The Twilight of the Bombs

by Richard Rhodes

  Shushkevich certainly hoped the West might help his despoiled and impoverished country—a Marshall Plan for the FSU might have prevented much of the robbery and reversion to authoritarianism that followed—but he understood we might not trust our former enemies. “You wouldn’t have to give us money,” he told me. “Give us bulldozers and paving machines and let us build a highway from Minsk to Moscow so that we can transport and sell our goods.” Ukraine, in contrast, wanted security guarantees, assistance for dismantlement, and compensation for the weapons themselves.

  I asked Congressman Lee Hamilton of Indiana once why the United States didn’t support a Marshall Plan for the FSU. He considered for a moment and said, “We were so used to thinking of them as the enemy, we just couldn’t turn our heads around that fast.”

  Under Shushkevich’s leadership, Belarus ratified START I in February 1993 and acceded to the NPT as a non-nuclear-weapons state. By summer it had returned all its tactical nuclear weapons to Russia. In December it received $76 million in Nunn-Lugar funds to facilitate moving its strategic nuclear arsenal as well, and by September 1994 it had transferred forty-five SS-25s to Russia, leaving thirty-six still to go. But Lukashenka had been elected president of Belarus by then. Lukashenka allowed another eighteen SS-25s to be returned as he consolidated his power over the Belarusian Supreme Soviet, rigged elections, and arranged for his presidential term to be extended from four to seven years. In July 1996 he tried to suspend shipment of the last eighteen SS-25s, arguing that his predecessor had made a mistake in giving them up, but pressure from Russia, with which he sought reunion, brought the final transfers in late November, whereupon Belarus became in fact the non-nuclear-weapons state that Stanislav Shushkevich had believed it should be.

  Russia was an apparent exception to the commodification of the FSU nuclear arsenal: It considered itself the successor to the Soviet Union so far as nuclear weapons were concerned. As such, it received weapons from its detached former parts, increasing the size of its arsenal. The increase was only temporary, however; the weapons Russia received were not added permanently to its arsenal, an expansion which the economically challenged country could not in any case afford, but were stored—stacked all over the place, in fact—until they could be dismantled, and the dismantling was paid for in large part with American funds. Paying for the dismantling of a former enemy’s most destructive weapons was such a bargain compared to building defenses against them that Bill Perry coined a name for it: preventive defense.6

  And it worked, Perry and Ash Carter wrote in 1999:

  When we took office7 in 1993, it seemed to us entirely unlikely that Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus would all stay on the path to become nuclear-free states; that Russia would continue to safeguard and dismantle weapons amidst its titanic social upheaval; that somewhere, sometime, there would not be a sale, diversion, theft, or seizure of these weapons or nuclear materials by disgruntled military officers or custodians somewhere across the eleven time zones that had been the Soviet empire. Every morning we would open the daily intelligence summary fearing to read that nukes had broken loose and hoping that at least U.S. intelligence sources would have detected the break. But so far, nukes have not broken loose. Much of the credit must go to Sam Nunn and Dick Lugar and their timely vision of Preventive Defense.

  This acknowledgment was generous, but the program follow-through was Perry’s. It was Perry, before and after he succeeded Les Aspin as secretary of defense in February 1994, who won over a recalcitrant Ukraine as its parliament wrestled with the issue of delivering its formidable arsenal of nuclear weapons to a Russia that was both hostile and predatory. In late 1993, during a meeting between Vice President Al Gore and Russia’s Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott proposed sending a joint mission to Kiev that would negotiate a resolution to Ukraine’s dogged resistance to arming Russia with nuclear missiles it considered to be its own. Gore asked Perry to head up the effort. “With Bill Perry leading8 our delegation,” Talbott writes, “we quickly reached broad agreement on a complex deal that would result in Russia getting the warheads along with American money to help with their dismantlement and Ukraine getting various forms of assistance from the U.S. as well as debt relief from Russia and international assurances on its sovereignty.”

  Yet it was particularly difficult to bring the Ukrainians around, Talbott wrote, when Ukraine and Russia were hostile to each other:

  Through the fall9 [of 1993], the U.S. had conducted quiet but arduous shuttle diplomacy between the two sides. For me, the short hop between Moscow and Kiev was like passing through the looking glass. From the Russian perspective, everything the Ukrainians did was stupid, childish, reckless, ungrateful and proof that their country had no business being independent. As the Ukrainians saw it, everything Russia did was malevolent, menacing and unfair, and validated hanging on to “their” missiles. From our own standpoint as go-betweens, both sides were doing just about everything they could to make a reasonable compromise impossible.

  The United States had made a bad beginning, U.S. arms negotiator Linton Brooks told me, especially with Ukraine, “because we started out10 with a model that we would convert the [START] treaty [between the U.S. and the Soviet Union] into a U.S.-Russia treaty and treat the other three successor states as if they were basing states—the analogy was, like the states in Europe that had American tactical weapons in them. A terrible mistake, but we quickly got by that.” Brooks was responsible for the final preparation of the START I and START II treaties in 1991 and 1992. “It was very surprising to us how little the nuclear aspect mattered at that point in the East-West relationship,” he recalled. “It wasn’t central the way it was during the Cold War. During the Cold War it was one of the chief venues of what passed for dialogue. But as the Warsaw Pact started to collapse and all that happened, it just became not very important in any kind of visceral way. So it changed the dynamic a lot.”

  Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, Perry’s deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia, points to the Clinton administration’s deliberate effort to move beyond purely nuclear issues as the key to converting the FSU successor states to the American view. “It required a reduction11 in focus on nuclear weapons—denuclearizing the agenda—to resolve the situation with Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan,” she recalled. Ukraine, and to a less obvious extent the other new states, had concluded that the United States was only interested in seeing them disarmed of their nuclear arsenals, after which it would abandon them to their fate. They had reason to be concerned. Talbott reported Clinton getting just such advice from Congress and even some of his own advisers. “You listen to those folks,”12 Clinton told him, “and what they’re saying comes down to: Write that place off. It’s going down. Step back so we don’t get sucked in.”

  Rather than invoking their disdain, the notion of a former Soviet Union armed with tens of thousands of nuclear weapons collapsing into ruin and civil war ought to have sobered Clinton’s critics. Even under the difficult but not yet ruinous conditions of the postcollapse period, the real point of consolidating FSU nuclear weapons in one successor state was less to prevent proliferation than to forestall terrorism. “It was all called nonproliferation,”13 Linton Brooks clarified, “but the overwhelming majority of it had nothing to do with nonproliferation. It had to do with counter-terrorism. If you secure the Russian arsenal, if you secure Russian nuclear material, you’ve done nothing about proliferation, because if they decide they want to give it to somebody, they still can. What you’ve done is to make nuclear terrorism more difficult. For all that we bragged about very large expenditures on non-proliferation, most of those expenditures were on things that really were securing arsenals.”

  Which explains a troubling paradox of post-Soviet assistance: why we promoted and facilitated the removal of thousands of nuclear weapons back to Russia, where even under Boris Yeltsin there were powerful factions still hostile to the United States. Viktor Mi
khailov, for example, Russia’s minister of atomic energy, vigorously opposed almost every United States–led effort at mutual security and cooperation. In 1993, over strenuous U.S. objections, Mikhailov tried to sell Iran a nuclear reactor. In 1994 and 1995, Talbott wrote, the Russian nationalist was “bypassing his own government’s14 export controls, blocking adoption of new and better ones and cutting deals with Iran that would accelerate its development of a nuclear weapon. His latest move in that direction was to offer the Iranians gas centrifuges, which they would unquestionably use to produce weapons-grade uranium,” and four nuclear reactors. Yeltsin quickly quashed Mikhailov’s rogue initiative at Clinton’s behest, but it illustrates the complexities of FSU threat reduction.

  The Russians had every reason to secure their nuclear weapons against diversion: They were surrounded by potential enemies, including breakaway regions like Chechnya, with which Russia fought a brutal war between 1994 and 1996. But they were not immediately convinced that the nuclear materials distributed across the country in laboratories and storage sites were similarly at risk.

  A Los Alamos scientist, Ron Augustson, recalled participating in a government-to-government program beginning in 1992 to design and build a storage facility for retired Russian nuclear warheads. “Progress on the storage facility was extremely slow,”15 Augustson said. “Meetings were held through 1992 and 1993, but everything was bogged down in the politics and administrative requirements of working with the [U.S.] Department of Defense. There was no money to pay the workers in Russia to build the facility and no money to buy Russian materials and equipment. The DoD wanted all the money to be spent here in this country. On the other side, the Russians did not admit the importance of our particular interests, which were safety analysis and protecting materials from insider threats. It was all very discouraging.”

  Protection from insider theft had not been incorporated into the Russian nuclear-safety culture. The Soviet Union had been “a ‘concentration camp’ state,”16 a Ukrainian nuclear safety official commented in an interview. “The system of protection in such a camp is designed so that those inside the camp cannot get out and flee. So the system of physical protection of nuclear material [did] not meet the standards that currently exist elsewhere in the world.” A Russian official at the Ministry for Atomic Energy told Jessica Stern, an NSC fellow, “Nobody even considered17 the possibility of workers stealing nuclear materials.”

  “As [our] contacts grew,”18 Augustson continued, “not only with the folks from Arzamas but with others as well, we learned that the Russians have a tremendous system of paper records, but nobody checks those records, and they were never meant to be used to draw an inventory. The emphasis was on putting product out, making a certain number of weapons from a certain amount of material. If they had a good process, they’d have more plutonium than they needed and they’d put that aside in case they ever had a need for it. After awhile, they would lose track of where they put the stuff. Through the fall of 1992 and into 1993, we were definitely getting the picture that they didn’t have a good idea of how much plutonium or highly enriched uranium they had at any given location.” Saving plutonium for a contingency sounds odd, but hoarding production was a standard subterfuge in Soviet industry, where benefits and promotion depended on fulfilling and overfulfilling quotas set annually by central planners. If production problems reduced output below quotas, the prudent manager could add the hoarded material to current output to make up the difference.

  The program to buy blended-down Soviet warhead HEU as fuel for American power reactors that the MIT physicist Thomas Neff had initiated in 1991 slowly came to fruition. “I do not know who19 ultimately approached whom (both sides remember it differently),” Neff wrote, “but by August of 1992, the US and Russia were in serious discussion of a framework for an HEU purchase agreement. On August 31, President Bush announced that the US and Russia had agreed in principle for the US to purchase fuel products from produced Russian HEU.” The two countries signed a bilateral agreement in February 1993: The United States would buy five hundred metric tons of HEU, “the quantity contained in roughly 20,000 nuclear weapons,” and the proceeds, expected to be about $12 billion, would be divided among the four FSU successor states. (“Used for making fuel,” Neff noted, “a kilogram of HEU is worth about $24,000, about twice the value of gold.”) The HEU would be blended down to reactor-level enrichment—less than 5 percent U235—and converted to uranium oxide in Russia, then shipped to the United States and sold to U.S. utilities, which meant that the program would pay for itself. “This process,” wrote James Timbie, a senior U.S. government adviser to the program, “would ensure20 that substantial amounts of fissile material would never again be used for nuclear weapons, would no longer require elaborate protection and accounting, and would never fall into the wrong hands.”

  There were problems along the way, including Russian concerns that U.S. monitoring of the blend-down process might reveal nuclear-weapon-design information, and efforts by the small U.S. uranium-production industry and its plant workers to block the importation of Russian-made fuel under fair-trade rules, but each problem in turn was laboriously resolved.21 As of 1998, when Neff spoke of his experience, Russia had dismantled more than half its Soviet-era nuclear weapons, making available four hundred metric tons of HEU. In 2010, uranium from Soviet nuclear-missile warheads was generating about 10 percent of U.S. electricity. The program was scheduled to be completed in 2013.

  THE HIGHEST-PROFILE FSU threat-reduction project may have been Sapphire, the covert retrieval of 1,278 pounds (581 kilograms) of highly enriched uranium from a warehouse at the sprawling Ulba Metallurgical Plant outside Ust-Kamenogorsk in far eastern Kazakhstan, about a hundred miles southeast of the main Soviet nuclear-weapons test site at Semipalatinsk. Besides affording the Clinton administration a welcome antiproliferation success story, the Sapphire operation—or, rather, a Hollywood version of it involving a stolen nuclear weapon—was dramatized in a 1997 thriller, The Peacemaker, starring Nicole Kidman and George Clooney.

  The real story was thrilling enough. A new, small, elegantly streamlined Soviet submarine turned up one day in 1969 at a quay on the Neva River reach of the Leningrad Sudomekh submarine shipyard. Across the next decade, extensive CIA and naval intelligence collection and analysis led to the conclusion that the submarine, given the NATO designation Alfa, was an advanced new nuclear-attack submarine with a titanium hull, a Soviet first. The Alfa was the world’s smallest military submarine and at burst speeds of forty-five knots—more than fifty miles per hour—one of the fastest. To deliver high power from a small power plant, the Alfa carried a molten-lead-cooled nuclear reactor fueled with highly enriched uranium. The uranium, in the form of uranium oxide–beryllium oxide ceramic fuel rods, was produced at the Ulba plant, which manufactured most of the Soviet Union’s military and civilian reactor fuel.

  The Alfa never made it into fleet operation, and Ulba stopped producing submarine fuel in the 1980s. A considerable quantity of leftover fuel and precursor materials remained in insecure storage at the plant, prodigally forgotten, when the Soviet Union dissolved, in December 1991. “The Kazakh government had no idea22 that this material was there,” Kazakh officials later told Harvard’s Graham Allison, a national-security analyst. “The facility director discovered the material and said, My goodness, here we have a thousand pounds of highly enriched uranium.” Its presence only became an issue when Kazakhstan began working with the IAEA early in 1993 to introduce the IAEA safeguards system into its civilian nuclear program. “By mid-1993,”23 wrote the nuclear historian William Potter, “Kazakhstan’s leadership appears to have decided that it would be prudent either to upgrade national safeguards at Ulba or, alternatively, remove the HEU from the plant.” Kazakhstan had committed itself by then to signing the NPT as a non-nuclear-weapons state—the Kazakh Supreme Soviet would ratify this commitment in December 1993—and President Nazarbayev chose removal. He contacted the United States government through it
s ambassador, William Courtney, in August 1993.

  Unfortunately, everyone who might be expected to follow up on Nazarbayev’s request for help securing enough HEU to make at least thirty-five atomic bombs was busy dealing with North Korea, which had expelled IAEA inspectors from its reactor complex at Yongbyon and was threatening to reprocess the reactor’s spent fuel to extract its plutonium. It was February 1994 before an engineer from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Y-12 uranium enrichment plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Elwood Gift, traveled to Kazakhstan to inspect the Ulba material. Gift described his inspection to journalists Andrew and Leslie Cockburn:

  He found himself in a vault24 about twenty feet wide and thirty-five feet long. From the twenty-five-foot ceiling the dim bulbs shone on hundreds of steel cans of differing sizes, most of them about the size of quart cans of tomato juice, stacked everywhere. Some were on wire shelves, some sat on the floor. Others were on plywood platforms. There were no windows, which Gift thought was just as well … but there was another door at the opposite end—unguarded.