexander Yakovlev, out of friendship and respect, had returned to his side after their earlier resignations. “Shevardnadze would leave his apartment38 at night,” Baker wrote of that final month, “and go spend long hours with Gorbachev, just to talk.”
A speech Baker39 delivered at Princeton University on 12 December, intended to be a statement of American foreign policy in relation to the new republics, thus became something of an elegy for a reformed adversary dying from a mortal wound. Baker declared that the two nations had become “partners, no longer competitors, across the globe.” They had been partners in facilitating the reunification of Germany, he said, partners in freeing up Central and Eastern Europe, partners in reducing both conventional and nuclear weapons, partners in ending regional conflicts all over the world, in reversing the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and promoting peace in the Middle East, “partners, in short, in ending the Cold War.”
In his State of the Union address, Baker’s boss would soon claim, “By the grace of God, America won the Cold War.” With more delicacy, Baker praised the farmer’s son who had initiated the transformation and opened his country to the world: “These achievements were possible primarily because of one man: Mikhail Gorbachev. The transformations we are dealing with now would not have begun were it not for him. His place in history is secure, for he helped end the Cold War peacefully, and for that, the world is grateful and respectful.”
But the Cold War, Baker continued, “left tens of thousands of weapons littering the Soviet Union, and it created a massive military-industrial complex. We must work with Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus, the other republics, and any common entity to help them pursue responsible security policies. And that means first and foremost destroying and controlling the most dangerous vestiges of the Cold War: weapons of mass destruction.” Exchanges had already begun “between our experts on nuclear weapons safety, security, and dismantlement and their Soviet counterparts,” and the process would accelerate in the coming weeks. The administration was “prepared to draw upon the $400 million appropriated by Congress” to assist in the demolition. (“The President is a little late,”40 Aspin critiqued Baker’s declaration a few days later. “If he had embraced these notions three or four weeks ago when we were struggling in Congress, he would have come out with twice as much money and much more flexibility for action on his part. But better late than never.”)
Traveling to Moscow three days after his Princeton speech, Baker met separately with Yeltsin and Gorbachev and quickly understood that the Soviet military had shifted its allegiances to Yeltsin. Yeltsin assured Baker that the nuclear weapons dispersed across the fracturing empire would remain under central command. To that end, after a meeting on 21 December in Alma-Ata, the capital of Kazakhstan, where seven other new republics—Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan—added their weight to the new commonwealth, the four initiators of the breakup were connected into the Kavkaz national leadership network—but three of the four would only be observers. “We received the equipment41 that was called ‘Metal,’” Shushkevich told me, “which would connect those people, and there was always a man around us carrying it. We only tried it once and it worked. But it was all a farce—it was all hypocritical—all those weapons of course were controlled by Yeltsin, which we understood. And you Americans also understood it was a pretense.”
While the president of Russia was to be first among equals in controlling the former Soviet Union’s strategic nuclear weapons, the weapons themselves were physically distributed across the four new republics and would become their legal property when Soviet sovereignty dissolved at the end of the year. In his Princeton speech, Baker had called on the new states to ratify and implement the START agreement and adhere to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as non-nuclear-weapons states, but how could they meet the requirements of the treaty with nuclear weapons in their possession, based on their soil, regardless of who controlled them? It was soon obvious to Baker that the only practical solution to the problem was that Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan should give up their nuclear arsenals to Russia. Making that happen was a problem of diplomacy, and in those final days, before the new states shouldered free from the cracked shell of the old Bolshevik despotism, Baker prepared to set to work.
IT WOULD HAVE HELPED Baker’s cause had Dick Cheney’s Department of Defense welcomed mutual verification. Both the United States and the Soviet Union had pledged to dismantle thousands of nuclear weapons. In previous arms-control agreements, a suspicious United States had demanded “effective verification” that Soviet weapons were actually being destroyed. This time around, the Bush administration seemed prepared to sidestep the issue and take the new republics on trust. Bush had not mentioned verification in his unilateral-weapons-reduction speech of 27 September, and a fact sheet the Defense Department released the next day had announced plainly, “We do not envision any42 formal verification regime, although we are willing to discuss confidence-building measures with the Soviets.” This omission seemed distinctly odd to two staff members of the American nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), researcher Christopher Paine and physicist Thomas Cochran, who had already begun meeting with Soviet scientists and leaders concerned with the problem. “The administration was suggesting,”43 they wrote of the fact sheet’s dismissal of verification, “as the Soviet Union fell apart, that a mere ‘exchange of information’ would suffice to establish the whereabouts and eventual elimination of about 15,000 nonstrategic Soviet nuclear weapons … deployed throughout the republics.”
In Moscow in mid-December, just as Baker was passing through, Paine and Cochran participated as members of a team representing the NRDC and the Federation of American Scientists in discussions with a small crowd of former Soviet Uni
on (FSU) and Russian officials to explore how dismantling could be verified without exposing any secrets of weapons design. From Moscow, the team, which included current and former weapons scientists from three U.S. national laboratories, went on to Kiev to hold similar discussions with the Ukrainians.
The Americans had come prepared to discuss methods of securely tagging and sealing warheads to prevent their diversion from a dismantling facility, including “fingerprinting” the unique markings on an arbitrary area of the warhead casing using cellulose tape, applying super-adhesive bar codes and tamper-revealing sealing tape, and locking the warhead casing with fiber-optic seals. They also outlined a method of determining if a specific warhead’s fissile materials, which are slightly radioactive, had been removed by recording each warhead’s unique radiation signature and comparing it to the radiation signature of a standard reference warhead. To demonstrate the technologies, Cochran, keeping up a running commentary in his flat Virginia drawl, fingerprinted the back of his Timex watch and simulated rapid bar-code scanning of a warhead casing from several feet away using a handheld bar-code scanner.
The Twilight of the Bombs Page 14
