THE DEAD HAND!!

THE DEAD HAND:

When Mikhail Gorbachev shook hands for the first time with Ronald Reagan at Geneva on November 19, 1985, the two superpowers  had amassed  about sixty thousand  nuclear warheads.  The arms race  was at its peak .” We looked  at each other  on the threshold , in front of the building where the negotiations were to take place , the first meeting,” Gorbachev  recalled more than two decades later .” Somehow , we extended  a hand to each other , and started talking. He speaks English , I speak Russian, he understands nothing, and I understand nothing. But it seems there is a kind of dialogue  being connected, a dialogue of the eyes.” At the end of the summit, when they shook hands again on a statement that a nuclear war could not be won and must never be fought , Gorbachev was astonished. “ Can you imagine  what that meant?”” It meant that everything we had been doing was an error.”

“ Both of us knew better  than anyone else  the kind of weapons that we had,” he said.” And those were really piles , mountains of nuclear  weapons.  A war could start not because of a  political decision , but just because of some technical failure.”  Gorbachev  kept a sculpture of a goose  in his Moscow office as a reminder  that a flock of geese  was once briefly mistaken for incoming missiles by the early-warning radars.

At Reykjavik, Gorbachev and Reagan went further toward eliminating  all nuclear weapons than anyone had gone before. But a  generation later , the great promise of Reykjavik remains unfulfilled.  The “ absolute weapon”  is still with us.  While the total number of warheads  has shrunk by about two-thirds, thousands are still poised  for launch. The United States  maintains  at the ready  about 2,200 strategic  nuclear warheads , and 500 smaller , tactical nuclear weapons . Another 2,500 warheads are held in reserve , and an additional  4,200 are awaiting  dismantlement. Russia  still maintains  3,113 warheads  on strategic weapons , 2079 tactical warheads  and more than 8,800 in reserve or awaiting dismantlement . That’s more than 23k  nuclear warheads.

Since the end of the Cold War , the world has changed dramatically . Amorphous  and murky threats ---failed states , terrorism  and proliferation ---have grown more ominous. Nuclear weapons will hardly deter  militias  such as the Taliban , or terrorists  such as those who attacked  New York, Washington , London, Madrid and Mumbai in recent years. The terrorists and militias seek to frighten  and damage  a  more powerful foe. So far they have employed  conventional weapons ---bombs, grenades , assault rifles  and hijacked airlines---but they also want to get their hands  on more potent  weapons  of mass casualty. Driven by intense zeal, they are not intimidated  by a  nuclear arsenal , nor deterred  by fear of death A lone suicidal terrorist carrying anthrax  bacteria  or nerve agents  in a plastic  pouch is not an appropriate target  for a nuclear—armed missile. And while  nuclear weapons  worked  as a reliable  deterrent  for leaders  in the Kremlin  and the White House , two experienced  adversaries , they may not work  so well if one of the protagonists is an untested  nuclear power , nervous and jittery.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union , the United States  twice re-examined  its nuclear weapons policies  and deployment  in formal studies , known as the Nuclear Posture Review . Both  times, in 1994 and 2002, the reviews acknowledged  that the world had changed  after the Cold War , but neither report was followed by radical change.  The main reason  was fear of the future ; nuclear weapons  were needed  as a “ hedge”  against uncertainty . At first , the uncertainty  was the chaos  in the former Soviet Union , and later it was the prospect  of some other nation or terrorist group obtaining nuclear weapons.

But the arsenals of the last  war seem a poor hedge against new threats . Four elder statesmen  of the nuclear age issued  an appeal in 2007 to take action  toward “ a world free of nuclear threat” . They were Sam Nunn , Chairman of the Senate Armed Services  Committee 1987-1994; George  Shultz , Secretary of State 1982-1989; Henry Kissinger , Secretary of State 1973-1977; and William J. Perry , Secretary of Defense  1994-1997. Gorbachev soon joined them . All were intimately  involved  with decisions about the nuclear balance of terror. The time has come to listen to them. ¹   

One of their recommendations is to eliminate the short-range battle-field or tactical nuclear weapons  left over from the Cold War. The United States has five hundred of these weapons  deployed, including two hundred in Europe . They were originally  intended to deter a Warsaw Pact invasion ; the Warsaw Pact is history. Little is known about the disposition  in Russia  of the thousands  of tactical  nuclear weapons removed from Eastern Europe  and te former Soviet republics  after te 1991 Bush-Gorbachev  initiative. They may be in storage  or deployed ; they have never been covered  by any treaty , nor any verification regime, and the loss of just one could be catastrophic.²  

Another step would be to take the remaining  strategic  nuclear weapons off launch-ready alert.  When Satanislav Petrov faced  alarm in 1983,  such decisions  had to made in just minutes . Today , Russia is no longer  the ideological or military threat  the Soviet Union once was; nor the United States pose such a threat to Russia. Americans invested much time and effort to assist Russia’s leap to capitalism in the 1990s---should we aim  our missiles  now at the very stock markets in Moscow  we helped design ? Bruce Blair  has estimated that both the United States and Russia maintain  about one third of their total arsenals on launch –ready alert. It would take one or two minutes to execute the launch codes fire Minuteman missiles in the central plains of the United States , and about twelve minutes  to launch  submarine-based missiles. The combined firepower  that could be unleashed in this time frame by both countries is approximately 2,654 high yield  nuclear warheads , or 100k Hiroshimas. Procedures  could easily be put  in place that would de-alert the missiles and create  deliberate launch  delays of hours, days or weeks  to prevent a terrible mistake And it would be wise for Russia to disconnect  and decommission  Perimeter , the semiautomatic  command  system  for nuclear retaliation. The Doomsday Machine was built for another epoch.³

After these steps , the United States and Russia could begin  working—ideally in a renewed partnership –toward the goal of total , verified elimination of nuclear weapons around the globe . The United States  and Russia together hold 95 percent of world’s warheads. The Moscow Treaty  of 2002, signed by President George W. Bush  and President Vladimir  Putin , called  for between 2,200 and 1700 warheads “ operationally  deployed”  on each side by the year 2012. Neither  nation would suffer from radical reductions from this level . In today’s world , thousands of nuclear warheads on each side do not provide  thousands of times  more deterrence  or safety than a small number of warheads. A drive toward liquidation of the arsenals would be a fitting  way to bury  the Cold War . So would a determined  effort  to halt  the spread  of nuclear weapons and fissile materials elsewhere , as the ratification  of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.  We should remember  the wisdom  of Bernard Brodie, the pioneering early thinker about atomic weapons , who wrote that they are “ truly cosmic forces  harnessed to the machines  of war.”  The war is over. It is long past time to scrap the machines.

In 1992, Senators Nunn and Lugar took a gamble with history . Back then , skeptics  suggested it would  be best  to let the former Soviet Union  drown in its own sorrows---to go into a “ free fall.” Nunn and Lugar  did not agree . They helped  Russia and the other  former  Soviet  republics  cope with an inheritance  from hell. The investment paid  huge dividends . In the years that followed , Kazakhstan , Belarus , and Ukraine  completely abandoned nuclear weapons. A total of 7,514 nuclear warheads, 752 intercontinental  ballistic missiles , and 31 submarines were deactivated.⁴    These were required by arms control treaties , but Nunn –Lugar provided the resources that made  dismantlement a reality.

Many of the facilities  with unguarded fissile material  in the mid—1990s  underwent security up grades . By 2008 , more than 70 percent of the buildings  in the former Soviet Union  with weapons –usable  nuclear materials  had been fortified , although  the uranium  and plutonium  were still spread  across more than two hundred locations.⁵ After Project Sapphire , highly enriched uranium  was removed , often quietly , from an additional nineteen research reactors  and sensitive  installations around the former Soviet bloc.⁶  The International Science and Technology Centre , started after  Baker’s visit to Chelyabinsk -70, made grants over fourteen years that benefited ,at one time or another , about seventy thousand scientists and engines involved  in building weapons.⁷   The anthrax factory at Stepnogorsk  was destroyed , including the giant  fermenters in Building 221. On Vozrozhdeniye Island eleven graves  where anthrax  was buried  were pinpointed; the substance , pink with a texture of wet clay , was excavated  and the pathogens neutralizerd.⁸  On the steppe near Russia’s southern border , a $1 billion factory  has been constructed  that will destroy the huge stockpiles  of chemical weapons , including sarin , stored in the nearby  warehouses. At the Mayak Chemical Combine  in the City of Ozersk , a massive  fortified  vault  was built in the United States  at a cost  of $309 million to store excess  Russian fissile materials . With a walls twenty –three feet thick, the Fissile Material Storage Facility  answered  the need  so starkly  evident  after the Soviet collapse---a Fort Knox to guard  uranium and plutonium.

It was never going to be easy for  a country so turbulent as Russia  to accept  the hand of a rich  and powerful rival , and it wasn’t. Suspicions, delays, misunderstandings  and errors  were abundant  in the years after the Soviet  collapse. ⁹  But overall , given the immense size of the Soviet military—industrial complex  and the sprawling nature  of the dangerous  weapons and materials , the Nunn –Lugar gamble paid off. The world  is safer  for their vision  and determination . It was also a bargain . The yearly  cost for all facets  of Nun n-Lugar  was about $1.4 billion , a tiny sliver of the annual Pentagon  budget of more than $530 billion. ¹⁰

Telling the whole truth about the Sverdlovsk outbreak  would be  a good first step  toward putting the terrible secret history of Biopreparat to rest.

The truth matters . Deception is a tool of germ warriors. The same disguise that concealed  the Soviet biological weapons  program as civilian  research could be used  to hide a dangerous  germ warfare program anywhere.  The anthrax letter attacks in the United States  in 2001, the outbreak of  Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome(SARS) in 2003 and the dramatic  advances in biosciences  have all underscored the destructive nature  of biological agents. The National Academy of Sciences concluded in a report  in 2009 that closed cities like Obolensk  with a relatively large footprint  are no longer necessary to house  an illicit  biological weapons program. A dangerous  pathogen , say  a virus, could be spread  with no discernible  signature.  The workspace  of a  biological  weaponeer  or terrorist could be safely nestled  inside university  or commercial laboratory,  impossible to discover  by satellite reconnaissance . People are the key , as Vladmir  Pasechnik demonstrated  by following his conscience  and revealing Soviet misdeeds . To detect such dangers  in the future requires  human contacts , networks, transparency  and collaboration , the pain staking building of bridges  that Andy Weber pursued.

In the  1990s , Russia seemed vulnerable  and desperate , but starting  in the year 2000, a surge of oil wealth fueled  a new sense of independence . Also Russia was led into another period of authoritarianism  under President Putin , during which it grew hostile to outsiders.  Under Putin, Russia increasingly shut down cooperation with the West on biological weapons proliferation.  Russian  officials  have insisted  that since the country has no offensive biological weapons program , there is no need to cooperate . But it also appears  Russia is reverting back to Soviet –era habits . Putin’s security services went on a hunt for suspected spies among  scientists , which put a chill on joint projects with the West.
Russia has long refused to open the doors  of three military biological research facilities . to this day , it is unknown  how far the Soviet Union  went in creating warheads  and bombs from bacteria  and viruses  that were developed  at Obolensk and Vector. Did the Soviets produce a super-plague  resistant to antibiotics?  Did they create  a cruise missile capable of disseminating  anthrax bacteria spores? Or warheads for an intercontinental ballistic missile  to carry small pox? And if they did these things , all in  violation  of an international  treated they signed  in 1972, should the details at last be brought to light? ¹¹ A string of Russian anti-plague institutes and stations that once fed into the germ warfare  program  also remained closed to Western cooperation. If there are no weapons, no offensive program , as Russia claims , then what is behind the closed doors? What formulas for weaponization  remain in the military laboratories?  And most importantly , what has become of the scientists  with know-how to create pathogens  that can be carried in shirt pocket?

What are they working on today?

If it wasn’t worrisome  enough  that Russia  was weak and vulnerable  after the Soviet  collapse, another jolt came in the 1990s : terrorists  and cults  were in search  of weapons of mass destruction.  The people who would commit  mass terror  lacked the resources  or industrial  base of a  government  or military , but they burned  with the ambition  to kill  in a large and theatrical way. Terrorism  certainly wasn’t new , but terrorists  in possession  of the arsenals of the Cold War  would be devastating .

In 1995, the Aum  Shinrikyo  cult released  the deadly  nerve  agent  sarin on three Tokyo  subway trains , killing  twelve  people , injuring  over one  thousand  and causing mass panic.  Technical problems , leaks and accidents plagued the cult. But the Tokyo subway attack  showed only what only a small  amount of dangerous  material could do.  The Tokyo calamity resulted from 159 ounces  of sarin. By contrast , in Russia , in a  remote  compound  near the town of  Shchuchye in western Siberia there are still 1.9 million projectiles  filled with 5,447 metric tons of nerve agents. ¹²

 Osama bin Laden  was reportedly  impressed with the Tokyo subway disaster  and the chaos it generated. In1998,  Al Qaeda  leaders  began to launch  a serious  chemical  and biological weapon effort, code-named Zabadi , or “ curdled milk” in Arabic. Details  of the effort were later revealed  in documents  found  on a computer  used by the Al Qaeda  leadership  in Kabul. Ayman Zawahri , the former  Cairo surgeon  who that year merged his radical group  , Islamic Jihad  in Egypt , with Al Qaeda , noted that” the destructive  power of these weapons  is not less  than that of nuclear weapons.”¹³  In 1999, Zawahiri recruited a Pakistani scientist to set up a small biological  weapons laboratory  in Kandhar . Later , the work was turned over  to a Malaysian  who knew the 9/11 hijackers  and had helped them, Yazid Sufaat.  He had been educated in biology and chemistry  in California , and spent months  at the Kandahar laboratory attempting to cultivate  anthrax. George Tenet , the former  CIA director , said the anthrax  effort was carried  out in parallel  with plot  to hijack airplanes  and crash them into buildings. ¹⁴ He believed , he said , that bin Laden’s strongest  desire was to go nuclear . At one point , the CIA frantically chased  down reports  that bin  Laden  was negotiating  for the purchase  of three Russian nuclear devices , although details were never found. “ They understand that bombings by cars , trucks, trains  , and planes  will get them some headlines to be sure,” Tenet wrote.” But if they manage to set off a mushroom cloud , they will make history …. Even in the darkest days  of the Cold War , we could count on the fact  that the Soviets , just like us , wanted to live. Not so with the terrorists.”¹⁵

 It is difficult to build  a working nuclear bomb , but less difficult to cultivate pathogens  in a laboratory.  A congressional commission concluded in 2008 that it would be hard for terrorists  to weaponize  and disseminate  significant quantities  of a biological  agent in aerosol form , but it might not be so difficult  to find someone to do it for them.” In other words,” the panel said,”  given the high –level  of know how  needed to use  disease  as a weapon  to cause mass casualties , the United States  should be less concerned that terrorists will become biologists and far more concerned that biologists  will become terrorists.” ¹⁶   

The tools of mass casualty  are more diffuse  and more uncertain  than ever before . Even  as securing  the weapons  of the former Soviet Union  remains unfinished  business , the world we live in confronts  new risks  that go far beyond Biopreparat.  Today one can threaten a whole society with a flask  carrying pathogens  created in a fermenter in  a hidden garage –and without a detectable signature.

The Dead Hand of the arms race is still alive. 

Dr. I.R.Durrani 

Posted in Gorbachev, OBL, Reagan, sarin, the chemical warfare, the halt to the arms race