The Dead Hand (24 page)

Andropov died February 9, 1984, and the ailing Chernenko was chosen as his successor. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher flew to Moscow for the funeral, arriving on February 13 in the bitter cold. On the day of the funeral, she met Chernenko for a short, private meeting. He read rapidly from a text, stumbling over his words from time to time. Thatcher recalled that she had been urged to wear fur-lined boots; at the Andropov funeral, guests had to stand for a long period in the cold. The boots had been expensive, she said. “But when I met Mr. Chernenko, the thought crossed my mind that they would probably come in useful again soon.”
³

At seventy-two years old, Chernenko had never been more than a shadow of Brezhnev as his chief of staff and a party apparatchik. Suffering from an advanced stage of emphysema, Chernenko faltered during his televised inaugural speech from a podium atop Lenin’s tomb, running out of breath in the middle of sentences. He was unable to hold a salute to the military parade as it passed before him in Red Square. At one point during Andropov’s funeral, Gromyko turned to Chernenko and instructed him in a whisper—loud enough to be picked up by microphones—“Don’t take off your hat.”
⁴
Two weeks later, in another televised address, Chernenko stumbled, lost his breath, paused for half a minute and, when he resumed, skipped an entire page of his text. Chernenko was a transitional figure, and his colleagues sensed it. “Whom did we acquire in the post of General Secretary?” asked Gorbachev. “Not merely a seriously sick and physically weak person but, in fact, an invalid.
It was common knowledge, and immediately visible with the naked eye. It was impossible to disguise his infirmity and the shortness of breath caused by emphysema.”
⁵

Anatoly Chernyaev, who was then deputy director of the International Department in the Central Committee, recalled that when Chernenko was to meet the king of Spain, aides wrote out his main points on small cards, with no long sentences, so that Chernenko would seem to be talking and not reading. “That was in the beginning,” Chernyaev said. “Later, Chernenko couldn’t even read the notes anymore, but just stumbled through them with no idea what he was saying.”
⁶

What if the ailing Chernenko had to make a decision about nuclear attack? For the Soviet leadership, the ultimate catastrophe would be a bolt-from-the-blue first strike that would destroy the Kremlin in minutes. There was a special underground train out of the Kremlin to the war bunkers—but what if they were facing sudden death, if the missiles were only minutes away, a decapitation? With the leaders gone, who would order retaliation? Who would transmit the orders? How would they communicate to the remote missile command posts and submarines? If decapitation were swift and powerful, perhaps they would not be able to retaliate; and if so, they were vulnerable. Soviet fears of decapitation were real, fed by actions in the United States. The directive signed by President Carter in 1980 for protracted nuclear war, P.D. 59, had deliberately singled out the Soviet leadership as a target. The deployment of Pershing II and ground-launched cruise missiles in late 1983 seemed to further reinforce the threat of weapons that could reach the Soviet Union in a matter of minutes.

In early 1984, just as Chernenko took power, Valery Yarynich, then forty-seven, a colonel in the elite Strategic Rocket Forces, was quietly transferred to a new position as a deputy department chief in the Main Rocket Armaments Directorate. Yarynich was a master of communications channels and methods who had worked for two decades setting up cables, radio systems and satellites which linked the rockets, troops, commanders and the political leaders in Moscow. He had a serious demeanor and a sense of purpose. When there was a break in a vital communications link for the Strategic Rocket Forces, Yarynich was the one they trusted to fix it quickly. He was transferred to a sensitive, ultra-secret new project for decision making and communications in the event of nuclear war.

In the early days of the Soviet nuclear weapons program, communications were primitive. Getting word to the troops—and the missiles—was time-consuming. Yarynich witnessed the cumbersome procedures. Born in 1937 to the family of a Soviet naval officer at Kronshtadt, near Leningrad, Yarynich graduated from the Leningrad Military Academy of Communications in 1959, two years after Sputnik. That December, the Strategic Rocket Forces was established as a separate service, and the giant, cumbersome R-7 liquid-fueled intercontinental missiles were put on combat duty. Khrushchev was boasting that the Soviet Union was turning out missiles like sausages. Yarynich served in the first Soviet division of intercontinental ballistic missiles, at Yurya, north of Kirov. They were just building the rocket base when he arrived, carving it out of the forest. At the end of 1960, Yarynich moved up to the corps headquarters in Kirov, where five new missile divisions were being formed.

At the time, the Soviet general staff transmitted orders to the missile commanders by radio and cable, using code words in a system called “Monolit.” The system relied on special packets prepared in advance and kept under strict control in a safe at the command posts, to be opened in an emergency. Yarynich recalled that during drills, in a decisive moment, an unfortunate duty officer often failed to open the packet fast enough with scissors because his nervous hands were shaking so badly. Precious minutes were wasted. The problem of using scissors was considered serious enough that experts were asked to come up with a new method. “The packet was constructed with a pull-string, on which an operator could tug to immediately open it up,” Yarynich recalled. The whole system was slow and cumbersome. Monolit had another, more serious shortcoming. The orders could not be recalled—there was no way to cancel.
⁷

In late October 1962, during the Cuban missile crisis, Yarynich was sent as a communications officer to supervise at a rocket division near Nizhny Tagil, 860 miles east of Moscow in Siberia. At the peak of the confrontation, the crews received an unmistakable signal through the Monolit system. The code word was “BRONTOZAVR.” The word was a signal: switch the command system from peacetime to combat alert status. A telegraph typed it out, and Yarynich took the paper tape from one
of the young women who served as operators. The word was unmistakable, he remembered. “Oh God,” he said. “BRONTOZAVR!”

“Never before had we sent it out,” he recalled. “It was a signal to cut open the packages.”

Inside the packages were new call signals and frequencies for radio communications in the event of nuclear war. “It was a wrong idea in my view, because to change frequencies and call signals when the war is breaking out meant to mess everything up,” Yarynich said. “Still, that was the procedure. So, our job was to introduce this new radio information immediately, everywhere, on receiving the order.”

Yarynich recognized immediately the message was not a drill. He handed the tape to a colonel on duty. “You understand?” Yarynich asked. The man was shaking. They had never received this command, even during exercises. The missiles at Nizhny Tagil were not yet fueled, so they would not be launched soon, yet the switch to combat alert was met with dread. “It was strangely quiet,” Yarynich recalled. “I cannot forget the mixture of nervousness, surprise and pain on the faces of each operator, without exception—officers, enlisted men, women telephone operators.” In the end, the Cuban crisis was defused, and in Nizhny Tagil, the “BRONTOZAVR” alert expired. But the problem of command and control of nuclear weapons grew more intense as the Soviet leaders threw their resources into building a new generation of missiles, which required new methods of control—the paper packets were obsolete.

The first attempt to automate the command and control system was ready by 1967. It was called “Signal,” and it could transmit thirteen fixed commands from headquarters to the troops, such as telling them to escalate to a higher readiness. The new system could also transmit a cancel order. While a vast improvement over the paper packets, the Signal system did not command the weapons, but rather sent orders to the troops, and they in turn had to operate the weapons. This was still cumbersome and time-consuming. As pressure increased for more speed and streamlining, a second stage of automation was developed in the mid-1970s, known as “Signal-M.” It reached all the way from the top decision-makers to the lowest level in the field. The installation of the new, faster
Signal-M came as the Soviet Union put on duty the new generation of missiles, including the giant SS-18. This was the first time the Soviet nuclear command and control featured a remote-control button that could be pushed to launch.
⁸

In the Soviet system of the 1970s, the General Staff oversaw the weapons at sea and on bombers, while the Strategic Rocket Forces supervised land-based missiles. At the time, Soviet leaders sitting in the Kremlin did not have a nuclear “football” carried around everywhere they went. The launch apparatus remained with the military branches. The political leaders shared control with the generals.

Yarynich, who worked on Signal-M, often pondered the profound psychological calculus of nuclear weapons command and control. How would real people behave when they had to press the button? How would they make a decision about whether to inflict utter devastation in just minutes? Yarynich recalled another episode he experienced in the mid-1970s when he was working on command and control systems for nuclear weapons. A malfunction occurred in the alert system. An erroneous message was automatically transmitted from the top down to the command posts of all rocket divisions: go one step to a higher alert. Most duty officers in the command posts failed to obey. “People didn’t believe it,” Yarynich said. “We were not at war.” Instead of summoning troops from their barracks to combat sites, they began telephoning their superiors to find out if the message was genuine. Only a lone duty officer, a lieutenant colonel, actually put his unit on alert. The incident revealed a great deal of reluctance in the rocket forces to push any buttons. The duty officers knew, Yarynich said, that “one could not act blindly.”

In order to give a Soviet leader additional precious minutes to make a launch decision, the military strove to build super-fast communications to carry messages from the headquarters right to the missiles themselves. In 1985, Signal-M was upgraded to a computerized system known as Signal-A, which allowed missiles in remote silos to be retargeted directly by the Strategic Rocket Forces main staff. Several different flight plans were stored at the launcher and could be chosen remotely. It would take only ten or fifteen seconds to load a flight plan.
⁹
The significance of this was that Soviet authorities would gain speed and bypass uncertainty—the human kind—on the ground. They would skip over any troops who, lacking discipline and burning with curiosity, might be tempted to pick
up the phone to ask what was going on. The military designers were being pushed all the time to make the launch system as fast as possible. “The designers said we need it—now it is five minutes, then it will be three, and soon it will be 20 seconds,” Yarynich recalled.

In addition to speed, the designers wanted fail-safe, ironclad security. They knew the flaws of Soviet industry, and the potential for error. Yarynich said they devoted just as much effort to guarding against failure or cheating as they did to gaining speed; they built in rigid procedures, constantly checking for anomalies, up and down the chain.

In 1985, the Soviet designers finished work on a nuclear “football,” in this case a briefcase known as the
Cheget
. Three were prepared: to accompany the general secretary of the party, the defense minister and chief of the General Staff. However, the
Cheget
was for information only; it could not be used to launch, and did not have a button to press. The officer carrying the
Cheget
would plug into a wider communications network, known as
Kavkaz
, designed just for the national leadership. Then the general secretary could give permission to the military, also plugged into
Kavkaz
, to launch. This “permission command” would then be transformed into a “direct command” by the General Staff. The direct commands were authenticated, and if proven correct, would become “launch commands” sent to the missiles.

Over the years, as Yarynich worked to build and strengthen these communications systems, he came to see the hair trigger as a dead end, that neither side could gain an edge by just shaving minutes off the decision process. But in 1984, he was doing his job, caught up in the quest for speed.

In the event of nuclear explosions, communications links would be vulnerable to disruption, especially between the headquarters and the missile silo. The Soviet military designers wanted to eliminate that uncertainty. All the previous experience had shown that the traditional cables, radio and satellite channels they had built to carry the data might be suddenly incinerated. They also feared the electromagnetic pulse that would precede a nuclear attack could wipe out all standard communications equipment. Some other means to control the missiles in time of war had to be found.