Casting Out the Communists : Whose Fingers Are on the Nuclear Buttons? Can They Be Trusted?

Who controls the nuclear bombs when a superpower disintegrates?

Before last week’s botched putsch , no doomsday scenario of the collapse of the Soviet Union was complete without the prospect of crazed nationalists capturing nuclear weapons and holding the world hostage in the name of self-determination. In his defense of the unsigned Union Treaty, President Mikhail S. Gorbachev often tried to exploit this fear.

The Committee for a State Emergency should have persuaded doomsayers to add Soviet hard-liners to their fantasies of how nuclear catastrophe might come about. Which of the eight power-grabbers could be trusted to keep his finger off the button when the going got tough?

But when Ukraine proclaimed its independence Aug. 24, a less apocalyptic and more complex scenario of nuclear fragmentation surfaced. Not all 15 Soviet republics are potential nuclear powers. According to the Pentagon’s “Soviet Military Power,” nuclear weapons are based in only four republics.

Russia, by far, is the nuclear giant. Nearly all the Soviet Union’s 1,400 land-based ICBMs are based there. A large portion of the country’s 13,000 tactical--or battlefield--weapons, including short-range missiles and nuclear artillery, are also deployed in the republic.

There are two ICBM complexes in Kazakhstan and nuclear battlefield weapons in Byelorussia. But since tactical weapons have reportedly been removed from the Baltics and Azerbaijan, and since the remaining medium-range missiles covered by the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty are slated for destruction, the most heavily armed non-Russian nuclear republic is Ukraine.

According to the Pentagon, it is home to one of the Soviet Union’s largest stockpiles of tactical weapons. Ukraine also hosts two SS-19 complexes, at Derazhnia, in the west, and at Pervomaysk, in the south. The number of missiles at the bases is classified, but the SS-19 can deliver six warheads up to 10,000 kilometers from launch site. As such, the SS-19s are candidates for the 50% cutbacks envisioned in the START treaty signed by Gorbachev and President George Bush. Whoever ends up running what’s left of the center could take advantage of the treaty to dismantle the missiles in Ukraine and Kazakhstan.

Tactical weapons are a different matter. Nuclear artillery shells, for example, are as small as 8 inches in length; they are easy to capture, steal or sell.

But even if the SS-19s are destroyed, it takes more than a day to dig up a ballistic-missile silo. The START reductions are to take place over an eight-year period. The Soviet Union is collapsing now.

Even before declaring independence, Ukrainians claimed that all nuclear weapons on their soil were theirs. “According to our Law on Economic Independence,” said Mikhailo Horyn, a leader of the nationalist organization Rukh, “all military hardware here is the property of the Ukrainian nation. That includes nuclear weapons.”

Since the Ukrainian Parliament declared control over all Soviet military forces deployed on its territory, the view that the weapons belong to Ukraine has acquired even more force.

Declarations, like most talk, are cheap, especially in the Soviet Union. The KGB and the military jointly control the nuclear button, not republican parliaments. Indeed, the Ukrainian Parliament does not even possess official information about the weapons based on its territory.

But central control is becoming increasingly dubious as the loyalties of the KGB and military fragment. Last Monday, elite KGB troops in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv asked to be placed under Ukrainian jurisdiction. More are sure to follow.

So, what will happen to the nuclear bombs? There are several possibilities.

Whoever finally emerges as the leader of the Soviet center could, despite the spreading declarations of independence, win over the four nuclear republics to a new federal treaty, thereby retaining control over military and foreign policy. This is highly unlikely. Yeltsin has made it clear that Russia won’t sign any treaty unless Ukraine does, and it’s doubtful that the Ukrainian Supreme Soviet would approve anything other than a transitional economic agreement now that the federation’s main support--the Communist Party--is propertyless and powerless.

Another scenario, put forth by Lev Lukianenko, a deputy in the Ukrainian Parliament, includes a transitional arrangement in which a joint strategic command of all nuclear republics must unanimously agree before launching any weapon. The Russian Parliament’s recent decision requiring its approval for nuclear launches is consistent with this possibility. As is last week’s Russian-Ukrainian joint communique that no decision on strategic weaponry will be made unilaterally. Though it is not legally binding, the declaration carries significant moral weight.

But Russia has never rejected nuclear weapons. In contrast, Ukraine, at least in theory, doesn’t want them. On Rukh’s initiative, last year’s declaration of sovereignty asserted that Ukraine is to be a nuclear-free zone that “neither keeps, produces, nor acquires nuclear weapons.”

“We want to be at peace with our neighbors,” explained Serhij Odarych, deputy head of the Rukh Secretariat. Besides, after Chernobyl, few people here have good things to say about anything nuclear.

Supporters of Ukraine’s own armed forces reject a nuclear arsenal as well. Col. Vilen Martyrosianis, a deputy in the Supreme Soviet and leader of the newly formed Union of Officers, Citizens of Ukraine, the nucleus of a future Ukrainian army, points out that even a Ukraine without nuclear weapons would still have everything it needs to make them, including 14 plutonium-producing nuclear reactors and a highly developed military-industrial complex. But the colonel recommended that until there is total disarmament, nuclear weapons should be controlled by some kind of new central authority.

Nonetheless, with such control collapsing, some think the issue would be out of their hands anyway. Volodymyr Muliava, an organizer of the Union of Officers, believes that the United States has a contingency plan for protecting Soviet nuclear installations, with U.N. peacekeeping troops, in case of central collapse or civil war. “And if they don’t, they should.”

In the absence of foreign intervention, however, some have suggested surrendering Ukraine’s nuclear weapons to Moscow in exchange for independence.

“No way,” says Odarych. “We might destroy the weapons ourselves or let some responsible international agency do it. But we won’t give them to Moscow, whether it’s Soviet or Russian.”

Others want to charge the Ukrainian representative to the United Nations to call on the agency to supervise the destruction of weapons here, thereby achieving both disarmament and diplomatic recognition of Ukrainian independence.

Both are in the West’s interest. Aside from removing the danger of nuclear fragmentation, recognition of Ukraine could make Russia think twice about the territorial claims its parliament seems to be making on Ukraine and Kazakhstan and prevent future conflicts that could make the civil war in Yugoslavia seem like child’s play.