War Scare.

• Author: Balir, Bruce

Peter Pry (Atlanta: Turner Publishing). See editor's note below.

Graham T. Allison, Owen R. Cote, Jr., Richard A. Falkenrath, and Steven E. Miller (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 295 pp., $16.

Andrew and Leslie Cockburn (New York: Anchor Doubleday, 1997), 288 pp., $23.95.

Whereas the principal aim of American nuclear policy during the Cold War was to deter a strong and aggressive Soviet Union, the nuclear risks we face today stem from Russian weakness. Russia's conventional forces have declined to the point that they can no longer protect Russian territory, and into this vacuum has rushed a growing reliance on nuclear weapons - including the prospect of their first use early in any serious conventional conflict. To make matters worse, the nuclear forces themselves have become vulnerable. Budget shortages prevent Russia from dispersing its weapons into the sanctuaries of the oceans and forests, to the point that, in their present configuration, its strategic forces could not ride out a U.S. attack. Consequently, Russia today faces far stronger pressures to "use or lose" its nuclear arsenal than at any time since the early 1960s.

While Russia relies more on nuclear weapons and on launching them on warning, its nuclear control regime is steadily deteriorating in physical, organizational, and human terms. Soviet designers built an impressive command system to ensure strict central control over nuclear weapons - a core value of Soviet political and military culture - but they understandably overlooked a host of dangers that developed after the Soviet empire dissolved. The list is long: coups, rebellions, secession, severe civil-military tensions, huge cuts in defense spending, dire working and living conditions even for elite nuclear units, operational atrophy and declining proficiency in matters of operational safety, widespread corruption, and pervasive demoralization. All the trends pertinent to the functioning of Russia's nuclear command and early warning system are negative, casting strong doubt on its ability to endure the stress and strain indefinitely. Russian nuclear forces are becoming more susceptible to accidental, unauthorized, or mistaken launch. This situation is worrisome enough even under normal conditions, and could become extremely dangerous if the Russian command system should come under heavy pressure during an internal or international crisis.

This is my view of the present state of affairs, and Peter Pry shares it. But he stretches the envelope too far, and thereby exposes this view to caricature and ridicule. He claims that practically every major and minor domestic and international crisis in Russia during the 1990s brought the world to the brink of Armageddon. Thus Pry argues that during the August 1991 coup, the Russian defense minister "almost certainly thought the coup, as an act of self-decapitation, would tempt the United States to consider a nuclear surprise attack." Pry believes the Soviets raised their nuclear alert level during the coup in order to beat the Americans to the punch if necessary. His interpretation of this episode, as with numerous other alleged nuclear "close calls", solidifies into the bald-faced assertion that "Soviet strategic nuclear forces had nearly launched a preemptive strike that would have taken the United States completely by surprise."

A similar interpretation is offered for the parliamentary crisis of fall 1993, pitting Boris Yeltsin against Alexander Rutskoy in mortal political combat. Once again top defense officials and the General Staff allegedly feared that the United States would seize upon the internal crisis as "an opportunity for launching a surprise attack." Pry details a Russian nuclear exercise conducted during the internal crisis, citing it as evidence that "the military girded for a possible U.S. surprise nuclear attack during the long anticipated showdown between Yeltsin and Rutskoy." By "girding" Pry means that the Russian General Staff was seriously ready to unleash a massive pre-emptive Salvo of nuclear missiles against the United States. He also finds ample evidence of Russian readiness to fire a nuclear weapon at a U.S. radar installation in Turkey if Turkey had directly entered the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

This litany of "war scares" - stretching from the early 1980s through the 1995 nuclear false alarm triggered by Norway's launching of a scientific rocket - indicates to Pry that the Russian military's paranoia about a sudden U.S. nuclear strike, combined with the country's internal turmoil, has created a real nuclear risk about which we (himself apart) remain totally ignorant. Russia could easily miscalculate U.S. nuclear intentions and mount a nuclear attack, he says, "for no good reason." This brief is sometimes persuasive, particularly in the case...