The Dead Hand

policy memorandum informed Baker: “The Soviet Union as we know it no longer exists. What matters now is how the breakup of the Soviet Union proceeds from this point onward. Our aim should be to make the crash as peaceful as possible.”¹²

It is hard to overstate the sense of relief, triumph and fresh possibility that arose from events in the Soviet Union that autumn. Forty-five years after George Kennan had written the Long Telegram, which laid the foundation for the Cold War strategy of containment, the protracted, draining competition that had shaped so much of the world abruptly came to an end, without cataclysm. “Today, even the most hard-eyed realist must see a world transformed,” said the CIA director, Robert Gates, who had voiced grave doubts about Gorbachev for years. “Communism has at last been defeated.”¹³

Yet even in these days of euphoria, when one could forget about the movie The Day After and the horror of nuclear winter, a danger appeared on the horizon. The threat was still masked by layers of Soviet secrecy and overshadowed by the celebratory mood. But an early hint came with Gorbachev’s pullback of tactical nuclear weapons. The warheads were hastily moved to new storage depots by train. Could a weakened Soviet military, barely able to feed hungry troops, adequately protect the nuclear charges? With so many competing power centers—republics breaking away into new nations—could the Soviet system of centralized command and control remain intact? No one knew the answers to these questions, but signs of chaos and upheaval were everywhere. The Soviet rail cars were relatively primitive, lacking sophisticated alarm systems. The warheads were deactivated before being put on the trains, but there were no armored blankets to protect them from a bullet or shrapnel. The warhead depots were filled to capacity. Sometimes the trains just stopped dead on the tracks. There was an acute shortage of containers to protect the uranium and plutonium removed from dismantled weapons. The Soviet system did not have a suitable, secure warehouse to store these dangerous materials over the long term. When a Soviet official visited Washington that autumn, he was insistent on the need for help from the West to build a secure warehouse for the plutonium from warheads. Thousands of plutonium pits, the essential chunk of material used to cause the nuclear explosion, were stored like so many boxes in a furniture warehouse. “The containers are sticking out of the windows!” he warned.¹⁴

No one was prepared for an arms race in reverse.

As he flew home, Nunn pondered what he had seen. He felt the United States had to help Russia and the other new states just emerging from the Soviet breakdown. “We could end up with several fingers on the nuclear trigger,” he thought. It was a nightmare of the nuclear age, yet concrete action was difficult to envisage. The dangers seemed pressing, but details were still scarce. One of the best-informed American experts about the Soviet system was Bruce Blair, the scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington, who had asked many of the key questions about Soviet nuclear command and control during his research in Moscow. Although Blair felt the old Soviet system of rigid, central controls was reliable, he shared Nunn’s worry about what would happen if it broke apart.¹⁷Another informed expert was Ashton B. Carter, a physicist, professor and director of the Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. During the 1980s, Carter had served at the Pentagon, and understood the complexity of the American nuclear command and control systems.¹⁶ Carter recalled telling Nunn that keeping a lid on nuclear weapons was not purely a technical matter. “A nuclear custodial system is only as stable as the social system in which it is embedded,” he added. “And it’s really made up of people and institutions and standard operating procedures and so forth, not just gizmos. When all of that is in the middle of a social revolution, you’ve got big trouble.”

A social revolution was just what Nunn had seen on the streets of Moscow.

Soon after his return, Nunn walked across the Capitol to the office of Representative Les Aspin, a Wisconsin Democrat, who was chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. Aspin earned a reputation when he first came to Congress as a publicity hound and a maverick who delighted in exposing wasteful Pentagon spending. In later years, he moved to the center, and, like Nunn, became an influential voice on military and defense issues. Right after the coup, on August 28, Aspin proposed a dramatic shift of guns to butter: take $1 billion from the $290 billion Pentagon budget and spend it on humanitarian assistance for the Soviet people. Two weeks later, on September 12, Aspin issued a white paper, “A New Kind of Threat: Nuclear Weapons in an Uncertain Soviet Union.” The United States should make sure that “the first winter of freedom after 70 years of communism isn’t a disaster,” Aspin declared.

When Nunn and Aspin met, the conversation was respectful, and at first, tactful. Nunn hoped to coax Aspin to change his approach. In Russia, Nunn said, the most pressing need was helping the Soviet Union dismantle its arsenal. They agreed on one bill that would provide $1 billion for transport of medicine and humanitarian aid, which was Aspin’s idea, as well as money for demilitarization, destroying warheads and converting defense factories to civilian purposes, which were Nunn’s priorities.¹⁷

Nunn and Aspin, both experienced politicians, seriously miscalculated the public mood.¹⁸ A recession was setting in at home, and voters were tired of overseas commitments. In early November, Democrat Harris Wofford upset Republican Dick Thornburgh for a Senate seat from Pennsylvania with an angry populist campaign, saying “it’s time to take care of our own people.” The Nunn-Aspin bill came at just the wrong moment. Polls showed Americans were opposed to sending direct aid to the Soviet Union. Aspin recalled, “You could feel the wind shift.”¹⁹

“It was clearly a firestorm, it wasn’t like it was mild opposition,” Nunn recalled. He was deeply frustrated. With his own eyes he had seen the chaos on the streets of Moscow, and he knew of the potential for nuclear accidents and proliferation, but the politicians in Washington seemed oblivious to the dangers. Some senators told Nunn they could not explain in one-minute sound bites why they should support his legislation, so they would not vote for it. Nunn went to the Senate floor November 13 and tried to break through the mood of indifference with a powerful speech. He said that even after the strategic arms treaty signed earlier in the year, the rapidly disintegrating Soviet Union, including the republics outside of Russia, still had fifteen thousand nuclear warheads to destroy, and needed help. “Unfortunately, nuclear weapons do not just go away when they are no longer wanted,” he said. The Soviet Union was short of storage space, transportation, dismantlement plants and equipment for radioactive materials handling. Nunn had learned these details from Viktor Mikhailov, the deputy minister of atomic energy, who had visited Washington and pleaded for help.²⁰

“Do we recognize the opportunity we have today during this period in history and the great danger we have of proliferation, or do we sit on our hands and cater to what we think people want to hear in this country?” Nunn asked.

“What are the consequences of doing nothing?”

Nunn wondered what kind of one-minute explanation his colleagues would need if the Soviet Union fell into civil war like Yugoslavia, with nuclear weapons all over. “If helping them destroy 15,000 weapons is not a reduction in the Soviet military threat, why have we been worrying about these 15,000 weapons for the last 30 years? I do not see any logic here at all,” he said. The United States had spent $4 trillion during the Cold War, so $1 billion to destroy weapons “would not be too high a price to pay to help destroy thousands and thousands of Soviet nuclear weapons,” Nunn insisted.

“We have the opportunity for an unprecedented destruction of the weapons of war,” Nunn declared. Yet he warned, “We are going to sleep—to sleep—about a country that is coming apart at the seams economically, that wants to destroy nuclear weapons at this juncture but may not in the months and years ahead.”

“Are we going to continue to sit on our hands?” Nunn then pulled back the legislation. ²¹

At this critical moment, the president was nowhere to be seen. Bush did not want to take political risks for the Nunn-Aspin legislation. But a handful of influential voices from Moscow made a difference in the Senate. Hours after Nunn pulled back the bill, Alexander Yakovlev, the architect of Gorbachev’s perestroika, spoke with senators in the Capitol at an early-evening reception, impressing on them the urgency of the crisis. Two days later, Nunn relaunched his efforts. Two top officials of the Institute for the Study of the United States and Canada—Andrei Kokoshin, who had met Nunn with his little white car in Moscow, and Sergei Rogov—were both at that moment in Washington. The institute had long been a meeting point between American and Soviet experts on defense and security issues. Nunn invited them to a small lunch, to which he also brought Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, a leading Republican voice on foreign affairs. At the lunch, Kokoshin and Rogov warned that power was slipping away from Gorbachev by the minute, and that in a “worst-case scenario,” nuclear weapons could be caught up in the struggle for power among the Soviet republics. This was a volatile,