5 Gorbachev said he had not planned the Vilnius violence,
6 Chernyaev, pp. 320–323.
7 Baker sent two papers to Gorbachev via the Moscow embassy. The March 5 meeting and the Baker message are mentioned in an April 5 letter from Major to Gorbachev. Katayev, Hoover. Also, see “Biological Weapons,” no date, Katayev.
8 Katayev, Hoover.
9 Jack F. Matlock Jr.,
10 Matlock,
11 Chernyaev, p. 352. Matlock also details the misunderstandings in his foreword to
12 Chernyaev, p. 352.
13 Beschloss and Talbott,
14 Chernyaev said he, too, had told Gorbachev of rumors about suspicious military movements around Moscow. Gorbachev was “offended” by these signals, he recalled. Chernyaev said the Supreme Soviet speeches of Kryuchkov, Yazov and Pugo had infuriated Gorbachev. Chernyaev, p. 354.
15 This account is based on Matlock, pp. 539–546; and Chernyaev, pp. 352–353.
16 Blair, interview, Feb. 20, 2004; Yarynich interview, April 20, 2003.
17 “On reply to the U.S. President on the question of biological weapons,” July 4, 1991, Katayev, Hoover.
18 At the time, the idea of a “grand bargain” was being floated—massive aid in exchange for true market reform and democracy. But Bush never approved large-scale aid and Gorbachev never got to true market reform. Despite a dramatic appeal for aid to the larger group of Western leaders, Gorbachev failed to secure a major economic package at the summit.
19 Chernyaev, pp. 358–359.
20 “White House Fact Sheet on the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty,” Presidential Documents, vol. 27, p. 1086.
21 Chernyaev, p. 369.
22 Why this moment? The new union treaty was clearly a factor. However, Gorbachev has also said the hard-liners may have overheard the discussion with Yeltsin about replacing them, which took place at the end of July, in a room at the presidential compound, Novo-Ogaryovo, outside of Moscow. The room was bugged. Gorbachev,
23 Gorbachev,
24 Chernyaev,
25 By some accounts, the codes on the suitcase were erased and they were not usable. However, the exact condition is not known.
26 Dobbs, pp. 387–389.
27 Yevgeny Shaposhnikov,
28 Yarynich, communication with author, August 2004.
29 Gorbachev has recalled that on August 27 he came home to find that Raisa was in tears. She had burned all the letters he had written to her over the years. She said she could not imagine someone else reading them if another coup were to happen. Andrei S. Grachev,
30 Dobbs, pp. 418–420.
CHAPTER 17: A GREAT UNRAVELING
1 Nunn, interview, March 10, 2005.
2 Vinson of Georgia, for decades the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, was Nunn’s great- uncle. Senator Stennis of Mississippi was then chairman of Armed Services. Another person who influenced Nunn was Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, who had also been chairman of the Armed Services committee. Russell died in 1971 and Nunn was elected to his seat.
3 Kenneth W. Thompson, ed.,
4 The visit was February 4–17, 1974. Nunn was accompanied by Frank Sullivan of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Nunn, interview, March 10, 2005. Frank Sullivan, interview, Jan. 31, 2006. Also see Nunn, “Changing Threats in the Post-Cold War World,” speech, Monterey Institute of International Studies, Monterey, Calif., Aug. 20, 1995; and U.S. Senate, 93d Congress, 2d Session, April 2, 1974, “Policy, Troops and the NATO Alliance, Report of Senator Sam Nunn to the Committee on Armed Services, United States Senate.” Courtesy of Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University, Atlanta, Ga.
5 David Miller,
6 Nunn told me the psychology of defeat and its effect on the American military after Vietnam led him to conclude that the Russian military would be demoralized after losing their empire. Nunn, communication with author, Aug. 26, 2008. See Nunn, “Vietnam Aid—The Painful Options,” Report to the Senate Armed Services Committee, Feb. 12, 1975, 94th Congress, 1st Session.
7 In the mid-1980s, Nunn and Senator John Warner (R-Va.) proposed creating risk reduction centers in the United States and Soviet Union to share information in a crisis. The first-phase ideas were accepted by Reagan and Gorbachev at Geneva in 1985, and on Sept. 15, 1987, the United States and the Soviet Union signed an agreement establishing Nuclear Risk Reduction Centers in Washington and Moscow. Nunn and Warner had also suggested a more ambitious effort, which was not adopted. “Outline of nuclear risk reduction proposal,” fact sheet, undated, and “Nuclear Risk Reduction Center,” Cathy Gwin, communication with author, July 28, 2008.
8 George Bush and Brent Scowcroft,
9 “Address to the Nation on Reducing United States and Soviet Nuclear Weapons,” Presidential Documents, vol. 27, p. 1348.
10 “Soviet Tactical Nuclear Forces and Gorbachev’s Nuclear Pledges: Impact, Motivations, and Next Steps,” Interagency Intelligence Memorandum, Director of Central Intelligence, November 1991.
11 Cochran of the NRDC tried to persuade Soviet officials to take actions to verify the pullbacks, but at the time they were not interested. See “Report on the Third International Workshop on Verified Storage and Destruction of Nuclear Warheads,” NRDC, Dec. 16–20, 1991.
12 George Bush,
13 Gates, prepared statement to the House Armed Services Committee, Defense Policy Panel, December 10, 1991, in
14 An American diplomat in Moscow cabled back to Washington a conversation with a Russian official who said the country “has virtually no adequate storage sites for the huge quantities of weapons-grade material that will result from destruction of substantial numbers of warheads.” “Russian views on destruction/storage of dismantled nuclear warheads,” Moscow cable to the State Department, Jan. 14, 1992, declassified to author under FOIA. The remark about plutonium pits was made by Viktor Mikhailov, who was then deputy minister of atomic energy, to Frank von Hippel in October 1991, while on a visit to Washington. Von Hippel, interview, June 1, 2004. The need for safe storage was raised at two unofficial workshops sponsored by the NRDC and the Federation of American
