The Dead Hand (80 page)

I am very much in debt to Ksenia Kostrova, who assisted with the papers of her grandfather, Vitaly Katayev. After the Soviet collapse, Katayev tried to adapt, establishing a private company. He was not very
successful, but he continued to dream. One of his more spectacular ideas was to use surplus intercontinental ballistic missles to assist stranded sailors, fishermen or mountain climbers. The missiles would release a rescue package tethered to a parachute. Katayev drew charts and trajectories for his ambitious plan, which he called “Project Vita.” His dream was never realized. Katayev passed away in 2001. His papers are deposited at the Hoover Institution Library and Archives, Stanford University.

Masha Lipman has long been my guiding light on Russia and offered valuable comments on the manuscript. My thanks also go to Irina Makarova, Vladimir Alexandrov and Sergei Belyakov.

At the
Washington Post
, I am deeply indebted to Katharine Graham and Donald Graham for their trust. They built a newsroom of creativity and dynamism under the leadership of Benjamin C. Bradlee and Leonard Downie Jr. Four gifted colleagues at the
Post
provided years of inspiration as well as valuable comments on the book: Rick Atkinson, Steve Coll, Michael Dobbs and Glenn Frankel. In addition, Robert G. Kaiser and Philip Bennett were unceasing in their friendship and encouragement, for this project and many others, over all the years we worked together.

Lou Cannon was my partner and tutor in Reagan’s time. My thanks also go to
Post
colleagues Laura Blumenfeld, Jackson Diehl, David Finkel, Peter Finn, Mary Lou Foy, Michael Getler, Jim Hoagland, Don Oberdorfer, Keith Richburg, Julie Tate, Gene Thorp, Joby Warrick and Scott Wilson. For support in a thousand ways, I am indebted to Rebekah Davis. My thanks also to Katja Hom, Kate Agnew and Terissa Schor.

Robert Monroe shared far more about chemical demilitarization than I could ever absorb, and I am deeply grateful for our long conversations. For research, my thanks to Alex Remington, Josh Zumbrun, Robert Thomason and Anna Masterova. Maryanne Warrick and Abigail Crim transcribed interviews.

An important contribution came from Thomas S. Blanton and the National Security Archive in Washington, which provided key historical documents and analysis. I am also grateful to Anne Hessing Cahn for access to her collection of papers at the archive.

I have been enriched by years of guidance and teaching by Archie Brown at St. Antony’s College, Oxford University.

Valuable contributions were also made by Ken Alibek, Martin Anderson,
James A. Baker III, Rodric Braithwaite, Matthew Bunn, Joseph Cirincione, Thomas C. Cochran, Dick Combs, Igor Domaradsky, Sidney Drell, Erik Engling, Kenneth J. Fairfax, Andy Fisher, Chrystia Freeland, Oleg Gordievsky, Tatiana Gremyakova, Jeanne Guillemin, Cathy Gwin, Josh Handler, Anne M. Harrington, Laura Holgate, Richard Lugar, Matthew Meselson, Vil Mirzayanov, Kenneth A. Myers III, Sam Nunn, Vladimir Orlov, Sergei Popov, Theodore A. Postol, Amy Smithson, Margaret Tutwiler, Yevgeny Velikhov, Frank von Hippel and Lawrence Wright.

I am grateful for a media fellowship at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, in 2004, which allowed me time for research. At the Hoover Library and Archives, I was assisted with great professionalism by Carol Leadenham, Lara Soroka, Heather Wagner and Brad Bauer.

At the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, Kings College, London, my thanks to Caroline Lam and Katharine Higgon, and at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, my gratitude to Lisa Jones. I also profited from research at the British National Archives at Kew, and the U.S. National Archives at College Park, Maryland.

To Esther Newberg, my deepest appreciation for unflagging commitment and enthusiasm. At Doubleday, Bill Thomas gave the project a life. From our first conversations, Kristine Puopolo provided wise counsel and was a thoughtful, inspiring editor. And my thanks also to Stephanie Bowen.

To my wife, Carole, who read the entire manuscript many times over, to my sons, Daniel and Benjamin, and to my parents, to whom this book is dedicated, I express profound appreciation for loving support on the long and winding road.

1
Margarita Ivanovna Ilyenko, interview, Nov. 30, 1998. Roza Gaziyeva is quoted by Sergei Parfenov in
Rodina
, no. 5, Oct. 24, 1990.

2
Matthew Meselson, Jeanne Guillemin, Martin Hugh-Jones, Alexander Langmuir, Ilona Popova, Alexis Shelokov, Olga Yampolskaya, “The Sverdlovsk Anthrax Outbreak of 1979,”
Science
, 1994, vol. 266, pp. 1202-1208; Jeanne Guillemin,
Anthrax: The Investigation of a Deadly Outbreak
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Ken Alibek, with Stephen Handelman,
Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World—Told from Inside by the Man Who Ran It
(New York: Random House, 1999), Ch. 7.

3
Theodore J. Cieslak and Edward M. Eitzen Jr., “Clinical and Epidemiologic Principles of Anthrax,” in
Emerging Infectious Diseases
, vol. 5, no. 4, July–Aug. 1999, p. 552.

4
Alibek was told the accident resulted from failure to replace a filter, but this account has never been confirmed. Alibek, pp. 73–74. Alibek said the release occurred on Friday, March 30. Given wind patterns, Monday April 2 seems more likely. Alibek told the author Monday was possible.

5
The children may have been indoors, in schools, or had a different immune system reaction, or been less susceptible to airborne anthrax than adults.

6
Lev M. Grinberg and Faina A. Abramova, interviews, Nov. 30, 1998. Abramova’s account also appeared in
Rodina
.

7
Guillemin, p. 14.

8
Vladlen Krayev, interview, Nov. 1998. It was later realized the incubation period could be much longer.

9
Some months after the epidemic, the KGB searched Hospital No. 40 for materials. Abramova hid unlabeled samples on a high shelf. The KGB did not find them.

10
Petrov interviews, January 1999; Jan. 22, 2006, May 29, 2007.

11
Pavel Podvig, “History and the Current Status of the Russian Early Warning System,”
Science and Global Security
, October 2002, pp. 21–60.

12
Podvig, p. 31.

1
Bernard Brodie, ed.,
The Absolute Weapon: Atomic Power and the World Order
(New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1946).

2
Albert Carnesale, Paul Doty, Stanley Hoffmann, Samuel P. Huntington, Joseph S. Nye Jr., and Scott D. Sagan,
Living with Nuclear Weapons
(New York: Bantam Books, 1983), pp. 31–32.

3
Admiral G. P. Nanos, “Strategic Systems Update,”
Submarine Review
, April 1997, pp. 12–17. Nanos quoted another admiral but affirmed this was a “reasonable, unclassified scale.” See “The Capabilities of Trident Against Russian Silo-based Missiles: Implications for START III and Beyond,” George N. Lewis, Theodore A. Postol, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Feb. 2–6, 1998.

4
David Alan Rosenberg, “The Origins of Overkill, Nuclear Weapons and American Strategy, 1945–1960,” in
Strategy and Nuclear Deterrence
, Princeton University Press, 1984, pp. 113–181. Also see William Burr, ed., “The Creation of SIOP-62: More Evidence on the Origins of Overkill,” EBB No. 130, doc. 23, “Note by the Secretaries to the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Strategic Target Planning,” Jan. 27, 1961.

5
McGeorge Bundy,
Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty
Years
(New York: Random House, 1988), p. 354.

6
“History of the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff: Preparation of SIOP-63,” January 1964. “New Evidence on the Origins of Overkill,” TNSA EBB No. 236, doc. 2. Also see McNamara commencement address at the University of Michigan, June 16. McNamara may have been influenced by the fact that, through improved satellite intelligence, the United States had obtained the first comprehensive map of the Soviet missile bases, submarine ports, air defense sites and other military installations. Desmond Ball and Jeffery Richelson, eds.,
Strategic Nuclear Targeting
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 65. Also see Alfred Goldberg, “A Brief Survey of the Evolution of Ideas about Counterforce,” Rand Corp., Memorandum RM-5431-PR, October 1957, rev. March 1981, p. 9. DNSA, No. NH00041.

7
Alain C. Enthoven and K. Wayne Smith,
How Much Is Enough?: Shaping the Defense
Program, 1961–1969
(New York: Harper & Row, 1971), rev. ed. (Santa Monica: RAND Corp., 2005), pp. 67 and 207.

8
The acronym was advanced by Donald G. Brennan of the Hudson Institute to capture what he thought was the folly of the idea of MAD. Brennan was an advocate of missile defense and finding a way out of mutual vulnerability. See “Strategic Alternatives,”
New York Times
, May 24, 1971, p. 31, and May 25, 1971, p. 39.

9
Arnold L. Horelick and Myron Rush, “Deception in Soviet Strategic Missile Claims, 1957–1962,” RAND Corp., May 1963. DNSA NH00762.

10
An exception to this was Europe, where the Soviets knew that tactical nuclear strikes were possible early in any war, and they planned for preemptive nuclear attack. See Vojtech Mastny and Malcolm Byrne, eds.,
A Cardboard Castle: An Inside
History of the Warsaw Pact, 1955–1991
(Budapest: Central European University Press, 2005), pp. 406–412.

11
John Hines, Ellis M. Mishulovich, John F. Shull,
Soviet Intentions 1965–1985
, BDM Federal Inc., for Office of Secretary of Defense, Sept. 22, 1995, offers a good overview of Soviet thinking based on interviews with Soviet participants. See Vol. I,
An Analytical Comparison of U.S.-Soviet Assessments During the Cold War
. Also see Aleksander Savelyev and Nikolay Detinov,
The Big Five: Arms Control Decision-making in the Soviet Union
(Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1995), pp. 1–13.

12
The end result of the competition was a turn toward hardened silos and reliance on a retaliatory posture, which Keldysh favored. Hines, Vol. II, p. 85; Savelyev, pp. 18–19; Vitaly Katayev, unpublished memoir,
Some Facts from History and Geometry
, author’s possession; Pavel Podvig, communication with author, March 27, 2009; and Podvig, ed.,
Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001).

13
The plan still incorporated the counterforce idea. Task Alpha would use 58 percent of the arsenal to hit Soviet forces. By contrast, task Charlie—cities and industrial targets—was to use only about 11 percent of the weapons. See “The Nixon Administration, the SIOP, and the Search for Limited Nuclear Options, 1969—1974,” TNSA EBB No. 173, doc. 3.

14
For Kissinger on Nixon, see TNSA EBB 173, doc. 22. H. R. Haldeman,
The Haldeman Diaries
(New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1994), p. 55. Kissinger pushed for the creation of limited nuclear war options, saying that threats of a massive attack were just not credible. On January 17, 1974, Nixon signed National Security Decision Memorandum 242, a top-secret directive that laid out a desire for a “wide range” of limited nuclear war attack options. The directive was the result of Kissinger’s prodding. See TNSA EBB 173 and Burr, “The Nixon Administration, the ‘Horror Strategy,’ and the Search for Limited Nuclear Options, 1969–1972,”
Journal of Cold War Studies
, vol. 7, no. 3, Summer 2005, pp. 34–78.

15
Hines, vol. II, p. 27.

16
The treaty limited each side to two sites with one hundred launchers. This was cut in 1974 to one site each. The United States built one around North Dakota missile fields, but later dismantled it. The Soviet Union built one around Moscow.

17
Lawrence Freedman,
The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981), p. 363. Kissinger press conference, July 3, 1974.

18
Nitze, “Assuring Strategic Stability in an Era of Détente,”
Foreign Affairs
, January 1976, vol. 54, no. 2.

19
Hines asked Soviet participants about key conclusions in the Team A-Team B experiment. While he found support for a Soviet desire for superiority, he also found U.S. assessments had overstated Soviet intentions as aggressive. Hines, pp. 68–71. For the Team B report, see “Intelligence Community Experiment in Competitive Analysis: Soviet Strategic Objectives, An Alternative View: Report of Team ‘B,’” December 1976, DNSA SE00501. Pipes later claimed Team B’s conclusions were based on a deeper insight into Russian history and mind-set. See Richard Pipes,
VIXI: Memoirs of a Non-Belonger
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 137. For Team A, see “Soviet Forces for Strategic Nuclear Conflict through the Mid-1980s,” NIE 11-3/8-76, Dec. 21, 1976, Vol. 1, Key Judgments and Summary, p. 3. Also see Anne Hessing Cahn,
Killing Détente
(University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998); and Cahn, “Team B: The Trillion Dollar Experiment,”
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
, April 1993, vol. 49, no. 3, pp. 22–27. For evidence Team B erred, see Raymond L. Garthoff, “Estimating Soviet Military Intentions and Capabilities,” Ch. 5 in Gerald K. Haines and Robert E. Leggett, eds.,
Watching the Bear: Essays on CIA’s Analysis of the Soviet Union
(Washington, D.C.: Center for the Study of Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency, 2003). Through the late 1970s and early 1980s, many hawks warned about the “window of vulnerability” for American land-based missiles. This argument, made by Nitze, Pipes and eventually Reagan, claimed that the larger number of Soviet missiles could wipe out the entire one thousand U.S. Minuteman missile force and fifty-four Titan missiles. But the SS-18s may have been less accurate than the United States thought. For example, NIE 11-3/8-78 estimated that had the Soviet Union initiated an attack on American missile silos in 1978, only about six hundred U.S. silo-based missiles would survive a one-on-one Soviet missile attack, and no more than about four hundred would survive a two-on-one strike. However, using flight test data from Katayev, Pavel Podvig estimated that 890 of the 1,054 U.S. silo-based missiles would have survived a one-on-one attack and 800 would have survived an attack in which each silo is targeted by two Soviet warheads. Podvig, “The Window of Vulnerability that Wasn’t: Soviet Military Buildup in the 1970s,”
International Security
, Vol. 3, No. 1, Summer, 2008. Bush, then CIA director, later told Congress the two teams reached the following conclusions: “1. Team A’s conclusions lead to estimates of ICBM accuracy which do not imply a severe threat to Minuteman until about 1980. 2. The Team B estimates of accuracy imply that such a threat could materialize much sooner.” See “DCI Congressional Briefing,” January 1977, Anne Cahn collection, TNSA. After the exercise was over, Team A pointed out that the Soviets lagged way behind the United States in theory, laboratory instrument quality and mass production of precision instruments such as guidance equipment needed for missile accuracy. See “Summary of Intelligence Community (‘A Team’) Briefing to PFIAB on Soviet ICBM Accuracy,” Cahn collection, TNSA. The document is undated but the briefing was in December 1976. Hines noted U.S. and Soviet experts used different assumptions about nuclear blast to judge whether missile silos were vulnerable. Hines, p. 70. Missile accuracy is measured by “circular error probability,” or CEP—the radius of a circle in which half the warheads fall. When the Soviets began deploying the first missiles with MIRVs in 1974, the U.S. intelligence consensus was they did not have a CEP better than 470 meters. These estimates were challenged by Team B, which suggested that Soviet missiles could become even more accurate (a smaller CEP). But according to Soviet flight test data, the CEP of the first-generation SS-18 was 700 meters; the SS-17 was 700 meters, and the SS-19 was 650 meters. The next generation of missiles, coming on line in the 1980s, were improved. The author is indebted to Pavel Podvig for these conclusions, based on Katayev, Hoover.