Nuclear Insecurity

by Ira Shorr

Ironically, the nuclear threat to America now stems more from Russian weakness than strength. The vulnerable state of Russian strategic forces, and the hair-trigger posture that still has both countries ready to launch thousands of nuclear weapons within minutes, means that a nuclear exchange could result from a simple misunderstanding. The NATO bombing of Yugoslavia has upped the ante, creating tension and uncertainty for a Russian military that, with no formidable conventional forces, has only the nuclear card to play.

"I believe the nuclear danger is higher today than ever before, even greater than it was during the Cuban Missile Crisis. At least they had time for the human survival instinct to kick in," says Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, a Washington-area think tank that deals with nuclear issues. "We have a superpower that has disintegrated, with a sick president, a collapsed economy, soldiers not getting paid -- and they're the ones watching the radar screens. This time around there might be no chance for calculation."

When it comes to the threat of nuclear attack, lack of accurate information is more than a theoretical problem. During the Cold War there were numerous incidents of equipment and software errors in missile warning systems that sent nuclear war planners scrambling. In June 1980, for example, U.S. nuclear command centers picked up what appeared to be an all-out Soviet missile attack. The United States quickly prepared to retaliate with bombers and Minuteman missiles before it discovered the false alarm, which eventually was traced to a computer chip error. The officer in charge agonized for eight minutes about whether the attack was real. He was later released from duty for not following regulations -- which called for him to decide in three minutes.

The post-Cold War world offers no relief from nuclear uncertainty. Consider the case of the Norwegian research rocket launched on Jan. 25, 1995. Russian technicians picked up the rocket on their radar screens and, thinking it was a U.S. nuclear missile that could scatter eight nuclear bombs over Moscow, they prepared to retaliate. For the first time in history, they activated the "nuclear briefcase" that accompanies the president. Just a few minutes from a decision to launch their own missiles, the Russians determined that the rocket posed no threat and backed away from the nuclear button.

Not only do the Russians have to worry about their inability to detect a nuclear attack because of the sorry state of their early warning systems, but they also face the fact that the bulk of their nuclear missiles are sitting ducks. "Budget shortages prevent Russia from dispersing its weapons into the sanctuaries of the oceans and forests," Bruce Blair of the Brookings Institution, a former Minuteman Missile launch officer, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee last year. "Russia today in fact faces far stronger pressures and incentives to use or lose its strategic nuclear arsenal than at any time since the early '60s."

The bottom line for Russian strategic nuclear planners is that they don't believe enough of their forces could survive a first strike to retaliate. Thus the Russians are prepared to "launch on warning" of an attack. And just as during the Cold War, U.S. nuclear posture is a mirror image of the Russians'. Each country has as many as 2,500 nuclear weapons on high alert status, meaning each side has less than 15 minutes to respond to a perceived attack.

The official Russian response to the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia has been sobering. "If the question is to be or not to be for Russia, we must use everything we have in our armed forces, including nuclear weapons," Anatoly Kvashin, chief of the Russian general staff, told the Russian newspaper Segodnya. And former Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, Boris Yeltsin's special envoy for the Balkans, recently wrote in The Washington Post, "The world has never in this decade been so close as now to the brink of nuclear war."

Advocates of de-alerting have put forth detailed procedures to lengthen the nuclear fuse, which include removing and storing warheads away from their delivery systems; removing the guidance systems from missiles; and pinning open the switches that fire the missiles. Under a plan proposed by Blair, the United States could maintain a sufficient nuclear deterrent by having five submarines, undetectable at sea and carrying up to 480 warheads in a state of low alert, so that it would take 24 hours to prepare them for launch; the Russians could maintain similarly secure warheads on mobile launchers. "What we need are rapid and large reductions in nuclear forces," Postol says. "The goal is for both sides to have small, secure forces that aren't vulnerable to attack, so that there is no incentive to launch weapons rapidly."

Disarmament advocates also promote on-site inspections and exact accounting and monitoring arrangements that would not only satisfy verification requirements showing each side that the other's weapons really have been deactivated but could enhance the security of nuclear stockpiles against theft and diversion to non-nuclear states or terrorists, a great benefit considering the sad state of Russian nuclear security.

But the split in U.S.-Russian relations over the NATO bombing appears to have torpedoed the chance for meaningful arms control. The Kremlin Security Council already has approved a plan to deploy thousands of tactical nuclear weapons that were unilaterally withdrawn at the end of the Cold War. While the Russians maintain the decision was made independent of the Kosovo conflict, The Washington Post reported that "other sources said the decision clearly reflected Russia's growing anxiety about the NATO airstrikes ... and continuing weakness in conventional, or non-nuclear weapons."

Also victim of the tense relations between the nuclear super powers is the START II treaty, which would cut the long-range nuclear arsenals on both sides from 6,000 each to less than 3,500 weapons. Ratified by the Senate in 1996, START II has languished in the Russian Duma. But disarmament advocates point out that the United States needn't be held hostage to the Duma's nuclear whims. A prominent group of arms control specialists under the leadership of the Henry L. Stimson Center, a Washington think tank released a report in February calling on the United States to leapfrog START II and take the initiative in reducing the inherent dangers of the present nuclear standoff. The report, called Jump-START, recommends that the United States "immediately declare its intention to reduce, alongside Russia, to 1,000 deployed strategic nuclear weapons within a decade." In addition, the report says, the United States and Russia should immediately de-alert the nuclear forces slated for destruction under the START II treaty, cutting the number of nuclear missiles on high alert from 2,500 on each side to 500.

But U.S. nuclear weapons policy remains on automatic pilot. The Clinton administration has showed little interest in redefining the status of nuclear weapons. It repeatedly has undermined the non-proliferation treaty by holding open the option of using weapons against non-nuclear states like Iraq. And it has shown no support for de-alerting, while downplaying the seriousness of the demise of Russia's early warning system.

MIT's Postol encourages the United States to help the Russians rebuild their early warning system by giving them the funding help to get critical satellites back in orbit. "The greatest danger we face," he says, "is not giving nuclear weapons issues the attention they demand."