When Blair’s book was published, he invited Yarynich to Washington.22 Yarynich believed strongly in openness. He brought with him to Washington a typewritten document, single-spaced, dated February 24, 1993. One page was titled, at the top, “Reserve commanding rockets system.” Under this, Blair saw a half- page, hand-drawn diagram, Figure 1. The drawing was labeled “Emergency Rocket Command System.” It depicted satellites in the air, missiles in silos, submarines, command centers and strategic bombers. Blair tried to figure out, what did it all mean?
Under the diagram was a half-page of text. As Blair read on, it dawned on him. Yarynich had told him earlier that there was no
And here it was, on the typewritten page: the Doomsday Machine.
Yarynich, who had personally worked on the system in 1984, had been very careful not to write down any technical data, nor numbers or locations of the system, and did not use the real name, Perimeter, in the document. Rather, he sketched its broad principles. Blair examined the paper closely. It outlined how the “higher authority” would flip the switch if they feared they were under nuclear attack. This was to give the “permission sanction.” Duty officers would rush to their deep underground bunkers, the hardened concrete globes, the
In May 1993, Blair visited Yarynich again in Moscow. This time, Yarynich gave him an eleven-page, single- spaced review of Blair’s book. It was a thoughtful document, and near the end of it, Yarynich mentioned a few errors he had found in the book, and thus helped Blair resolve the riddle. Yarynich told Blair the reason the command rocket test flights were not followed by launches of the huge intercontinental ballistic missiles was this: the Soviets knew that the Americans were watching. So they waited, delaying launches by forty minutes or up to twenty-four hours to fool the Americans, and hide Perimeter.
Blair took notes. When he got home, he called his sources and checked the U.S. flight test data again. He was especially interested in the test of November 13, 1984, right after Reagan’s election.
Sure enough, Yarynich was right. The heavy missiles did fly, just forty minutes after the command rockets.
Yarynich believed Perimeter had a positive role. If it were turned on, the leaders in the Kremlin would feel less pressure to make a dangerous, hair-trigger decision to launch on receipt of the first warning. They could wait. It might help them avoid a terrible, impulsive mistake. But Blair had a different view. He knew from his own experience that in the American system of command and control, people were the essential firewall. People ruled machines. The Soviet Union seemed to have built a Doomsday Machine by removing all but a few people. Blair was uneasy that it put launch orders in the hands of so few, and with so much automation.
Blair revealed the amazing system in an op-ed published in the
“Yes,” Blair wrote, “this doomsday machine still exists.”
Blair was inundated with phone calls from around the world. The very next day he was visited by Larry Gershwin, the national intelligence officer for Soviet strategic weapons, who was the man most responsible in the intelligence community for tracking Soviet missiles, bombers and submarines. Gershwin was intensely interested in what Blair had discovered. American intelligence had known some pieces of the puzzle, but they had not understood the command and control aspects of the Doomsday Machine.
Blair had connected the dots.23
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YELTSIN’S PROMISE
After he became Russian president, Yeltsin quickly and privately admitted the truth about Soviet biological weapons. On January 20, 1992, he met the British foreign secretary, Douglas Hurd, in Moscow. The British ambassador, Rodric Braithwaite, passed a note to Hurd during the meeting, suggesting he ask Yeltsin about germ warfare. For nearly two years, Braithwaite had been demanding answers about the program. He had been stonewalled. This time, Yeltsin said something “spectacular,” Braithwaite recalled.
“I know all about the Soviet biological weapons program,” Yeltsin told Hurd.
It’s still going ahead, even though the organizers claim it’s merely defensive research. They are fanatics, and they will not stop voluntarily. I know those people personally, I know their names, and I know the addresses of the institutes where they’re doing the work. I’m going to close down the institutes, retire the director of the program, and set the others to work designing something useful, such as a cow with a yearly yield of 10,000 liters. When I’ve checked for myself that the institutes have in fact stopped work, I’m going to ask for international inspection.
“Those people,” Yeltsin said, expressing disgust, “can even make a cow grow an extra leg.”
“We were stunned,” Braithwaite recalled. “We could do no more than thank him.”1
When Yeltsin met Baker in Moscow on January 29, the American secretary of state was equally impressed. Yeltsin proposed another major leap in the downhill arms race, reducing strategic weapons still further. “I saw a different Yeltsin from the man I’d seen before,” Baker recalled. “Whereas in the past he had often seemed vague and rather glib, now he spoke at greater length, with no notes, about highly technical issues.” Yeltsin admitted a Soviet biological weapons program had existed, and he promised to dismantle it “within a month.” He repeated his pledge to British Prime Minister John Major in London on January 30, and to President Bush at Camp David on February 1. Celebrating his sixty-first birthday at Camp David, Yeltsin said, “There has been written and drawn a new line, and crossed out all of the things that have been associated with the Cold War.” Neither Yeltsin nor Bush said anything in public about biological weapons, but Dmitri Volkogonov, the historian, who was advising Yeltsin then, relayed word to reporters during the Camp David summit that they had discussed it. This didn’t make the headlines, which were dominated instead by word of deeper cuts in strategic arms and pledges of cooperation in other areas, but it was noted in news accounts that day. Volkogonov said that Yeltsin promised “a number of centers and a number of programs dealing with this issue have been closed,” and “from 1992 there will be no budget allocations to that program.”2
Sergei Popov, who had carried out some of the most ambitious experiments in genetic engineering at Vector and Obolensk, saw the economic despair all around him. He wasn’t interested in selling his knowledge, he just wanted to escape the hardship. “When it started to collapse,” he said, “people started selling everything from the shelves in the labs. So what we ended up with was almost empty labs. Whatever we had, reagents, equipment, everything had been sold.”
His friend in Cambridge, Michael Gait, sent him an application for a postdoctoral fellowship in England. Popov carefully completed all the paperwork. On his resume, he stated that in Obolensk, among other things, he was working on “microbiology of pathogens,” but he didn’t say more. He identified himself as a “department chief” who was carrying out studies “on recombinantly produced proteins.” He was careful not to say he was genetically engineering pathogens for weapons. Popov worried that if he mailed the application from Obolensk, the KGB would intercept it, so he drove to Moscow and mailed it from the main post office, figuring it would not be noticed. The letter got through; Gait then wrote back with the news—a grant was awaiting him from the Royal Society.
Popov needed KGB permission to travel out of the country, even temporarily. He told the Obolensk director, Urakov, that he had a grant from the Royal Society, and that he was going to England “to set up connections” for possible business deals. Privately, Popov knew that Urakov wanted to get his son out of Russia. When Popov promised to help with the son, the director did not decline. Urakov turned to the KGB boss in his office. Shall we let him go? Urakov asked.
The KGB man nodded yes. They gave Popov his travel documents.3
