Improving verification was a political game more than a technical necessity, intended on the one hand to thwart the neocons who raised claims of Soviet cheating, serving on the other hand to introduce further delay in ratifying the TTBT. Despite its politics, the JVE project produced tangible returns, the contemporary director of Los Alamos told me; “the side product was,29 the scientists got to talk to each other.” Siegfried S. Hecker, known as Sig, a tall, lean, voluble Austrian-born plutonium metallurgist, was appointed Los Alamos’s fifth director in 1985. “I was in the Kearsarge control room with Victor Mikhailov when we set that off,” he said. “I’ll never forget talking to the director of Chelyabinsk-70 at the steakhouse where we celebrated afterwards; he said the JVEs were boring, that there really wasn’t any science in them and we did them because some politicians wanted them done. What we should really do, he said, since nuclear explosions take you into a space of physics you can’t approach any other way, is use nuclear tests for joint scientific experiments. So even at the beginning of our exchanges, the scientific camaraderie took over. It happened with people working side by side, getting to know how much we shared. We working for our country, they working for theirs. This wasn’t Reagan and Gorbachev any more; this was us. It had turned real.”
After the two JVEs, both sides settled down in Geneva to hammer out the technical details of the Threshold Test Ban Treaty. Mikhailov ran that negotiation as well, and though in basic orientation he was a hard-line Russian nationalist, he and his allies in the Soviet nuclear establishment recognized that working with the American labs would give them credibility within their own country and help them get funding.30 “Our guys came back from Geneva31 in 1990 and said the Russians were ready to talk to us,” Hecker recalled. “They’re really serious, they’d like to get together and they’d like you to come over there. So I went to the Department of Energy and said we were picking up a lot of feelers that the Russians wanted to talk, that I thought we could get inside the fence [of the Soviet labs].”
The DOE wasn’t interested. “It was too radical,32 and government bureaucrats aren’t rewarded for their ingenuity. How could we possibly send people with knowledge of how to design nuclear weapons into enemy territory? It took a long time for us to get over the intelligence mode and into the outreach mode. The Russians made that transformation sooner than we did. DOE just didn’t see what there was to gain.” Hecker blames himself in part for not making the case. “My thoughts weren’t that well developed. I mostly thought that we were spending millions for intelligence that we could get for free, as we did during the JVEs. We had a lot to learn and a lot to gain just by going over there and meeting these people. None of it took hold until the August putsch. Then people understood, some people, that potential disasters could come from the dissolution of the Soviet Union. But I still couldn’t get through the bureaucracy. Nunn-Lugar was a totally separate initiative.”
The breakthrough came indirectly from George H. W. Bush. The president had called his Cabinet together in mid-December 1991 to explore how to respond to the imminent breakup of the Soviet Union. As Gates would emphasize, Bush was particularly concerned with brain drain from the FSU nuclear-weapons complex and asked for ideas about keeping former Soviet scientists at home. A few days later, Hecker told me, at a retreat for DOE lab directors in Leesburg, Virginia, the secretary of energy, Admiral James Watkins, brought up Bush’s worries. “He said Bush is concerned33 about what’s going to happen to their scientists. Are they going to Iraq, Iran, and North Korea? What can we do to keep those guys at home? I’m asking you guys for input—what can we do?” After a short discussion Hecker raised his hand. “I said, look, Admiral Watkins, I’m a lab director and I worry all the time about losing our scientific talent. I’m sure that the Russian lab directors are sitting there thinking exactly the same thing—‘The place is coming apart; how in the world do I keep these guys at home?’ They probably have lots of ideas. Why don’t we go ask them?” Hecker’s question, writes a colleague, was “an astonishing suggestion34 for the time given the tight secrecy surrounding anything related to nuclear weapons.” Watkins immediately responded, “Why don’t you?”
Two months later, Hecker did, along with his Livermore counterpart John Nuckolls and two staff members from each lab. On 23 February 1992, when their plane landed at the Arzamas-16 airport, one of the leaders waiting to greet them in heavy coats and ear-flapped mink ushankas was Yuli Khariton, eighty-eight years old, who had established the weapons laboratory there under the sponsorship of Igor Kurchatov in 1946 and had served ever since as its scientific director. A small, sturdy man with jug ears and a prominent nose, Khariton extended his hand to the Americans and said, “I’ve been waiting for this moment35 for forty years.”
Hecker was electrified. His scientific training had been technical, he told me, not philosophical, and until he became lab director at Los Alamos he had not given much thought to the larger political authority that lay latent in relations among scientists, who share common standards of logical clarity, honesty, and respect for evidence that transcend national boundaries. Coincidentally, the vehicle through which he explored those ideas had been my book The Making of the Atomic Bomb, particularly the discussion in it of the Danish physicist Niels Bohr’s ideas about how the value system of science and the personal relations of scientists might serve as a model for improving international security. Reading my book, he had understood Bohr’s argument intellectually, but it struck him with great emotional force when he shook Yuli Khariton’s hand. “Then it was just born instantly,”36 he told me. “All of a sudden I realized exactly the power that you wrote about. With scientists the respect is there already, on the table. The trust takes a little longer.”
Khariton was the Soviet Oppenheimer, the man who directed the building of the first Soviet atomic bomb. “From the moment we stepped off the plane,”37 Hecker said, “the offer of friendship was obvious.” Before dinner on that first day in Arzamas-16, Khariton invited the Americans to the House of Science, a meeting place for the lab’s science community, and talked there about the history of the atomic project in the U.S.S.R. “He addressed us in excellent English,” Hecker recalled in a memorial lecture in 1999 (Khariton died in 1996), “with a decidedly British accent picked up during his graduate studies at Cambridge in 1926 to 1928.” Oppenheimer and Khariton had both been graduate students in Ernest Rutherford’s Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University during those years, though they had not known each other.
As he did later in my own communications with him, Khariton took pains with the American lab directors to emphasize the quality of his lab’s work, Hecker said:
Academician Khariton told us38 that Klaus Fuchs, the German-born scientist who joined the Manhattan Project as part of the British mission, delivered detailed diagrams and descriptions to Soviet intelligence officials of the American device tested at Trinity on July 16, 1945. He told us that he and other Soviet officials made the decision to build a copy of the American device (although in the spirit of making scientists work hard and learn in the process, only a few of his co-workers saw the American diagrams). With great pride, he stated that by August 1949 they had actually developed a much superior design themselves right here in Arzamas-16. The Soviet design weighed half as much and was demonstrated to be twice as powerful when it was tested in 1951.
Hecker couldn’t resist asking Khariton why he didn’t test the superior Soviet design first. “He said it was very simple39—they knew the American design worked. Given the tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States at that time, failure was not an option.” Khariton and Igor Kurchatov had met with Stalin, the Arzamas-16 scientific director went on, and told the Soviet dictator they’d gone over the espionage information in great detail and believed they could do much better. Stalin had looked him in the eye and said coldly, “The cost of failure40 will be proportional to your rank in the establishment.” Both scientists understood that Stalin was threatening them with execution if t
he first test failed. Stalin’s threat was probably the basis for what Khariton called the “folklore” that the prizes awarded to the scientists after the successful test inverted Stalin’s threat, that in Hecker’s words, “those who in case of failure41 would have been shot were to receive the title of Hero of Socialist Labor, those who would have been given the maximum prison term were to be awarded the Order of Lenin, and so on down the list.”
Hecker realized on that first visit that the Russian laboratories represented “an oasis in a third-world country42: superb people, very well educated, very patriotic, very dedicated, but totally demoralized. They’d gone from privilege to hardship—late paychecks, still living in closed cities, nowhere to go. Superb schools, but not even the simplest medicines such as aspirin for their children and the aged.” His Russian counterparts shared a broad view of the value of science for opening up the world. “We found scientists eager to work with us, to show their own country how good they were. Working with us, they thought, would help them with their own government and within their scientific community.” The most immediate problem was security of their nuclear materials—the plutonium and HEU that the Soviet nuclear establishment had manufactured in such prodigal abundance over the decades of the Cold War. “The problem wasn’t ‘loose nukes,’”43 Hecker reflected. “Those things have serial numbers on them so you can track them. They’re something you had to worry about, but it turns out they took good care of them. But the materials were a whole different story. The Soviet program created huge amounts of weapons-usable materials, close to fifteen hundred metric tons, enough for fifty thousand to one hundred thousand weapons. It was everywhere, at a hundred different sites across the FSU, in every imaginable form—weapons, scrap, acid solutions, waste ponds, waste dumps, fuel for reactors, experimental assemblies. No one knew exactly how much was produced, and it only takes a few kilograms to make a bomb.”
In Soviet times, materials as well as weapons had been protected by what Hecker learned his Russian counterparts had called “the system of grave consequences.”44 Los Alamos came to call it “guns, guards, and gulags.” Hecker explained: “There was a good second line of defense. Everything in the country was closely controlled; Big Brother was watching everything in Soviet society. The borders were virtually impervious and the social system didn’t make it easy for someone to profit from illegal transactions.” By 1992, these safeguards had broken down. “The gulags went away, the borders opened up, movement within the country became easy, the guards were demoralized and were paid only occasionally, the free-market economy took over (including a strong element of organized crime that rushed in to fill the vacuum left by the oppressive Communist Party) and everything was for sale.”
Hecker saw the need immediately. “I started talking to the Russians45 right away about working together to see if we could help them protect their materials. Because we had experience. Our borders had never been closed, so we’d had to develop ways to control nuclear materials in a milieu much more like what the Russians now had to deal with.” On the second leg of their visit, at Chelyabinsk-70, the Americans negotiated a tentative agreement on the work the two nations’ labs would undertake together. “The list of topics for collaboration began with scientific experiments,”46 Hecker recalled, “and then went down through nuclear-materials control, nuclear safety and security, and various arms-control-related things. We promised to take it back to Admiral Watkins for approval, and they said they would take it to Mikhailov.”
After a final dinner in Moscow with Mikhailov, who was already complaining about the lack of action and lack of money, the two American lab directors stopped in Washington on their way home and presented Watkins with the tentative agreement they had negotiated at Chelyabinsk. “Just about instantly he gave us47 the go-ahead to do the scientific collaboration,” Hecker says. “He also said that all the other topics needed to be approved and worked through the same government interagency process that all Nunn-Lugar programs were subject to. So he could not approve nuclear-materials control and accounting or even the environmental topics.” In fact, the Bush administration’s National Security Council balked48 at allowing the U.S. weapons laboratories to collaborate with the Russians on nuclear-weapons safety and security without interagency oversight. However urgent the need, foreign policy trumped nuclear-materials security, and approval would have to be negotiated among the NSC, Defense, State, and other interested agencies.
Where the resistance came from is not hard to work out. It revealed itself in congressional testimony even prior to the lab directors’ trip to Russia. During a hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee in early February 1992, Senator Trent Lott told a witness that he had a list “from Secretary Cheney”49 of Russian strategic-modernization programs “that are still under development and going forward.… Here is a country … that is still producing very sophisticated new programs.… Do they have the technical capability to do what needs to be done [to secure their nuclear material]? Or are they just saying, Hey, the Americans will pay for this [and] we can go do something else?” So Dick Cheney was feeding information to sympathetic Republican senators about Russian military developments, developments he interpreted to mean that the Russians might use American dollars to repair their broken nuclear complex while spending their own money on strategic modernization. Cheney’s key involvement shouldn’t be surprising; he had resisted aiding the FSU from the beginning, believing that it should be allowed to crumble into ruin, and Nunn-Lugar money in particular was coming out of his defense budget.
Hecker wisely opted to move cautiously. If protecting materials was still too controversial, the labs would do scientific experiments together, lab to lab, to support the Russian scientists while building a record of successful collaboration. Soon after his return from Russia Hecker appointed Stephen Younger, a physicist who had designed nuclear weapons at Livermore before moving to Los Alamos in 1989 to work in senior management, to coordinate the collaboration. With others from Los Alamos, Livermore, and the Sandia National Laboratories, the U.S. lab responsible for ordnance engineering and stockpile maintenance, Younger traveled to Russia in May 1992. One of the Russians with whom he had already discussed a joint experiment, Alexander Pavlovskii, surprised him with a list of proposed topics of collaboration. “I was not the head of the delegation nor an expert on Russian science,”50 Younger told a Los Alamos roundtable in 1996, but “Pavlovskii singled me out and said, ‘I want to give you a list of proposed topics of collaboration, and I want you to write comments on it and give it back to me in the morning.’ I was later told that the Russians at Arzamas-16 had picked me as their principal representative in the United States.” Younger marked up the list, crossing out large numbers of topics “because some of them were very sensitive and others were outright classified.… Our response to many of their proposals was that we weren’t allowed to talk about many of the things on their list, but there were some topics that were real possibilities.”
On a second visit a month later, they worked out a specific agreement. “During that trip,”51 Younger noted, “we became acutely aware that many of the scientists were facing financial catastrophe. And I’m not using that word lightly. It’s one thing not to be able to replace the TV if it breaks. It’s quite another not to be able to buy insulin for your kid who is diabetic and who is going to die unless you find some money. That’s the kind of financial pressure they were facing.” The administrative director of Arzamas-16, Vladimir Belugin, raged at Younger over what he considered to be delays in delivering aid. “I’m tired of Americans52 coming to the Institute and making promises and not delivering anything,” Younger quoted him. “Americans talk, talk, talk but never do anything. Unless this meeting results in something substantive, this will be your last visit to Arzamas-16.” An agreement emerged to work on two experiments in pulsed-power generation using explosives, Pavlovskii’s specialty and an interest of Younger’s. Back in Los Alamos, Hecker agreed to release discretionary laboratory f
unds to support the joint research even though, he says, “we were on extremely thin ice”53 in doing so.
Younger was aware of high-level opposition to the lab-to-lab endeavor. “There were many people54 in the United States who didn’t want us to work with the nuclear institutes,” he says. “They were afraid we might be working on nuclear weapons and giving away secrets. Or maybe we were all spies, or maybe all the money we spent would go to the Communist Party.” His own feelings toward the Russian scientists and their labs warmed as he traveled back and forth, much as Mikhailov’s had:
Prior to my first trip55 to Moscow, I bought a travel guidebook, complete with a foldout map of the city. What struck me immediately was that there were no target circles on the map—most of my experience looking at maps of the Soviet Union involved thinking of it as the enemy. This impression faded with time as I recognized that being at the Russian nuclear-weapons laboratories was somewhat like looking into a mirror. Russian scientists had the same dedication to their country that I had to mine, the same attention to security and the same concern about the potential proliferation of nuclear weapons to other countries.
Younger had been as belligerent as Mikhailov in the high days of the Cold War, telling new recruits at Los Alamos not that nuclear weapons were weapons of last resort but that they were “intended to prevent56 other countries, other states, other national entities from doing something that really isn’t in America’s national interest,” that “you get people’s attention when you threaten the existence of their nation.” The reification of human beings into an enemy fed such democidal arrogance on both sides of the Iron Curtain; opening up the weapons complex, as Bohr had predicted, opened up more than a few hardened hearts.
The Twilight of the Bombs Page 17
