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| About CDI > Staff > Bruce Blair > Selected Publications |
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Who's Got the Button?
The Slightly Shaky Control of Russia's Nuclear Weapons The Washington Post, September 29, 1996 By Bruce G. Blair
The announcement that control of Russia's nuclear launch button will pass from President Boris Yeltsin to Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, if and when Yeltsin undergoes heart bypass surgery this fall, should remind the United States of the continuing peril of Russian nuclear weapons. While the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 reduced the threat of a deliberate nuclear attack, the risk of a breakdown in the control of those nuclear weapons has actually grown since then. What's more, U.S. security policy toward Russia is partly responsible. The chances of nuclear catastrophe, accidental or otherwise, remain remote but the problems besetting the complex organization controlling Russian nuclear weapons need to be understood and addressed by Western governments. If they aren't, the West may discover too late how it unwittingly undercut nuclear safety. This warning emerges from a decade of study of Russian nuclear control and interviews with scores of Russian experts, including many who designed and operated the strategic missile forces and their command-control networks. With their help, I examined the intricate details of Russian nuclear operations and safeguards and found several basic deficiencies and adverse trends. First, as the cohesion of the Russian military weakens, the danger of unauthorized actions by weapons commanders and custodians grows. With manpower and material shortages worsening, the nuclear forces cannot escape the demoralization and corruption already plaguing the regular army. Although local commanders need secret "unlock" codes held by the general staff in Moscow to actually fire any of these weapons, the circumvention of the codes cannot be ruled out, particularly by lower-level officers on submarines at sea. Second, convulsions at the top of the nuclear chain of command in Moscow could occur, given an unstable political system that still lacks effective institutional checks and balances. This weakness may be compounded by the general staff's possession of the codes that enable senior officers to initiate a missile attack independent of political authorities. Third, while Russia's nuclear arsenal will continue to shrink, the Kremlin will retain strategic submarine forces and increase its force of mobile land-based ballistic missiles. This realignment (sought by U.S. arms negotiators) tends to undermine operational safety because safeguards on mobile forces on land and sea are inferior to those on rockets housed in silos. In a political crisis these safeguards might degrade further, as the Russian military plans to distribute the codes to middle-level commanders in the field. A fourth deficiency concerns Russia's nuclear strategy which still rests on a philosophy of "launch on warning" — that is, launching Russian missiles before incoming enemy missiles arrive. That means that Russian authorities must respond to a warning of an impending nuclear strike within 15 minutes. Procedures now in place allow only three or four minutes for detecting an attack, and another three or four minutes for top level decision making (using the famous nuclear suitcases). The doctrine of launch on warning has been in effect for years. What is new is Russia's increased reliance on it following the post-1991 disintegration of their conventional forces. And the inherent danger of this quick-draw posture is compounded by the deterioration of Russia's early warning network, which is falling on hard times like the rest of its military infrastructure. These strains on Russian control of their nuclear forces result from a combination of severe domestic problems and long-standing operational practices carried over from the Cold War. But U.S. policies cannot be held blameless. Our daily nuclear posture is deeply implicated in the problem because it poses a steadily increasing threat to Russia's strategic forces and to the organization that commands and controls them. Russian military planners are looking at a steep decline in the combat readiness of Russia's least vulnerable forces — submarines at sea and mobile land missiles in the field. This presents them with a harsh fact: If Russia faced a foreign missile attack and if their current strategic forces were not launched promptly on warning, then only a very small fraction of their arsenal — and possibly none — would be able to retaliate after absorbing the attack. Compounding Russia's problems are the new D-5 missiles on U.S. Trident submarines, whose accuracy and short flight times reinforce Russian reliance on quick launch. The Russian military is responding to this pressure in ways that strengthen nuclear deterrence at the expense of operational safety. In recent months Russia has redoubled its efforts to disperse more mobile missiles on land to secret hiding places. It also stepped up its training of the personnel who operate the strategic forces. In June, Russia conducted an unprecedented military exercise in which several submarines launched missiles simultaneously in the Sea of Okhotsk off the Siberian coast. To compensate for the growing vulnerability of top command posts in the Moscow vicinity, the Russian military has opened (at great expense) a deep underground command post for the general staff beneath Kosvinsky Mountain in the Urals. Another key U.S. program with a strong negative effect on Russian nuclear control is the ballistic missile defense program. At this time the program, designed to enable the United States to destroy incoming warheads, poses a larger political than strategic problem for Russian leaders. But Russian war-planners cannot and do not ignore the prospect that even a modest anti-missile program — an interceptor system capable only of shielding U.S. territory from very limited nuclear strikes — could doom their already feeble deterrent force. The logic goes like this: The U.S. could decimate Russia's nuclear forces with a first strike; Russia could then only fire off a few missiles — which the U.S. ballistic missile system could intercept. This apprehension is justified. Today only about 100 Russian strategic missiles (carrying as few as 150 warheads) could survive a sudden U.S. attack. After factoring in other causes of attrition, launch failures and command disruption, the Russians can count on less than 50 reliable and controllable nuclear weapons — while the United States would have thousands. Adding in a U.S. missile defense system could be decisive. According to a Pentagon report prepared last year for Rep. Floyd Spence (R-S.C.), chairman of the House National Security Committee, a modest system could almost certainly block Russian missiles carrying less than 50 warheads. In other words, Russia would no longer project a credible threat against the United States. We take these speculative estimates with a grain of salt but Russian planners have to take them with a shot of vodka. Russia's likely response to losing a credible retaliatory deterrent: heavier reliance on launch on warning and preemptive strikes against threatening adversaries. Once again, this strengthening of deterrence would undermine stability and operational safety. The proposed expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe poses similar dangers. It will likely reinforce Russia's growing dependence on nuclear weapons and impel Russia to take steps that bolster deterrence but compromise safety. For instance, if the Western military alliance included Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary, Russia would likely reverse its present course of deactivating its huge stockpile of tactical nuclear weapons. The Russians have more than 20,000 tactical nuclear weapons; these might wind up redeployed along Russian borders, in Kaliningrad and in Belarus. Unfortunately, tactical weapons have the poorest safeguards. Further dispersal of them beyond the many dozens of depots already in use would represent a serious setback for operational safety and safeguards against theft. Does all this seem academic in this post-Cold War era? The issues and threats raised do seem to invoke rarefied calculations of a previous era. But the stress and strain on Russian nuclear control is very real. Alleviating it surely counts as a vital U.S. interest. We need to pursue policies that encourage the Russians to reduce their reliance on nuclear weapons, to restrain their dispersal of weapons and to ease their "hair-trigger" launch readiness. For Russia to make such a fundamental change requires that the United States offer extensive measures of reassurance and unusual reciprocity in deactivating nuclear arsenals and adopting less aggressive stances. A paramount security interest is to ensure ironclad Russian safeguards against the theft of their nuclear weapons and the materials used to make them, and against the accidental use of nuclear weapons. We need to examine the notion of NATO expansion and indeed all of our current security policies with these considerations in mind. When these policies were crafted, their effect on Russian nuclear control got short shrift. Copyright The Washington Post Bruce G. Blair is president of the Center for Defense Information.
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