Unwanted Russian Warheads a Prize Waiting to Fall Into Wrong Hands : Arsenal: More than 19,000 weapons scattered across nation and under uncertain control raise specter of their illicit sale to would-be nuclear powers.

Scattered somewhere across Russia’s vastness, more than 19,000 nuclear warheads are waiting to be taken apart and destroyed.

The good news: The Russian military doesn’t want them anymore. The bad news: Nobody knows where they all are--nobody in the U.S. government, and perhaps nobody in the Russian government, either.

And that makes U.S. officials nervous.

“A superpower arsenal of that size, if it is not contained and managed properly in the midst of the economic and political revolution that’s going on there, has the potential to be the single largest proliferation event in the whole history of nuclear weapons,” warned Ashton B. Carter, assistant secretary of defense in charge of non-proliferation efforts.

“If you consider how hard (Iraqi leader) Saddam Hussein was working to get two kilograms of enriched uranium . . . (in the former Soviet Union) you see hundreds of thousands of kilograms of material--some fabricated into weapons, some just sitting there, some still being made,” he said. “Never before have we had the disintegration of a nuclear power. That is new and uniquely dangerous.”

Already, agents of Iran’s radical Islamic regime have reportedly been sighted in Russia and formerly Soviet Kazakhstan, offering large sums of money for nuclear hardware.

*

And in recent months a chilling new danger has begun to worry U.S. policy-makers: the possibility that Russia’s burgeoning organized-crime mafias could buy nuclear weapons for resale abroad.

“These groups have the resources with which to bribe nuclear-weapons handlers or employees at facilities with weapons-grade nuclear material,” CIA Director R. James Woolsey told a congressional hearing last month. “They also have established smuggling networks that could be used to move such material out of the former Soviet Union.”

No bombs or other warheads are known to have leaked out of the former Soviet Union, although smugglers have succeeded in shipping out fuel rods and low-grade uranium from nuclear power plants.

But senior U.S. officials say it is possible that a nuclear bomb could disappear without anyone noticing because Russia’s control over its huge nuclear inventory is so uncertain.

“There are warheads and (nuclear) material scattered all over Russia, the inventories are not very good, and there are turf fights between agencies over who gets to control it,” said Leonard S. Spector of Washington’s Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Some Russian officials scoff at the Americans’ fears. “It’s absolutely impossible to lose a warhead,” Maj. Gen. Vitaly N. Yakovlev, deputy chief of the Russian Defense Ministry’s nuclear directorate, told the Moscow newspaper Literaturnaya Gazeta.

Yakovlev said that his agency maintains a database that records the location and contents of every nuclear warhead. Personnel have access to warheads only in groups of three or more, he said, apparently to reduce the chances that one or two bad apples could try to steal a weapon.

But other Russians are as concerned as their U.S. counterparts. Sergei P. Bogdanov, a spokesman for the Federal Counterintelligence Service (a successor to the KGB), said he was surprised that more nuclear material had not disappeared.

“When people in our country hear that for three kilograms of (radioactive) mercury you can get $1,000, no one thinks about the danger,” he said. “They only think of how much they can earn.”

The problem, U.S. officials said, is not the warheads on the long-range missiles that were aimed at the United States; those are well accounted for.

Instead, the greater danger comes from thousands of tactical nuclear weapons, from artillery shells to warheads for short-range battlefield missiles, that were amassed in case the superpowers ever went to war in Central Europe.

Under an informal U.S.-Russian agreement, all those weapons are slated for destruction. But for now, they are being warehoused at up to 100 sites in Russia, many temporary storage areas under army control.

The short-range missile warheads would be good candidates for illicit sale to would-be nuclear powers; many were designed for the short-range missiles that Iran, Libya and Syria already possess.

The United States does not know how many of those small nukes Russia has--and never really did, officials said. The official estimate of 19,000 is only a “ballpark figure,” according to one official. Outside experts, such as Bruce Blair of Washington’s Brookings Institution, have said that the tactical nuclear stockpiles could hold as many as 43,000 warheads.

*

In addition, Russia’s civilian Atomic Energy Ministry oversees half a dozen research facilities with substantial amounts of nuclear weapons material.

“The scenario that worries us is this: What if someone in organized crime finds a storage location where the soldiers are not doing well?” one U.S. official asked. A Russian colonel is paid $191 per month; a private makes $16 to $44. “What would inhibit the Russian mafia from offering those guys enough money to hand over a nuclear weapon?”

The United States has offered to help Russia improve its control over nuclear materials with a proposed $30-million program of training and software for inventory systems. But the program has barely gotten off the ground. Only $416,000 has been earmarked for specific projects, and not all of that has been spent.

“The Russians are not very receptive to our proposals in this area,” a U.S. official said. “They are suspicious of our desire to know about these things . . . and, looking at it from their point of view, that’s understandable.

“The problem is that we are relying on the patriotism and ethics of a lot of Russian soldiers and civilians to keep this stuff under control. We can’t count on that forever.”

*

Times reporter Beth Knobel in Moscow and special correspondent Mary Mycio in Kiev contributed to this report.