Russia’s Nuclear Grasp

By Adrian Karatnycky, president of Freedom House, a human
rights organization, and co-author of “New Nations Rising: The Fall of the Soviets and the
Challenge of Independence.”

The New York Times, August 30, 1994

When NATO ministers gathered in Brussels on Aug. 19 to honor their late Secretary General,
Manfred Worner, they also discussed the growing problem of nuclear security in Europe. Their
concern was prompted by the smuggling of nuclear fuel from Russia this summer — most recently,
a 10.5-ounce shipment of plutonium seized this month in the Munich airport. Yet the NATO
leaders ignored a far more serious strategic threat that is gathering momentum in the former
Soviet Union.

In recent weeks, Russia and other former Soviet republics have pressed forward with plans to
create a military alliance that mocks President Clinton’s Partnership for Peace, doing precisely
what that proposal was designed to avoid: creating new Eastern and Western blocs. More
ominously, even as nuclear weapons are being withdrawn from Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan,
many in the Russian military and political elite want to reassert authority to protect former Soviet
republics with Russia’s nuclear arsenal.

The means for spreading Russia’s nuclear reach is a draft agreement for a military alliance,
which is to be submitted early in 1995 to the leaders of the Commonwealth of Independent States.
The plan was endorsed at a late July meeting of the commonwealth’s Collective Security Council
and is actively supported by Russia’s Defense Minister, Pavel Grachev.

According to the commonwealth’s chief of staff for military coordination, Gen. Viktor
Samsonov, Russia’s strategic nuclear forces will provide a kind of shield against “possible
aggressive intentions against all C.I.S. participant states.”

The draft security treaty also calls for the eventual creation of joint armed forces, collective
peacekeeping forces and a joint air defense system. In short, it seeks to restore a cohesive,
coordinated military force under unified control and under Russia’s nuclear protection — a defense
arrangement resembling that of the Soviet Union.

More and more, influential politicians in Russia are posing obstacles to global security interests.
Konstantin Zatulin, chairman of the Parliament’s Committee for Commonwealth Affairs, is beating
the drums for a “special relationship” and “strategic partnership” between Russia and Ukraine.
And he hints that Russia may not pressure Ukraine to give up its nuclear weapons after all — a
clear retreat from pledges to turn Ukraine into a non-nuclear state.

On a visit to Kiev last month, Mr. Zatulin suggested that if Ukraine and Russia became strategic
partners, “the issue of Ukraine’s nuclear disarmament would not be a top priority for Russia.”

While Washington’s attention is focused on the smuggling of small (if deadly) amounts of
plutonium, the far more important commitments to remove and dismantle the nuclear arsenals of
Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan — one of the Clinton Administration’s paramount foreign policy
achievements — could be undermined. Until the new military alliance began gathering support
among the independent republics, the Soviet nuclear shield had been steadily receding. The U.S.
should now make clear that the expansion of that shield would disrupt the equilibrium between
NATO, the former Soviet republics and Eastern Europe.

The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty is of only limited help: it restricts the dispersal of nuclear
weapons but does not prohibit states from allowing allies to station nuclear weapons on their soil.
So the U.S. and its NATO allies will have to use all diplomatic means to convince Russia that it
isn’t in anyone’s interest to draw more countries behind a nuclear tripwire.

At the moment Russian foreign policy is in the hands of pragmatists committed to
democratization, economic reform and cooperation with the West. But the Yeltsin team faces a
stiff internal challenge from popular and powerful anti-Western forces. Support for the restoration
of the Soviet Union is widespread in the Russian military, and the Parliament is dominated by
anti-Western rhetoric — from Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s neo-imperialist rantings to the vituperative
speeches of Communist leader Gennadi Zyuganov, whose party seeks to revive the U.S.S.R. and
attacks the U.S. for seeking to impose a worldwide “military dictatorship.”

Moreover, the pro-Communist Agrarian Party has made common cause with nationalist zealots
like parliamentarian Sergei Baburin. Together, these parties captured nearly 50 percent of the vote
in Russia’s December 1993 parliamentary elections, suggesting that a candidate sharing their
anti-Western views has a real chance of winning Russia’s 1996 Presidential elections.

So as Russia’s defense establishment presses forward with efforts to build a new military
alliance, the U.S. and NATO should ask against whom this alliance and its nuclear shield are
directed.

With Russia’s democratic future open to question, the U.S. ought to be unequivocal in its
opposition to a new military-political-nuclear alliance among the states of the former U.S.S.R. We
should concentrate on convincing Ukraine, which still holds the world’s third largest nuclear
arsenal, to honor commitments to relinquish the weapons and to resist Russian entreaties to join
its military bloc.

While diligently responding to problems arising from Soviet disintegration — including the illicit
sale of nuclear fuel — the West has so far failed to develop strategies to deal with the threat of
post-Soviet integration. At this delicate moment, a miscalculation could mean acquiescence to a
new post-cold-war rivalry. And if reformers fail in Russia, a new East-West nuclear divide could
prove as damaging to the interests of democracy and prosperity in the region as the decisions
made half a century ago by the Allies in Yalta.