intended for those who had worked on Soviet weapons programs. How many in the room thought they might qualify? One by one, they stood up. Among them, Weber met the director of an institute that, in Soviet times, worked on plant pathogens intended to wipe out the entire American wheat supply. The director invited Weber to visit, and Weber found, to his amazement, they were also working on how to grow crops
In 1998, Weber made contacts at the Research Center for Molecular Diagnostics and Therapy in Moscow. The institute, which worked with dangerous pathogens in the Soviet years, had fallen on hard times in the 1990s. A scientist from the institute confided to Weber he had just received an e-mail from a postdoctoral student in Tehran who wanted to come work there. Weber told him: don’t reply. Within weeks, Weber helped arrange grants from the International Science and Technology Center for some of the hard-pressed researchers to begin working on civilian projects.
Over the next few years, more secrets of Biopreparat spilled into the open. In 1998, Alibek published his memoir, describing his career in the germ warfare system. In May 2000, Nikolai Urakov, the director of Obolensk, hosted a conference cosponsored by the International Science and Technology Center. In an extraordinary day, journalists were shown around parts of Korpus No. 1, where Sergei Popov and Igor Domaradsky had worked on genetic engineering. Urakov complained the laboratory was receiving only 1 percent of the government budget of Soviet times—the rest they had to earn on their own. Urakov, director of the largest facility for developing bacteria for biological weapons in the old days, announced a new mission: “We have to protect humans from diseases.”7
Over and over again, Weber found the key was forging relationships with scientists, respecting their dignity, their desire to carry out useful research, and building their trust. Governments and agreements had their purpose, but the real success started when they could look you in the eye and speak directly. The
For Weber and many of those Westerners who went to the former Soviet Union to staunch the threats, there was also a frustrating unknown. They could tally up the success stories, measure the number of fences built and grants given, but could only guess at what had slipped through their fingers. It was the nature of threat reduction that it was always risky business, devilishly challenging, often defying a chance to declare absolute success. In trying to prevent something, the most consequential and terrifying metric was failure.
————— EPILOGUE —————
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?” Gorbachev told me. “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 nuclear 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, 2,079 tactical warheads and more than 8,800 in reserve or awaiting dismantlement. That’s more than 23,000 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 airliners—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 reexamined its nuclear weapons policies and deployments 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 the 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 battlefield 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 the former Soviet republics after the 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 Stanislav Petrov faced the false alarm in 1983, launch decisions had to be made in just minutes. Today, Russia is no longer the ideological or military threat the Soviet Union once was; nor does 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 to two minutes to execute the launch codes and 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 100,000 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
