The Impulse walkout was the latest in a string of nightmarish episodes involving Russia’s decaying arsenal. More than ever, the nuclear priesthood in the West has concerns about just how much control Russia has over its nuclear weapons. Since 1991, intelligence agencies say, there have been several serious attempts to smuggle small amounts of plutonium out of the former Soviet Union. In 1995 the Russian strategic command believed for about 15 minutes that the test launch of an atmospheric-research rocket from the coast of Norway was a pre-emptive nuclear strike-and alerted Boris Yeltsin that he might have to authorize a counterstrike. And last month Western intelligence reports suggested that, thanks to a malfunction in Russia’s command and control apparatus, a preliminary “prepare to launch” signal had more than once gone down the line to Russia’s strategic rocket forces- for no apparent reason.
Now, in response to alarm in the West, the Russians are trying to allay some of the world’s more urgent fears. Recently, in two exclusive interviews with NEWSWEEK (the first in which they have ever discussed Russian command and control in detail with a foreign journalist), the directors of the Impulse lab flatly denied the reports of dangerous malfunctions in the system they designed. “I have worked here since July of 1980, and I never heard ofanything like this,” says Boris G. Mikhailov, Impulse’s general director.
For any nuclear power, command and control systems comprise the men and machines that effectively become the arsenal’s brain and vocal cords. When news of the strike at Impulse trickled out in Feb-mary, alarms peaked–both in Moscow and in Washington. The Russian government finally paid its arrears, and the roughly 900 workers returned to their jobs after five days. But in Washington the lingering question was obvious: if working conditions were so bad that the engineers at Impulse were walking out, what condition could the system they are charged to maintain possibly be in? Soon after, the then defense minister, Igor Rodionov, provided his own answer. To the fury of his top commanders in Moscow, he said publicly that it wasn’t at all clear whether Russia could guarantee the security of its nuclear arsenal.
Boris Mikhailov, the general director of Impulse, and his chief system designer, Vladimir Petukhov, acknowledge that the Russian command and control system is in dire need of an overhaul. And they admit that such an overhaul cannot be done now bemuse of a lack of funds. But the Impulse directors also emphatically insist that there is no risk-none-of an accidental launch. “The strategic missile command and control systems cannot be the muse of a nuclear accident,” Mikhailov says. There are still elaborate, redundant safeguards built into the system. “Some of its points,” he adds defiantly, “[remain] better than those of similar U.S. systems.”
Despite Mikhailov’s denials, sources in both Russia and the United States insist that the reports of the command and control systems’ malfunctions are accurate. The Russians and their American colleagues may soon get a chance to talk about the discrepancy in these accounts. Under the auspices of the Draper Laboratory, a defense-related research facility, and the Brookings Institution, Mikhailov, Petukhov and other Russian military and government officials have been invited to the United States for what would be a quietly historic conference in August. The topic: how the two sides might reduce the threat of the post-cold-war world’s worst nightmare, a nuclear accident. The Russian command and control chiefs have never met their American colleagues. There might never be a better time.
