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.