NUCLEAR DISARRAY

By Bruce W. Nelan

Russian military officers stared wide-eyed at the glowing image on their radar screens: an incoming missile on course to hit Moscow in 15 minutes. They were tracking a rocket about the size of a U.S. submarine-launched Trident that seemed to be streaking in from the Norwegian Sea. There had been no particular tension between Russia and the U.S. on Jan. 25, 1995. Still, the officers knew that if this were a surprise attack, the first American missile to be fired would probably be from a submarine, aimed to detonate over Russia and generate an electromagnetic storm that would fry the country's electronic circuitry. The radar crew flashed a warning of the possible nuclear attack to an underground control center south of Moscow.

Duty officers inside that bunker went by the book, relaying the warning up the line. One buzz went to the three nuclear code briefcases assigned to President Boris Yeltsin and his top two military officials. On each briefcase a small light beside the handle blinked on. The officer carrying Yeltsin's case rushed to the President and flipped it open. On an electronic map inside, they saw a bright dot over the Norwegian Sea. Beneath the map was a row of buttons, offering a menu of attack options on targets in the U.S.

On military bases across Russia, red lights flashed and Klaxons blared, alerting the troops in charge of the country's strategic nuclear weapons to get ready to use them. Yeltsin and his military commanders, linked by phone, waited to hear whether an attack had been confirmed. About 12 minutes after the mystery missile soared onto the radar screens, military analysts could see that it was not heading for Russian territory. It turned out to be a Norwegian scientific rocket sent aloft to observe the aurora borealis. The Norwegians had dutifully notified the Russian embassy in Oslo, but the word was never relayed to the military. "For a while," says Sergei Yushenkov, a member of the Russian parliament's Defense Committee, "the world was on the brink of nuclear war."

It may still be near the brink, despite the end of the cold war and the dismantling of thousands of warheads, because the people and the machines that control Russia's nuclear arsenal are being neglected. Like the rest of the armed forces, the soldiers in the Strategic Nuclear Forces (SNF) are largely unpaid, unfed and unhappy. The delicate computer networks at the heart of the nuclear force are not being maintained properly, and the safeguards that prevent accidental or unauthorized launches are fraying.

Bill Clinton likes to point out that Russian missiles are no longer aimed at targets in the U.S. It is true that both sides agreed in 1994 to switch the missiles away from their cold war assignments, but it isn't true that this step moved the world a safe distance back from Armageddon. The missiles' computer memories retain those targets, and they can be restored very quickly. "It is just a matter of a couple of minutes," says a Defense Ministry official in Moscow. And if a missile is launched without a selected target--even if by accident--it reverts to the original one.

Despite arms-control agreements that have reduced the numbers, Russia still has an estimated 1,300 strategic missiles with more than 6,000 warheads, and they are on hair-trigger alert. The country's retaliatory policy is to launch on warning, meaning its war plans call for the launching of a retaliatory salvo of thermonuclear missiles if Moscow receives confirmed warning that Russia is under attack, but before it has suffered any damage. Moscow has even updated its military doctrine and now claims the right--as the U.S. has done for decades--to be the first to use nukes when it believes it must. "We will choose the means," says Security Council secretary Ivan Rybkin, "including nuclear weapons."

With these kinds of high-risk strategies, a government needs to have the tightest, most reliable command-and-control system that money can buy. That is not what Russia has today, and the Russians admit it. Defense Minister Igor Rodionov says the problem is obvious. The system is built on electronics, which must be carefully maintained and regularly replaced. But last year the forces received, by Rodionov's estimate, only 10.5% of the funds needed to do that. The result, he predicts, is that "we may lose the entire system." The links between radars and headquarters, the computer management of missiles and the physical security of the warheads could all break down. The issue is at the top of the agenda this week when Rodionov meets Secretary of Defense William Cohen at the Pentagon.

For lack of funding, some of the key defense industries are floundering and might not survive. The Impulse complex in St. Petersburg, for example, turns out components for command-and-control systems but has been immobilized by unpaid bills and sporadic strikes. "They have not had a military procurement order in months," says a Moscow expert.

Equipment is vital, but in any military unit the people are equally important, and they are breaking down too. The soldiers of the SNF, members of an elite warrior class, are being reduced to misery and poverty. They are paid very little--$180 a month for a submarine commander--when they are paid at all. Last year some of them, along with their families, threatened to block the Trans-Siberian railway if they were not paid. Others kill themselves; the suicide rate in the SNF is reportedly the highest in the armed forces.

A visit to Krasnie Sosenki, the Little Red Pines, makes it easy to see why the troops are so depressed. This is a military base 190 miles north of Moscow that houses officers of the Strategic Rocket Forces, who command the land-based missiles. Here the nuclear elite lives in row after row of shabby five-story apartment buildings, laundry on the balconies. The officers are bewildered and angry. One major, who has served 24 years in the SRF and will retire in six months, did not see a paycheck for four months. "How would you feel," he asks, "if you served half your life, and on the threshold of retirement they just stop paying you?" His wallet is empty, and he has only enough money to buy two loaves of bread at the private kiosks that now constitute the base's main supply line. On snow-covered Karl Marx Street, a female noncommissioned officer who will give only her first name and patronymic, Galina Ivanovna, snaps, "We're living in poverty. That's all you need to know."

If the troops are that dispirited, what might they do? What might they not? Last week the Federal Security Service officially confirmed that it had arrested a colonel in the SRF who had been collecting classified information on the missile forces and was planning to try to sell it to someone at the U.S. embassy in Moscow. The next such officer might be willing to sell not just secrets but a warhead--or the plutonium to make one. "The missile forces must be fed," says Robert Bykov, a retired colonel of the SRF. "If those who guard Russia's nuclear weapons go hungry, we might face some terrifying consequences."

The potential is there for some form of nukenapping--grabbing weapons for ransom or nuclear blackmail--or sales to rogue states or terrorists, or unauthorized launches by renegade commanders. Some Russians even fret about a nuclear civil war. If a region in Siberia were to declare its independence, a retired senior officer in Moscow speculates, "the entire missile force in the area might cut itself off from the chain of command and control and get reprogrammed to be able to launch at will."

A top-secret CIA study last September, first reported by the Washington Times, rated the likelihood of such a launch as still low but found the Russian control system under such unprecedented stress that some high-level commanders in Moscow were worried about the security of their nuclear weapons. The CIA also reported that the famous code briefcases are not what they seem. They allow the President or the Defense Minister or the Chief of the General Staff to authorize a nuclear attack, but the actual ability to launch missiles lies much further down the line of command, even in regional command posts and submarines, which, says the CIA report, "have the technical ability to launch without authorization by political leaders or the General Staff."

Under these circumstances, uncountable things could go wrong, and the CIA lists three most feared scenarios. First is a political crisis in Moscow that could lead to a military coup or a breakdown in command authority from the top. This could leave elements of the strategic forces to their own devices.

Second is a possible miscalculation of U.S. actions during some kind of crisis. The Russians might wrongly think they were under attack from the West and fire their rockets. This danger has greatly increased because the Russian early-warning system is not what it used to be. It has lost major radar stations in the new nations of Ukraine, Latvia and others. Some of its satellite-tracking stations have gone to Ukraine, Georgia and Kazakhstan. The high command is now partially blind, which increases its apprehensions, produces false alarms and makes good decisions harder.

Third on the CIA's worry list is the possible "involvement of local, nuclear-armed units in separatist movements." The question here is what might have happened if the leaders of Chechnya's rebellion had had access to some nuclear weapons during the time the Russian army was pounding Grozny into rubble.

Such concerns have revived the worldwide call, even from some very senior generals and admirals, to abolish nuclear weapons. But a large part of the risk could be eliminated by the less radical step of "de-alerting" the forces, taking them off their hair-trigger posture. Since there is no political reason to think war is around the corner, why not make it impossible to fire the missiles without a great deal of time-consuming preparation?

Various proposals on how to do that have been put forward, several by Bruce Blair of the Brookings Institution, a leading expert on nuclear weapons. Missile nose cones, he suggests, could be replaced by large, blunt tips, or disabling pins could be inserted into rocket engines. Indeed, warheads could actually be removed from the missiles, under mutual inspection procedures. All of the steps could be reversed, but they would build in a safety valve of time, giving an opportunity to reflect.

These ideas have not caught on. Defense Secretary Cohen ducks the issue. Others, like former Assistant Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter, seem to think de-alerting would distract people from the campaign to abolish the weapons altogether.

The big problem would be selling de-alerting to the Russians. They are more reliant on nuclear weapons than ever because their conventional forces have fallen apart. And the weapons of mass destruction have a weightier meaning and symbolism to Russia today: they are the pillar on which a proud nation rests its claim to superpower status. With their army, navy and air force in disrepair, the Russian leaders are very unlikely to respond with smiles and nods to suggestions that they disable, even temporarily, their terrifying nuclear forces. Besides, no one is trying to persuade them.

--Reported by Brigid O'Hara-Forster/London, Andrew Meier and Yuri Zarakhovich/Moscow and Mark Thompson/Washington

With reporting by BRIGID O''HARA-FORSTER/LONDON, ANDREW MEIER AND YURI ZARAKHOVICH/MOSCOW AND MARK THOMPSON/WASHINGTON