Enduring nuclear legacies

M V Ramana

The massive nuclear complexes in Russia and the US survive as a legacy of a past where the respective military industrial complexes were given vast amounts of money and power. In South Asia too, similar institutions are in the process of intensifying their political clout. The sooner they are stopped, the better

The collapse of the Soviet Union ended the so-called Cold War with the United States. One would have thought that this event would have ended the widely feared (rightfully so!) and most dangerous aspect of that confrontation — the nuclear standoff between the US and the Soviet Union. But Russia, which inherited the Soviet Union’s arsenal, and the US still possess thousands of nuclear weapons. A significant fraction of those are on ‘hair trigger’ alert, ready to be launched in a matter of minutes on their deadly and destructive missions, increasing the risk of accidental nuclear war. Nevertheless, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, public concern about the dangers from nuclear weapons has been low. This, in large part, is due to widespread ignorance about the state of nuclear arsenals in different countries.

Knowledge about nuclear weapons in the supposedly free and democratic pole in the Cold War confrontation, namely the US, was scarce and highly classified. It remains so. The situation in the Soviet Union was even worse. Secrecy was rampant. For example, the most important elements of the Soviet nuclear weapons design and manufacture infrastructure were housed in 10 closed cities, which do not appear on maps. They were usually known not by their own names, but by post-box numbers; for instance, Chelyabinsk-65 or Arzamas-16.

Till recently, the only information about Soviet nuclear complex available to anyone outside of the nuclear elite was with US intelligence agencies. For decades the US Central Intelligence Agency has maintained an extensive programme of espionage, using both human spies and technological means such as aircraft and satellites, to gather information about the Soviet nuclear programme. It was only the 1980s that the first non-governmental compilations of nuclear information became available to the public, notably the series put out by an American NGO, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

In 1991, a group of young Russian scientists and analysts at the Centre for Arms Control Studies, Moscow, started the Russian Nuclear Forces Project. Since virtually no information about the Soviet nuclear weapons was available to the Russian public, they began by translating and publishing the NRDC’s book on Soviet nuclear weapons. Then they updated it using open (i.e., not including secret or classified information) Russian sources to provide up-to-date and accurate information about the state of the Russian nuclear forces and the attendant industrial infrastructure.

The result was a book that was so good that in October 1999, the Federal Security Service (the FSB, formerly the KGB) seized all undistributed copies of the book alleging that it divulges state secrets. It is one of the best compliments such a book can receive. But given the emphasis on using only public and open sources, the allegations were baseless. Rather, it was just another attempt at maintaining secrecy. Finally, in May 2002, the FSB, failing to prove their allegations, returned all seized materials.

In the meanwhile, the book was translated by one of the authors and published in English in 2001 by the MIT Press (http://mitpress.mit.edu/). Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces edited by Pavel Podvig and including chapters by Oleg Bukharin, Timur Kadyshev, Eugene Miasnikov, Pavel Podvig, Igor Sutyagin, Maxim Tarasenko, and Boris Zhelezov, is a massive compendium of various aspects of the Russian nuclear arsenal — the structure and operations of strategic nuclear forces, the treaties that bind their sizes, the nuclear weapons production complex, the Soviet nuclear testing programme and so on. Meticulously documented (but since most of the sources are Russian, only those who know Russian and with access to journals/reports in that language can use them), Podvig et al have produced a great reference book and a definitive guide to nuclear weapons and related infrastructure in Russia.

What is most striking upon reading this book is the sheer size of the nuclear arsenal and the associated complex. For example, over the years there were more than 30 different intercontinental ballistic missile systems, 17 different ballistic missile submarines, nine different air and missile defence systems and so on. Each of these different systems, of course, came in large numbers. This multitude also implied an equally gargantuan manufacturing infrastructure.

The Soviet Union’s concern, bordering on paranoia, about US military superiority and possible attack meant that it essentially tried to match the US warhead for warhead, missile for missile. In the process it literally went bankrupt. This has important lessons for Pakistan and India. Pakistan has sought to match the nuclear arsenal and conventional military strength of India. Similarly, some Indian hawks have argued that India needs to match China by building several hundred nuclear weapons. Within the dangerous, flawed but yet seductive logic of nuclear weapons and deterrence, such attempts to maintain parity are all but inevitable. But in the bargain, South Asia will also become home to a gigantic nuclear complex, beggaring us in the process.

We return to the puzzle we began with — why does Russia maintain thousands of these weapons well after the end of the Cold War? One major factor is the combined institutional power of the various ministries (Minatom, defence, aviation, radio, electronics…) involved in nuclear weapons activities, and their reluctance to give up this fund of resources and prestige. Though the original rationales — the Cold War confrontation in the case of the US and Soviet Union — are no longer valid, these institutions have a vested interest in maintaining a large nuclear arsenal. Similar institutional interests are at play in the US too.

The massive nuclear complexes in Russia and the US survive as a legacy of a past where the respective military industrial complexes were given vast amounts of money and power. In South Asia too, similar institutions are in the process of intensifying their political clout. The sooner they are stopped, the better. Countering this institutional power requires the sustained efforts of a large-scale nuclear disarmament and peace movement, one that we must all join and contribute to.

M V Ramana is a physicist and research staff member at Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security and co-editor of Prisoners of the Nuclear Dream

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