Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 4, No. 1 | Nuclear Doomsday: Is the Clock Still Ticking? page 2

Russia
Despite having forsaken the ideology that caused it to be labeled “The Evil Empire” by Ronald Reagan, America’s last Cold War president, Russia remains the leading nuclear risk for U.S. interests.

“The Duck and Cover era didn’t totally go away at the end of the Cold War because we still have thousands of nuclear weapons on alert,” says Charles Ferguson of the Council on Foreign Relations, one of many experts concerned by the potential rise of a hard-line government in Moscow.

The U.S. and Russia collectively maintain approximately 26,000 nuclear weapons of which perhaps 2,000 are on so-called hair-trigger alert. Not surprisingly, after drawing back and mothballing its nuclear presence from former Soviet republics, the Russian nuclear command and control infrastructure slipped into what many experts describe as a dangerous state of erosion. It was, after all, the competition of building, maintaining and operating this war machine that hastened the Soviet collapse, so why throw good rubles after bad, especially in years of economic severity? Today, the deterioration of command and control is unnerving to U.S. military officials who see potential for an accidental launch of systems lacking adequate safety controls.

The cautionary tale of a near accidental war arising from the U.S. and Russia remaining on high alert took place January 25, 1995, when an incoming missile was spotted by Russia’s early-warning system headed in the general direction of a Russian nuclear submarine base. The missile had the “signature,” or appearance, of a multistage nuclear missile fired from a U.S. Trident submarine. Moscow was alerted and President Boris Yeltsin prepared a retaliatory strike against the United States. In turn, U.S. systems would have detected the Russian launch and retaliated long before a Russian warhead reached its target. The incident, widely regarded as the closest the U.S. and Russia came to full-blown nuclear war, ended after it was realized that the incoming missile was a Norwegian research rocket. Customary alerts sent from Norway weeks earlier had arrived in Moscow, but in a breakdown of the command structure, were never delivered to the appropriate authorities.

Even under the best of circumstances—and even a dozen years later, these clearly are not the best of circumstances—“When you get any very complicated set of technologies together with human beings there’s a fair chance for accidents to happen,” notes Kennette Benedict, Executive Director of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Specifically, Benedict refers to the concept of “normal accidents,” the phenomenon under which the potential for accidents increases in correlation with the complexity of technology and potential human error.

“Because the Russian system is not quite as well maintained as it was in the past, there is worry now on the part of some in Russia,” Benedict says, “that it could be hacked into by an outsider. They might be able to launch a missile from Russia and because [the United States maintains] this ‘launch-on-warning’ system, it is possible the U.S. might launch a missile back before the first one from the Russians would even land on U.S. soil.”

Much has been made of so-called Russian “loose nukes.” Yet, there may be less to these concerns than logic might dictate. During the hectic early 1990s when Russia was withdrawing its nuclear military presence from former Soviet republics, it seemed to stand to reason that some materiel would go unaccounted for. As Dick Cheney stated at the time, while serving as Secretary of Defense, even a 99.9 percent success rate in securing those weapons would have been potentially catastrophic. That’s because if you do the math, 99.9 percent of the Soviets’ estimated 22,000 tactical nuclear weapons would leave 22 weapons unaccounted for, each with yields ranging from 0.5 kilotons to 2 kilotons, the equivalent of from 200,000 to 800,000 sticks of TNT.

Indeed, appearing on 60 Minutes in 1997, former Russian National Security Advisor Aleksandr Lebed claimed that more than 100 suitcase-sized tactical nuclear weapons had gone missing since at least 1995. The number was later reduced to 42. While official Russian denials came fast and furious, at least one former high-ranking Soviet scientist testified in Congress confirming the existence of the devices, and other snippets of documentation emerged in support of Lebed’s claims. Add to that the sense of economic desperation that gripped post-Soviet Russia, where formerly comfortable scientists and military officials were tempted by corruption, and the threat of black-market nukes seemed quite plausible.

Yet, a decade later there is still no certainty. A study by the Monterey Institute of International Studies’ Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS) concluded that Lebed’s claims were never “adequately dismissed by his critics, nor fully substantiated by his supporters.”

A point to consider in assessing the threat posed by “loose nukes” is that during the period of Soviet disintegration and economic turmoil, the Aum Shinrikyo, a Japanese-based terrorist-cult group with 60,000 followers in Russia, was shopping the global black markets offering upwards of $15 million for Soviet-era nuclear weapons, according to evidence presented at the trial of the group’s leaders, who engineered a March 20, 1995 attack on the Tokyo subway system using the chemical nerve agent sarin. Twelve people were killed and up to 1,000 injured. The time would have been ripe for the group to have obtained such a weapon in some underhanded way, but apparently, they never did.

The only “loose nukes” that have turned up are in the custody of former Soviet states—none in private hands. One problem for marketing Russian or Soviet nuclear weapons is that unless purchased through a very senior insider, the purchaser would be stymied by a sophisticated lockout known as Permissive Access Links (PALs) requiring knowledge of lengthy security codes as well as SAFF (Safeing, Arming, Firing and Fusing) Procedures, which requires specialized instructions or training. “Stealing a nuclear weapon appears to be a very unlikely pathway for terrorists to detonate a nuclear explosive,” according to Ferguson.

In the late 1990s, Energy Secretary Bill Richardson empanelled a bipartisan task force to assess U.S. programs helping Russia secure its nuclear weapons and fissile materials. The panel, chaired by former Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker, a Tennessee Republican who also served as Chief of Staff in the Reagan White House, and Lloyd Cutler, Chief Counsel to presidents Carter and Clinton, reported back with a stern warning in January 2001, just as President George W. Bush assumed office. Said Cutler, “The most urgent unmet national security threat to the United States today is the danger that weapons of mass destruction or weapons-usable material in Russia could be stolen and sold to terrorists or hostile nation states and used against American troops abroad or citizens at home.”

Best estimates are that Russia maintains 1,100 metric tons (2.9 million pounds) of Highly Enriched Uranium (HEU) and 150 metric tons (400,000 pounds) of plutonium, of which, according to NTI’s Securing the Bomb, about half is now safely secured.

“Security in Russia, at the moment, is clearly much, much better than it was in the mid 90s,” says Matthew Bunn. “There’s just no doubt that it’s like night and day compared to what it used to be.” However, Bunn notes, that still means that a very large amount of HEU is vulnerable. And, as the incident in Beslan, Russia demonstrated in September 2004, there is no lack of determination among some terrorist elements. In that event, 32 Chechen terrorists, armed with automatic weapons, machineguns, explosives and grenade launchers, took 1,200 children and adults hostage. What are the odds that a similarly armed, coordinated attack on a weapons facility, possibly aided by insiders, could be repelled?

Next page: Today's effort to cantain nuclear terrorism or accidents is built around a patchwork of treaties, when what is needed is a globally coordinated approach.

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