WHAT HAPPENED TO THE SOVIET SUPERPOWER’S NUCLEAR
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE SOVIETSUPERPOWER’S NUCLEAR ARSENAL?CLUES FOR THE NUCLEAR SECURITY SUMMITGraham AllisonMarch 2012
Discussion Paper #2012 – 04Belfer Center for Science and International AffairsJohn F. Kennedy School of GovernmentHarvard University79 JFK StreetCambridge, MA 02138Fax: (617) 495-8963Email: bcsia ksg@harvard.eduWebsite: http://belfercenter.orgCopyright 2012 President and Fellows of Harvard CollegeThe author of this report invites use of this information for educational purposes,requiring only that the reproduced material clearly cite the full source: Allison, Graham.“What Happened to the Soviet Superpower’s Nuclear Arsenal? Clues for the NuclearSecurity Summit.” Discussion Paper 2012-04, Belfer Center for Science and InternationalAffairs, Harvard Kennedy School, March 2012.Statements and views expressed in this discussion paper are solely those of the author anddo not imply endorsement by Harvard University, the Harvard Kennedy School, or theBelfer Center for Science and International Affairs.Cover Image: In this 1998 photo taken in Pervomaisk, Ukraine, a senior U.S. defenseofficial, second left, looks into a Soviet SS-24 ballistic missile silo which was to beeliminated in accordance with the Treaty on the Reduction and Limitation of StrategicOffensive Arms. Photo by Associated Press.Layout by Courtney Anderson
AcknowledgementsThe author would like to thank Simon Saradzhyan, Research Fellow at the Belfer Centerfor Science and International Affairs; Melanie Getreuer, former Research Assistant at theBelfer Center for Science and International Affairs; and Ben Rhode, Research Associateat the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs for their help in preparing thispaper.
TABLE OF CONTENTSIntroduction. . 1The Setting . 4Step-By-Step: What Happened To Soviet Nukes?. 6Strategic Nuclear Arsenal . 6Tactical Nuclear Arsenals . 12Nuclear Theft . 13Cooperative Threat Reduction . 15Lessons Learned . 20Next Step: Global Alliance Against Nuclear Terrorism . 23Appendix: Graham Allison’s Memo to Colin Powell. . 28
INTRODUCTION“If the Soviets do an excellent job at retaining control overtheir stockpile of nuclear weapons - let’s assume they’vegot 25,000 - and they are 99 percent successful, that wouldmean you could still have as many as 250 that they werenot able to control.”Dick Cheney, “Meet the Press,” December 1991When leaders from 53 countries convene at the second Nuclear Security Summit in Seoulthis March, they will review the substantial progress that has been made in securingnuclear weapons and materials worldwide since the inaugural summit in Washington twoyears ago, as well as what still remains to be done.On the one hand, there can be no question that by focusing like a laser beam on the issueof securing nuclear weapons and materials beyond the reach of thieves and terrorists,persuading participants in the 2010 Summit to pledge that by 2014 all such materials willbe either secured or eliminated, and working with states case-by-case to consolidate,secure, and indeed eliminate weapons-usable material, this effort has made the world asafer place. On the other, despite many notable advances and a laudable boost in generalawareness of the problem, too many weapons and too much material remain at risk. Thepace of preventative actions taken does not yet match the threat. Securing all weaponsand materials is an immense political and logistical challenge. But the consequences offailing to do so could be truly catastrophic. The Seoul summit will play an indispensablerole in moving governments to address this challenge with the vigor it demands.The international community has faced similar challenges before, perhaps ones evenmore daunting. To stretch our imagination about what can conceivably be done, andprovide some historical perspective on the task remaining before us, it may be instructive1What Happened to the Soviet Superpower's Nuclear Arsenal?Clues for the Nuclear Security Summit
to review what actually happened when a nuclear power became a failed state inDecember 1991.Twenty years ago Russia and fourteen other newly-independent states emerged from theruins of the Soviet empire, many as nations for the first time in history. As is typical inthe aftermath of the collapse of an empire, this was followed by a period of chaos,confusion, and corruption. As the saying went at the time, “everything is for sale.” At thatsame moment, as the Soviet state imploded, 35,000 nuclear weapons remained atthousands of sites across a vast Eurasian landmass that stretched across eleven timezones.Today, fourteen of the fifteen successor states to the Soviet Union are nuclear weaponsfree. When the U.S.S.R. disappeared, 3,200 strategic nuclear warheads remained inUkraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus, most of them atop intercontinental ballistic missiles(ICBMs) that stood on alert, ready to be fired at targets in the U.S. Today, every one ofthe nuclear weapons in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus has been deactivated andreturned to Russia, where they were dismantled and the nuclear material in the warheadsblended down to produce fuel for civilian reactors.Strategic nuclear weapons are nuclear warheads aimed at an adversary’s nuclearweapons, cities and military infrastructure. Typically, they are large in yield and heavy.Of greater interest to terrorists, however, were the former U.S.S.R’s 22,000 tacticalnuclear weapons with smaller yields and shorter ranges. These were designed primarilyfor battlefield use, with some small enough to fit into a duffel bag. Today, all of thesehave also been returned to Russia, leaving zero nuclear weapons in any other state of theformer Soviet Union.Former Czech president Vaclav Havel observed about the rush of events in the 1990s:“things have changed so fast we have not yet taken time to be astonished.” Perhaps themost astonishing fact about the past twenty years is something that did not happen.Despite the risk realistically estimated by former Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney in2What Happened to the Soviet Superpower's Nuclear Arsenal?Clues for the Nuclear Security Summit
December 1991, two decades have passed without the discovery of a single nuclearweapon outside Russia.This paper will address the question: how did this happen? Looking ahead, it willconsider what clues we can extract from the success in denuclearizing fourteen postSoviet states that can inform our non-proliferation and nuclear security efforts in thefuture. These clues may inform leaders of the U.S., Russia, and other responsible nationsattending the Seoul Nuclear Security Summit on March 26-27, 2012. The paper willconclude with specific recommendations, some exceedingly ambitious that world leaderscould follow to build on the Seoul summit’s achievements against nuclear terrorism inthe period before the next summit in 2014. One of these would be to establish a GlobalAlliance Against Nuclear Terrorism.3What Happened to the Soviet Superpower's Nuclear Arsenal?Clues for the Nuclear Security Summit
THE SETTINGAs fate would have it, I was in Moscow in August 1991 when a group of conservatives inthe Soviet security establishment attempted to overthrow President Mikhail Gorbachev.Tanks commanded by the plotters ringed the Kremlin; Gorbachev, then on vacation in thesouthern part of the country, was placed under house arrest. With a longtime Russianfriend, Andrei Kokoshin, later the national security advisor to Russian President BorisYeltsin, I inspected the tank battalion and other military units surrounding the Kremlinand elsewhere in Moscow. As we walked and talked, it became clear to both of us thatthe coup would fail and that the Soviet superpower was soon to be no more.On the plane back to the U.S., I wrote a private memorandum to the Chairman of theJoint Chiefs of Staff at that time, Colin Powell, with whom I had worked in the Reaganadministration. Entitled “Sounding the Alarm,” that memo stated: “Soviet disunion couldcreate additional nuclear states, provoke struggles for control of Soviet nuclear weapons,and lead to a loss of control of strategic or non-strategic nuclear weapons.” Since theseevents are now history, and the memo was private but not classified, it is attached here asappendix.Could the newly-independent former Soviet states, having been dominated by Russia forcenturies, be persuaded to give up the nuclear weapons within their borders? To many ofthem, a nuclear deterrent appeared to be the best guarantor of independent survival andsecurity. Fatalists dismissed the proposal to eliminate these arsenals as a fool’s errand.Nonetheless, as a result of a bold strategy that defined a bright red line of zero nuclearweapons in these states, established deep U.S.-Russian cooperation, and carefullyemployed the full array of carrots and sticks, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus eachagreed in 1994 to eliminate all nuclear weapons on their soil. By the end of 1996, everyone of the 3,200 strategic nuclear warheads in these states had been deactivated andreturned to Russia. In addition, 14,000 Soviet tactical nuclear warheads that had beendeployed outside Russia were returned, and many of them dismantled.4What Happened to the Soviet Superpower's Nuclear Arsenal?Clues for the Nuclear Security Summit
In what was not only a strategic, but also a logistical triumph, Russian military andsecurity services managed to maintain control of tactical warheads, to load them ontotrucks, trains, and aircraft, and to return them to secure storage sites in Russia. As aformer DHL executive observed, this would have been an extremely demandingassignment even for the “world’s leading package delivery service,” let alone for a stateapparatus beset by organizational crises.5What Happened to the Soviet Superpower's Nuclear Arsenal?Clues for the Nuclear Security Summit
STEP-BY-STEP: WHAT HAPPENED TO SOVIET NUKES?The collapse of the former Soviet Union presented policy-makers with three uniquenuclear challenges. The first was to address the fact that Soviet strategic nuclear weapons— principally its nuclear-armed ICBMs — were located in four of the Soviet successorstates, raising the prospect that the demise of the Soviet Union would result in theemergence of several states with intercontinental nuclear arsenals. The second was tosecure and consolidate the Soviet Union’s far-flung arsenal of tactical nuclear weapons,the type that would be most transportable to a terrorist group or rogue state in search ofan instant nuclear capability. The third was to prevent the theft of nuclear weapons orweapons-usable material from Russia, or elsewhere in the former Soviet Union.Strategic Nuclear ArsenalCompetition for ownership and control of the Soviet Union’s strategic nuclear forcesposed the most urgent challenge. When the U.S.S.R. collapsed, the former Sovietstrategic arsenal was left in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus, as well as in Russia.President George H.W. Bush had no problem identifying the best feasible outcome forthe U.S.: a single nuclear successor state, Russia. Russia’s national security establishmentstrongly agreed.Numerous obstacles lay between American and Russian preferences and their realization,particularly in the case of Ukraine. Belarus was a much less serious concern because ofits subservience to Moscow. Kazakhstan wavered only briefly before the pragmaticpolicies of President Nursultan Nazarbayev set his republic firmly on a course towardtotal denuclearization, a status it achieved when the last nuclear warhead was removedfrom Kazakh territory in April 1995.6What Happened to the Soviet Superpower's Nuclear Arsenal?Clues for the Nuclear Security Summit
Ukraine, however, had a simple and intuitively compelling reason for wanting to retain aminimal nuclear deterrent: to assure its independence from Russia. As Ukraine’s thenDefense Minister Konstantin Morozov, a key player in the negotiations that ended in theelimination of nuclear weapons in Ukraine, put it plainly: “Ukraine would have posed nothreat to anyone if, hypothetically speaking, it had possessed tactical nuclear weapons.Such weapons could have deterred Russia in its unfriendly political and economic lungesat Ukraine.”1Moreover, thoughtful American voices counseled Ukrainians that the best possibleguarantor of that independence lay in an independent nuclear deterrent. According toZbigniew Brzezinski (President Carter’s national security advisor), the Clintonadministration’s focus on Ukraine’s nuclear status was misplaced.2 In reality, Brzezinskiargued, the continued strength of Russia’s age-old “imperial impulse” necessitated thatthe U.S. recognize “the fact that Ukraine’s independent existence is a matter of far greaterlong-range significance than whether Kiev does or does not promptly dismantle its postSoviet nuclear arsenal.”3 American political scientist John Mearsheimer concurred withBrzezinski’s assessment: “Ukrainian nuclear weapons are the only reliable deterrent toRussian aggression.”2Had Ukraine retained the strategic nuclear weapons it inherited from the former SovietUnion, it would instantly have become the third largest nuclear weapons power in theworld. The implications of this fact for U.S. national security can hardly be exaggerated.Some 1,250 nuclear warheads on ICBMs targeting American cities would have comeunder the command of a new and unstable government in Kiev.In one of its first and most consequential national security initiatives, the Clintonadministration moved in 1993 to engage Ukraine in a multi-dimensional relationshipaimed at ensuring prompt and complete denuclearization. As Assistant Secretary of1Konstantin Morozov’s communication with author, April 14, 2011.Zbigniew Brzezinski, “The Premature Partnership,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 73, Issue 2 (March/April 1994).3Ibid.2John J. Mearsheimer, "The Case for a Ukrainian Nuclear Deterrent," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 72, No. 3(Summer 1993).27What Happened to the Soviet Superpower's Nuclear Arsenal?Clues for the Nuclear Security Summit
Defense with lead responsibility for the former Soviet Union, I participated in the newadministration’s development of a strategy for achieving this ambitious objective. Thatstrategy had five major strands.First, the U.S. sought to persuade Ukraine’s new leaders that nuclear weapons were notthe solution to their security problem, but rather a target that could provoke a Russianattack. Initially, the military chain of command of strategic nuclear forces in Ukraine ranfrom Moscow to Strategic Missile Forces officers in Ukraine. After Ukrainian presidentLeonid Kravchuk forced military officers serving in Ukraine to swear sole allegiance tothe new Ukrainian state, questions of command and control of weapons became moreambiguous. On the one hand, Moscow continued to control the codes required to unlockand launch nuclear-tipped missiles. On the other, many of these technical systems hadbeen developed by scientists and engineers in Ukraine — who were now coming to thinkof themselves as Ukrainians.Those of us at the Defense Department were acutely aware of the possibility that acontest for control of nuclear weapons in Ukraine, or an attack upon them, could triggeran accidental launch of warheads that would destroy American cities. The vaunted SS24s carried ten independently targeted warheads with a yield of 550 kilotons each, allaimed at American targets.Thus, the message from the U.S. Department of Defense to Ukrainian Minister ofDefense Morozov, the Ukrainian national security advisor, and Ukraine’s president wasthat the nuclear arsenal in Ukraine threatened American national security. On repeatedoccasions, as Assistant Secretary, I told Ukrainian counterparts that if I were an advisorto the Russian General Staff and concluded that Ukraine was about to take operationalcontrol of nuclear-armed ICBMs, I would advise attacking the weapons and facilities toprevent that outcome.Second, U.S. strategy sought to persuade Ukraine’s leaders that its best hope for survivalin a dangerous world, especially since it shared a long, yet undetermined border with a8What Happened to the Soviet Superpower's Nuclear Arsenal?Clues for the Nuclear Security Summit
wounded bear that had for the previous millennium dominated Kiev, lay in establishing areal relationship with the U.S. As the sole remaining superpower, the U.S. wasunambiguously number one. Washington was, we told the new leaders of Ukraine,prepared to enhance military-to-military relations with a non-nuclear Ukraine. As theworld’s economic superpower, the U.S. was also the gatekeeper to the economic andtechnical assistance Ukraine sorely needed from the World Bank and the IMF. U.S.assistance to Ukraine would be conditioned on their elimination of nuclear weapons.Third, U.S. strategy underscored for Ukrainians the real dangers posed by nuclearweapons. Just seven years earlier, Ukraine had experienced the nightmare of Chernobyl.A civilian nuclear power plant had melted down, releasing highly radioactive materialacross a large swathe of Ukraine and Belarus. Every new member of the Ukrainiangovernment and military had a personal story about the devastating consequences of thattragedy. Earlier, as a member in a Harvard project that provided economic and politicaladvice to the emerging government in Kiev, I had created the first bumper sticker for thenewly independent Ukraine. It warned in both Russian and Ukrainian: “Every nuclearweapon is a Chernobyl just about to happen.”As negotiations over the nuclear weapons dragged on, and evidence of Ukraine’sseriousness about taking operational control of nuclear weapons mounted, Russiannegotiators struck a responsive chord by arguing that the weapons in Ukraine had passedtheir “service warranty” and were at risk of leaking radiation or even exploding. The U.S.did nothing to deflate such exaggeration. Morozov, Ukraine’s then-Defense Minister,believes to this day that Ukraine could not have ensured the safe operation of nuclearweapons on its territory. According to Morozov, Ukraine had “no technological capacityfor ensuring safe operation of nuclear weapons.” In fact, when asked to name the topthree reasons why Ukraine gave up nuclear weapons, Morozov cited (1) the unpredictableconsequences that the Ukrainian government would have had to face if it had decided toclaim command and control of the nuclear weapons deployed in Ukraine; (2) the lack oftechnical preparations that would have been needed to take over their maintenance and9What Happened to the Soviet Superpower's Nuclear Arsenal?Clues for the Nuclear Security Summit
operation quickly; and (3) the need for Ukraine to comply with the Nuclear NonProliferation Treaty (NPT).3Fourth, the U.S. strategy for denuclearizing Ukraine also engaged Russia. Here, the U.S.and Russia shared a vital national interest. Even though Ukraine had joined theCommonwealth of Independent States, Russia felt threatened by Ukraine’s potentialn
STEP-BY-STEP: WHAT HAPPENED TO SOVIET NUKES? The collapse of the former Soviet Union presented policy-makers with three unique nuclear challenges. The first was to address the fact that Soviet strategic nuclear weapons — principally its nuclear-a
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