BUTTON, BUTTON, WHO’S GOT MOSCOW’S NUCLEAR BUTTON? RENEGOTIATE START TO GIVE SOVIET DEMOCRATS CONTROL

(Washington, D.C.): The recent,
abortive Soviet coup has stimulated an
intense — but largely uninformed —
discussion about Soviet nuclear command
and control. People in the defense
community, on Capitol Hill and in the
press who should know better are consumed
with a high-stakes version of
“Button, Button, Who’s Got Moscow’s
Nuclear Button?” If the United
States and its allies are not careful,
they may respond to this legitimate
question in a manner that undercuts,
rather than facilitates, the emergence of
a reliable check on a possible Soviet
nuclear attack.

Agitation in Washington and elsewhere
on this score was stimulated by reports
from a member of the Russian delegation
dispatched to liberate Mikhail Gorbachev
from his captivity in the Crimea.
According to reports published first in
the Washington Post, Gorbachev
told his liberators that those in the KGB
and armed forces who placed him under
house arrest removed from his possession
a briefcase that ostensibly holds the
enabling codes needed to launch the
Soviet nuclear arsenal.

Is There a Soviet
“Football”?
Such a
briefcase — actually a sophisticated
device for authenticating nuclear release
orders informally known as “The
Football” — does accompany the
President of the United States
at all times. It is not clear that the
Soviets have actually replicated this
arrangement. The idea that a counterpart
“football” had been removed
from Gorbachev’s hands nonetheless
provoked a heightened (albeit
retroactive) sense of concern that the
world may, in the midst of the coup, have
slipped appreciably closer to nuclear
Armageddon.

That conclusion is unjustified by the
facts as they are now known. Worse yet,
if misapplied in the present context of
an unravelling Soviet state, such
concerns could prompt the United States
and its allies to take steps that
actually have the effect of perpetuating
the Soviet strategic threat — rather
than effectively constraining it.

Consider the following:

  • The KGB and the Soviet armed
    forces — whose leadership
    ostensibly removed the nuclear
    authorization codes from
    Gorbachev’s possession — are the
    very organizations that developed
    them in the first place. In other
    words, the precipitators of the
    coup were not outsiders seizing
    control of something to which
    they did not otherwise have
    access. To the contrary, they
    were all insiders,
    including those who ran the same
    institutions charged day-in and
    day-out with protecting and, if
    necessary, utilizing such nuclear
    codes.
  • Furthermore, there is reason to
    believe that, even prior to
    the coup
    , the chain of
    command for Soviet nuclear
    decision-making did not
    “mirror-image” U.S.
    arrangements which vest such
    responsibility exclusively with
    the president. In their doctrine
    and operational practices, the
    Soviets have long seemed
    (correctly) to discount the
    possibility of an American
    first-strike. If strategic
    nuclear war were to occur,
    therefore, it would likely arise
    from deliberate and preemptive
    action by Moscow.
  • Consequently, the Soviet Union
    appears to have developed command
    and control mechanisms tailored
    to a collective
    nuclear-release process rather
    than ones such as those the
    United States has put into place
    which are optimized to ensure
    swift and reliable retaliation in
    the event of a surprise nuclear
    attack. As best as can be
    discerned, the Soviet Defense
    Council
    — whose members
    include the heads of the armed
    forces and the KGB as well as the
    president — would have to
    authorize any use of Soviet
    strategic nuclear weapons, not
    simply whoever had possession of
    a “football” assigned
    to Mikhail Gorbachev at any given
    time.

  • Perhaps it was for these reasons
    that (among others) the erstwhile
    Soviet Foreign Minister,
    Alexander Bessmertnykh,
    maintained — before he was
    removed from office for
    complicity in, or at least
    acquiescence to, the coup — that
    the “constitutional”
    arrangements for controlling
    nuclear weapons were preserved
    throughout.
  • In any event, recent reports have
    revealed that Gen. Y.P. Maksimov,
    commander of the Soviet Strategic
    Rocket Forces, acted unilaterally
    to reduce the readiness of some
    (and possibly all) of the weapons
    under his command. Mobile SS-25
    intercontinental ballistic
    missiles, for example, were
    observed by U.S. intelligence
    being relocated to their
    operating bases from field
    deployments. While they could
    still have been fired from such
    bases, the Bush Administration
    interpreted this development as a
    confidence-building measure
    intended to ease any concerns
    Washington might feel about the
    coup having nuclear
    repercussions. It certainly
    undercut the proposition that the
    “hard-liners” were
    hell-bent-for-leather to
    thermonuclear war.

Purposeful Dissembling for
Political Ends?
A cynic
might conclude from the foregoing that
Western anxieties about who has
controlled Soviet nuclear weaponry in
recent days are being calculatedly
inflamed by disinformation about the
status of Gorbachev’s launch codes. Such
a theory would reinforce already
significant speculation that Gorbachev
may not have been quite the innocent
victim of the putsch that he has
been made out to be. If the coup were
orchestrated with the Soviet President’s
consent — for example, as a device for
enhancing his own power at home and
leverage overseas — (a view held by such
Soviet notables as Yelena Bonner, Garry
Kasparov and Eduard Shevardnadze) — it
would be hard to think of a more dramatic
means of achieving these objectives than
to claim that the Soviet President had
temporarily ceased to be a check on the
Kremlin’s Strangeloves.

Whether one buys the “Potemkin
coup” theory or not, the existence
of immense quantities of Soviet nuclear
weapons and the importance of preventing
them from being unleashed is quickly
developing into the linchpin of
Gorbachev’s argument that central
authority must be preserved in the Soviet
Union. Gorbachev himself, his spokesmen
and Gorbophiles in the West raise the
specter of uncontrollable proliferation
and nuclear civil war if the
democratically elected governments in the
republics take control of — or gain
launch authority over — Soviet strategic
and other nuclear forces on their
territory.

It would be a tragic mistake if the
West were to accept this line of
reasoning and to use it as a pretext for
trying yet again to shore up Moscow
center. Indeed, Western interests
would actually be far better served if
such democratic governments were
explicitly brought into the USSR’s future
nuclear command and control arrangements.

Today, it appears that Boris Yeltsin of
the Russian Republic already has at least
practical — if not de jure
veto power over any decision to launch
Soviet nuclear weapons, thanks to the
appointment to top jobs in the KGB and
armed forces of personnel thought to be
loyal to him and his government. The
Center for Security Policy believes that
the world is a safer place as a result.

Democracy — The Best Hedge
Against Nuclear Aggression:

In fact, the best — if not the only
— hope for a genuine amelioration of the
threat still posed by Soviet strategic
arms lies in the prospect that democratic
influences may come to hold still greater
sway over Soviet nuclear decision-making.
We have, after all, little concern about
the substantial nuclear arsenals in the
hands of the British and French.
Similarly, our anxieties about a
conventional attack on Western Europe
launched through and with the assistance
of Eastern European states were greatly
allayed as democratic governments came to
power in many of those nations.

Importantly, the United States
has at hand a ready vehicle for
formalizing arrangements that accord
democratic forces in the dissolving
Soviet Union direct responsibility and
appropriate control over the Kremlin’s
nuclear weaponry
. All that it
must do is insist on renegotiation
of the recently signed Strategic Arms
Reduction Treaty
.

Why START Should Be
Renegotiated:
With the fall
from power of those like Bessmertnykh and
the Chief of the Soviet General Staff,
General Mikhail Moiseyev — men whose
intransigence in the negotiating end-game
did much unnecessarily and unjustifiably
to weaken the effectiveness and
verifiability of that accord’s
constraints on Soviet strategic arms — START
should be reworked anyway
. At
the same time, provisions should be
introduced that ensure the Treaty
faithfully reflects the emerging reality
that Russian, Ukrainian, Byelorussian and
Kazak governments have important roles to
play in decisions affecting the status and
any use of
nuclear weapons from
their territory.

By supporting the devolution of
responsibility for such nuclear issues to
democratic governments and by
fielding a global strategic defense
system capable of defeating any limited,
accidental or unintended ballistic
missile attack, the United States can not
only strike an important blow for its own
enhanced security. It can also advance
the day when the Soviet nuclear arsenal
ceases to pose a real threat to world
peace.

Center for Security Policy

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