Earlier this fall, as the nuclear superpowers raced to see who could have fewer arms, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev made a grand promise: The Soviet Union would destroy at least 16,000 nuclear weapons-more than half its arsenal.
Thanks to Gorbachev`s pledge and an earlier arms-cut announcement by President Bush, the world rests easier today.
In fact, keepers of the so-called Doomsday Clock have pushed back the hands of the macabre timepiece to 11:43 p.m., the farthest from midnight ever.
”The Cold War is over,” declared the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists in Chicago recently as it reset the clock.
However, while Armageddon may have been delayed, it has not necessarily been averted. Gorbachev`s word notwithstanding, nuclear-arms specialists say it will take the Soviet Union at least a decade to get rid of the weapons it already has tagged for destruction.
Given the quickening pace of the central government`s breakdown, moreover, the Soviet Union soon may have no place to store the arms securely before they are dismantled-and without safeguards, they might end up almost anywhere.
”The specter of Soviet nuclear weapons falling into irresponsible hands now rears its ugly head,” warned Sen. Connie Mack (R-Fla.), an influential member of the Armed Services Committee. ”The danger of theft or sales of these terrible weapons to terrorist states is real.”
Thomas Cochran, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council who has met frequently with ranking Soviet military officials to discuss the practicalities of nuclear disarmament, agrees.
”The big threat is just to get on top of the inventory, to put on an extra seal, to make it more difficult for a rogue colonel to drive away with them,” he said.
Noting that the average monthly salary of a Soviet arms technician is only $6.66 at the official exchange rate, Cochran added, ”These things start looking like hard currency to people who work around them.”
Such fears swept through Congress before its winter recess. On Nov. 27, two weeks after sponsors abandoned a similar measure, both chambers voted to take as much as $400 million from the Defense Department and spend it to help the Soviet Union speed up the collection and destruction of its nuclear weapons.
The legislation also could expand the government`s $165 million humanitarian aid effort announced last month; the bill permits Bush to use as much as $100 million of the defense budget to airlift food and medical supplies to the Soviet Union this winter.
The Soviet Union has an estimated 30,000 nuclear weapons, the accumulation of a 40-year arms race.
Even before August`s botched coup in Moscow, arms specialists had recognized that a nuclear-weapons build-down might take almost as long as the buildup. For instance, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty signed last July gives the Soviets seven years to decommission some 5,000 long-range missiles. The U.S. government, which is better staffed and funded, can work faster. But arms specialists say that even in the U.S. technicians could labor two years to fulfill Bush`s vow in September to destroy more than 3,000 short-range missiles.
When it comes to the Soviet nuclear inventory, however, the world may not have that much time. Negotiators always had assumed the Soviet command center would remain in charge of its arsenal while the warheads were painstakingly defused. But that appears more unlikely every day.
Indeed, many nuclear-arms specialists no longer speak of a single nuclear superpower in the Soviet Union.
Instead, recognizing the sovereignty of the remaining Soviet republics, they now tote up 12 potential nuclear states-and perhaps more as the Soviet government and military wither away.
The U.S. is an improbable target of the nuclear club`s newest members. Specialists say the Soviet Defense Ministry still controls the missiles capable of obliterating U.S. cities.
For the moment, that includes the missiles stationed in Ukraine, whose voters declared independence Sunday.
Further, the specialists say these missiles are too big and too complicated to be snatched and fired by renegades.
But at hundreds of bases across two continents, the Soviet Union also has thousands of short-range missiles, shells and mines-smaller, less-sophisticated weapons that more easily could be stolen and used by others. And a theft need not be large to be intimidating.
”If even one-hundredth of 1 percent of the nuclear weapons in the Soviet stockpile falls into the wrong hands, destruction greater than the world has seen since Hiroshima and Nagasaki could result,” warns a study by Harvard University`s Center for Science and International Affairs published in November.
The U.S. assistance could provide an added safeguard, enabling the Soviet military to move all its nuclear missiles from other republics into Russia by next spring, contends nuclear-arms specialist Ashton Carter, director of the Harvard center.
The money, which could put U.S. military personnel and American defense contractors on-site, also could compress the destruction process by years, specialists say.
But the timetable may be unrealistic, and the U.S. contribution could turn out to be little more than a down payment.
The Soviet Union has an estimated 15,000 tactical, or short-range, land-based missiles that are thought to be stationed in Russia and eight other Soviet republics. Simply transporting that many weapons probably would overwhelm the fractured and poorly equipped Soviet military, specialists say. In addition, the Russian republic has no place to warehouse all these arms. And even if the arms could be brought under Russian control that quickly, the Soviet Union has no full-scale weapons-destruction plants or long-term storage sites for the contaminated components of the weapons.
Top Soviet military officials recently told a group of senators that an investment of several billion dollars would be required to speed things along. The Soviet Union, however, is effectively bankrupt and now must borrow money even to import food. So specialists say it`s unlikely that the Soviets will accomplish much without additional foreign assistance.
Congress may end up providing more help later. Noted Sen. Slade Gorton
(R-Wash.): ”It would be a terrible irony if the fall of communism actually increased the dangers of proliferation.”
