In the shocking aftermath of the attacks on New York and Washington, even as we grapple
with the war on terrorism, the nuclear nightmare is stirring once again.
Some experts say the risk of an accidental launch of a nuclear missile may be even higher
today than in the Cold War.
For more than 50 years, the security of the world depended on a hair-triggered balance
of terror between the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union.
Now, both Russia and the U.S. appear to be united in the war against terrorism, but still
there are dangers and disagreements.
President Bush remains committed to shielding the United States under a national missile
defense, which President Vladimir Putin has always insisted could set off a new spiral
of the arms race.
Russia's 6,000 warheads are aging and unreliable.
Her failing early warning systems could plunge the world into doomsday by accident, panicking
commanders of her cash-starved and demoralized armies could launch a desperate first strike.
Tonight, for the first time on television, NOVA penetrates Russia's largest missile base
and the inner sanctum of its command and control center.
Vladimir Posner, a leading Russian journalist raised in America and a Kremlin insider for
decades, presents an intimate portrait of Russia's rocket men and raises provocative
and unsettling questions.
How do Russians view the uncertain new era of nuclear defense?
Who are the men who hold the keys that could unleash your missiles?
And could it be, as some maintain, that the world is at greater risk of nuclear obliteration
now than at any time during the Cold War?
Major funding for NOVA is provided by
The Park Foundation
Dedicated to education and quality television.
This program is funded in part by The Northwestern Mutual Foundation.
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Western Mutual Financial Network.
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It's given us the framework
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Thank you.
Ten years after the end of the Cold War
and ten years after the downfall of the Soviet Union,
Moscow's military museum preserves what one might call
the relics of the country's former might.
The country's military is very low in morale
and even lower in money.
But the strategic nuclear forces are anything but museum pieces.
And thousands of missiles are still ready and waiting.
Russia's nuclear missiles are deployed at some 20 sites
scattered across the country's vast spaces.
Until today, the missile bases have been highly secret,
sealed off from outsiders.
But NOVA has gained access to Russia's largest missile base,
the heart of the nation's nuclear force.
This is the township of Svetli.
In Russian it means bright.
Situated some 500 miles southeast of Moscow,
Svetli was built 25 years ago
and ever since then has been the country's
number one strategic nuclear missile base.
Over that past quarter of a century,
there have been stupendous changes in Russia, but not here.
As always, twice a week a replacement squad of missileers,
in Russian called Raketchiki,
heads out to 20 remote launch control centers.
From underground bunkers,
they will command 200 missiles buried in silos.
This is the hidden world of the Raketchiki,
the underground tunnels leading to the missile launch centers.
For decades, Russia's missileers have watched over the nation's
nuclear arsenal, ceaselessly checking the readiness
of the missiles under their control.
And every time they go on duty,
they await the ultimate order to turn the keys
and launch nuclear devastation.
This is the nuclear punch of Russia's biggest missile base,
the Topol-M.
A squadron of 30 Topol-M's is based around Svetli.
Designed to be fired from either a mobile launcher or a silo,
the Topol has a range of over 6,000 miles
and the destructive power of 35 Hiroshima bombs.
Incidentally, Topol means poplar tree in Russian.
Heaven forbid having to rest in its shade.
22-year-old Lieutenant Yevgeny Pavlov is an extremely bright
and likable young man who could have chosen a much more
financially rewarding career than that of Missilea.
To join the Raketchiki, he left behind a passion for action sports
and a girlfriend.
My girlfriend, my mother wanted that I will become a doctor,
but I'll say never and my dreams at school was to become a Russian officer
and that's why now I'm a Russian officer.
Once upon a time, Russians enlisted in the armed forces
because of the advantages offered over civilian life.
Higher pay, more available homes, good school and good hospital facilities
and of course the status, the respect.
That is no longer the case for all of the Army,
with one exception, the strategic missile forces.
In a missile launch simulator on the base,
Colonel Yuri Petrovsky is training Lieutenant Pavlov
and other young Raketchiki.
Colonel Petrovsky arrived here when Lieutenant Pavlov was born 22 years ago.
Then it seemed that nuclear war was just around the corner
and the enemy was at the gates.
At that time the ideology that was fed to us,
you could say it shaped my view of the world,
that the enemy is across the sea.
Now I understand there is no enemy as such,
but in my old brain cells maybe some of that remains.
Colonel Petrovsky and his wife Natalia,
a teacher at one of the local schools,
have recently moved into a bigger apartment on the base.
Their daughter and her husband often come to visit them
from the nearby city of Saratov where they are studying.
Both the Colonel and his wife are staunch supporters of life on the base.
Life here in the town is unique, odd.
It's also cheerful, interesting and unusual.
I would say that things are more orderly here than in a big city.
It's better for children.
In big cities they can fall in with bad company, there are drugs.
Here we don't have things like that.
And what do we live for?
We live for our children, for the family.
Just outside Svetli base lies the village of Tachishchevo.
It's the same population as Svetli, but that's all they have in common.
There are few jobs here and little money.
Tachishchevo is what the reality of post-communist Russia looks like,
a country where economic woes and social disintegration
have slashed the average male life expectancy to just 59 years.
Within the gates of Svetli base the world is very different.
This is more than just a military base.
It's a town, a town of 20,000 complete with three public schools,
sports facilities, a cultural center, a hospital.
It is a closed town.
It's not open to anyone.
It's off limits for those who don't live here, and it is privileged.
The registration of new babies on the base is a special occasion.
The champagne, music and dancing are just some of the signs
that life here is very different.
The schools would make Moscow envious.
The kids seem confident, happy and secure.
But while life on the base is certainly better than in most of Russia,
by Western standards it would have to be called a hard
and often bleak existence.
Let me say that a colonel who is responsible for warheads
equal to all nuclear potential of Great Britain,
he receives less than $60 a month.
But believe me that two years ago the situation was even worse.
They did not receive even this small salary.
Even in Russia it's not a big money.
And a few years ago Russian officers were permitted to have a few days
on leave in order to raise money as a gypsy cab drivers, for instance.
I don't know why, but they have their own ideology.
And I asked this question to myself a lot of times,
why people are serving in such difficult conditions,
but they are serving and they are thinking about the defense of their motherland.
And it looks rather interesting in Russia where from time to time
you think that no one believes in anything.
The continuing faith of the people stationed here at Russia's biggest missile base
has to do in part with the traditional privileges
which almost always underlie traditional loyalties.
But for Russia's elite missileers Svetli offers something more.
The biggest part of funding is located there.
You can see the best barrack rooms, the best recreation centers,
and people there are very enthusiastic
because they are working with the newest missile system in Russia, Topol-M.
And this experience will play a crucial role in their future career.
General Yuri Kavelin is the base commander.
He was a construction worker, then joined the army
and progressed through the ranks of these strategic missile forces.
He now commands 6,000 Raketschiki and 2,500 military support forces.
He knows exactly how things stand with the troubled Russian military,
but he has no doubt about the morale of the Raketschiki.
The missile forces are a special world, a special world.
It's a world which, from the creation of the missile forces,
was based on the best traditions of the Russian army and the best officers.
At the beginning we had tank, navy and air force officers,
the best officers of the Russian army, and we continue this tradition until today.
My father used to say, someone always has to start the process of changing things.
When we arrived at military college,
our commanding officers started to train us as the people who have to show the world a new army.
I think our generation is going to change the army
so that it will be respected again as it was in the past.
Russia's missiles are test-fired several times a year to check their readiness.
In spite of today's problems, we have managed to preserve our stability, flexibility and war readiness.
However, there is a problem of weapons aging fast.
The aging of our missiles demands constant attention.
Russia's maintenance crews are fighting to keep their missiles in service.
Russia's weapons are often simpler and less prone to break down than Western armaments,
like the Kalashnikov submachine gun, which functions in any conditions.
But a nuclear missile is not a Kalashnikov, and the effects of aging can be disturbing.
Right now we have about 6,000 strategic nuclear warheads ready to go,
but it's obvious that in the coming years the number is going to decrease
because a lot of the missiles that are today in operation are old ones,
going up to about more than 20 years old, sitting in silence for more than 20 years,
and soon they'll have to be scrapped.
It's more or less clear that something is going on within these missiles
which serves 20 or even more years.
Fortunately, until now we have no incidents and accidents with these missiles,
but God knows what can happen in the nearest future.
I think that given the terrible situation with the Russian economy
and terrible conditions with Russian military, it's a miracle that nothing happened
during the last 10 years after the Soviet collapse.
However, unfortunately, it shouldn't be considered as a precedent that nothing happened in the future.
The problems of Russia's aging missiles come to a focus here,
in the command center of these strategic missile forces just outside Moscow.
I met the commander-in-chief, 4-star general Vladimir Yakovlev.
This is how it is.
The ability of the means we control allows us to see any point on the globe,
if necessary.
Despite general Yakovlev's confidence, all the evidence suggests
that Russia's ability to monitor the planet from space is steadily deteriorating.
On at least two occasions, false alarms brought the Russians to within minutes
of ordering a full-scale nuclear strike.
In September 1983, a Soviet base received a satellite warning
that five ballistic missiles were heading their way.
The satellite had mistaken sunlight reflecting off clouds for the fiery plumes of ICBMs.
The world was spared only because of the brave hunch of a single Russian officer.
In January 1995, Russian radar picked up the signal of a rocket
which seemed to be heading toward Russia from an area patrolled by U.S. Trident submarines.
The alert spread all the way up the chain of command to President Yeltsin,
who is said to have taken out the nuclear suitcase used to authorize an all-out strike.
The alert was called off with only two minutes to spare.
The rocket was actually a Norwegian probe designed to study the Northern Lights.
Since this 1995 incident, Russia's entire early warning satellite network may have broken down,
in which case it would be dependent only on ground-based radar
and blind to many potential attacks.
Which means that Russian national command authorities,
they would receive information about possible missile attack at a very late stage.
They know that and it makes them more nervous
and they could much easier interpret flight of birds as a missile attack.
And as a result, the missiles could be launched.
Some experts think that the major missile base at Svetli, and even Moscow itself,
could be wiped out without the Russians receiving any warning.
Nervous Russian military commanders have less and less information on which to base their decisions.
The problem is authorized launch based on misinterpretation or miscalculation, based on the wrong information.
So the missiles, I doubt that they could fly by themselves.
However, Stanislavsky, who was a very famous Russian theater director,
said if you have a rifle on a wall in a first act,
it is a guarantee that somebody would shoot from that in a fourth act.
For Colonel Petrovsky, enjoying a picnic with friends on a rare day off,
there is no question that if that gun goes off, it won't be by accident.
He also knows it was Anton Chekhov, not Stanislavsky, who said that.
The Colonel told me he had never met a foreigner before our film crew,
and he's never been allowed to travel outside the country.
But despite these restrictions, the endless hours on duty, and the problems with pay,
the Colonel has no doubts about the commitment and morale of the Roketschiki.
I would describe it this way.
A missileer is always on duty.
If a border guard protects the frontier of the country, a missileer protects the entire country.
In my youth, I was attracted by military service.
I liked the idea of uniform.
It was my first dream, it has come true.
Now, Yevgeny Pavlov, a child of the new Russia, is beginning his career as a missile man with the same certainty.
To be a missile forces man, I think it's to guard the peace and keep the country stable,
because, after all, nowadays nuclear weapons are a deterrent.
So as long as we have nuclear weapons, we'll be ready to fight, as we are now.
It's unlikely anyone will want to challenge us.
Today's challenge to Russia's nuclear security lies closer to home.
A string of bombings in Moscow and elsewhere has shocked the public and politicians
into awareness of the mounting global threat of terrorism.
This training exercise based on dealing with a terrorist attack once seemed like something out of an action movie.
In today's Russia, it could actually happen.
The menace of international terrorism has put the missile defense forces on high alert against possible attacks on the silos.
After the terrorist actions, today's exercise has an alarming relevance.
And by the way, they were using live ammunition.
Before every spell of duty in the missile launch centers, the RK-2K undergo a series of psychological tests.
The aim is to check their emotional state. Now, it's obvious that people with a finger on the nuclear trigger should be in full control of themselves.
But I found the process somewhat bewildering.
The first test is to define personality traits, and the second is not so much a test, rather to work out biorhythms.
In assessing personal traits, and everyone knows it these days, it's been proved.
On the basis of a person's attitude to color, one can determine not only their emotional state, but also their qualities.
As for biorhythms, a human being is influenced by various rhythms, the rhythm of the sun's movement, lunar movement, and so on.
And these biorhythms, date of birth, the lunar phase at that time, the impact of the sun on the Earth in that year, on that basis the biorhythms are constructed.
The psychologist said that if the biorhythms were negative, whatever that means, she would use additional tests to assess a RK-6 fitness for duty.
And I wanted to ask her if she used tarot cards, but I decided this was not the place for humor.
This is essentially a man's world. Women are recruited, but only for support roles, such as communications.
Unlike their American counterparts, the Roketschiki have not accepted women for the ultimate duty of commanding missiles in the launch centers, and probably never will.
In our country, any member of the rocket forces is, in the final analysis, also a commanding officer. He has subordinates, he has people he has to work with.
If he is the boss, what's his attitude to the women? I don't want to see that there's prejudice towards them, that they're offended, but it's bound to disturb things. At least it would disturb things in launch control.
And another thing, our missileers have duty periods lasting three to four days. For a woman, that's probably a bit difficult. Although our Russian women can do anything.
After all, women are programmed to preserve peace, the world around them. That's their natural foundation.
Men are more programmed for destruction, for war. No matter how strange that is, no matter how sad.
These may be children of the new Russia, but their indoctrination has a decidedly old-fashioned flavor.
On their 40th anniversary, the Rocketschiki commemorate their Memorial Day.
Colonel Petrovsky shares the story of his early years on the base with the new missileers.
It's a little education in pride and honor, but for the first time in four decades, there is a new ingredient. Truth.
The victories in space, both true and false, were paid at an expensive price.
The Rocketschiki officers of the old-fashioned cosmodrome mark their lives with the
people, including Marshal Nadelin, the first commander of these strategic missile forces.
The terrible accident had never before been admitted.
To many of the Rocketschiki, this admission comes as a revelation.
For this new crop of young officers, it bears witness to a sometimes tragic, but always heroic, heritage.
For 22 years, Colonel Petrovsky has followed a successful and secure career on the base.
Newcomers face a less certain future.
Despite the insistence on tradition and continuity, there is a clear break between the generations.
With the Cold War certainties gone and no replacement for the old Soviet beliefs,
the young and the old march to very different beats.
Today, Russia sees itself threatened not by nuclear devastation, but by guerrilla warfare.
While nuclear weapons are Russia's only remaining claim to superpower status,
the leadership realizes that the threat of terrorist groups can be defeated only by a modern conventional army.
But the Rocketschiki consume almost three-quarters of Russia's military budget, and big cuts are inevitable.
President Putin clearly decided to de-emphasize the role of nuclear weapons,
because he realized that they cannot be used against clear and present dangers like Chechnya or Taliban,
so that he clearly wanted to reduce spending on nuclear forces and invest more money into conventional deterrent.
Russia's economic crisis means that the military pie has become much smaller,
and the fight for the biggest slice much more bitter.
The defense minister, a former missile commander who insisted that Russia must preserve its nuclear missile capability, was replaced.
The chief of the general staff, who argued for deep nuclear funding cuts to modernize conventional forces, was not.
The conventional forces became increasingly in disrepair.
And while it's obvious that we're not fighting a war with America right now, and no one's planning to,
but we're fighting a war in the Caucasus against Chechen rebels,
and the capabilities of the Russian conventional forces are almost all exhausted right now in Chechnya without getting a clear-cut victory.
Russia faces potential problems not only with Chechnya.
We are not very certain about the intentions of our Chinese friends.
We don't know what NATO would do in the foreseeable future.
A very popular idea here, they bombed Iraq, they bombed Yugoslavia,
and they did not bomb Russia during the Chechen war because Russia had nuclear weapons.
Russia faces enormous separatist problems.
And given 170,000 ground troops, it is impossible to sustain any aggression by conventional means.
And in this unstable climate, Russia has adopted an alarming new policy.
For the first time in our history, we say that we can use nuclear weapons in answer of conventional attack.
We saw that nuclear weapons, which are still very strong, comparable to American nuclear arsenal,
it's the last guarantee for Russian security.
And based on nuclear, our nuclear weapons, it's the only mean which prevents our friends to invade or bomb Russia.
That's a perception here, right or wrong, but that's perception.
The war memorial in the city of Saratov, not far from the base,
commemorates the death of some 300,000 people who defended that city in World War II.
For Lieutenant Pavlov's generation, it's history.
But for older Russians, the memory of nearly 30 million people killed is very real.
The horrors of the Second World War were quickly followed by the Cold War with its nightmare nuclear standoff.
Last Friday in Moscow, we witnessed the beginning of the end of that era, which began in 1945.
We took the first step toward a new era of mutually agreed restraint and arms limitation between the two principal nuclear powers.
In 1972, both superpowers signed the ABM Treaty,
which severely limited the development of any defense against nuclear missiles.
They put their faith in the uneasy balance of terror called MAD, mutually assured destruction.
Twenty years later, with the end of the Cold War, the superpowers began dismantling their huge nuclear stockpiles.
Desperate to cut back on nuclear spending, Russia has destroyed hundreds of silos with the help of American funding.
In the first months of his presidency, George W. Bush reduced that funding
and declared his intentions to ignore the ABM Treaty and create a national missile defense.
As the first tests of the missile shield system went ahead, tensions between America and Russia rose.
The United States was accused of taking advantage of Russia's weakness.
Then came the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C.,
and suddenly relations between George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin shifted again, this time for the better.
Although the administration has said it still wants to go ahead with the missile shield,
a new era of strategic collaboration between Russia and the U.S. against terrorism seems to lie ahead.
It is in this swiftly changing situation that Russia could be tempted to deploy the new Topol-M missile.
To date, the Topols are armed with just 30 of Russia's 6,000 warheads.
But President Bush's plan for an anti-missile screen have given the Topol a new relevance.
Designed in the 1980s in response to President Reagan's Star Wars missile defense,
the Topol flies low to evade space-based attack and sends out a scatter of decoys to fool enemy warning systems.
Despite the thaw in relations between Russia and the United States,
there remains the threat that the scrapping of the ABM treaty could set off a new chapter of the old Cold War arms race.
Without an American ABM system, the Topol doesn't have any meaning in it.
It's just a ballistic missile that's not actually much better than any other ballistic missile.
Its main features will really be important when there is an ABM system with which it could penetrate.
But actually for the designers of the Topol, it's better that the United States quickly proceed to create an ABM system.
Because then the Russian generals who were pressing for Topol to be deployed already for several years will say,
You see that? We were right.
As it often happened in the Cold War, military-industrial complexes of two countries, Russia and the United States,
are sort of helping each other out all the time.
Because one has no sense without the other.
For his work on testing the Topol-M at Tsvetli, Colonel Petrovsky was given an award by Russia's Minister of Defense.
Rousing music and a well-drilled parade precede every spell of duty.
But they can't conceal the grim fact that the Rokechiki could be heading off to unleash nuclear devastation.
They're considered the most sort of battle-ready part of the Russian military.
They say that they can send their rockets up to go to the United States, Britain or China or elsewhere on the globe
in about two minutes after receiving orders from the general staff in Moscow.
For more than 30 years, Russia's Rokechiki have headed off for the missile fields without ever having to do the ultimate job of turning the nuclear keys.
But ask them if with the passing of years and the fading of old animosities it's all just routine
and they will tell you that they are as ready as they always were, just as ready.
We have no right to lower the level of our war alertness as defined by the President, the Minister of Defense and the Commander-in-Chief.
The targeting and the precise functioning of the weapons have to remain at the necessary level, despite the passing of decades.
Svetli's 20 missile launch control centers are scattered across the barren steppes for miles around the base.
Just 350 Rokechiki have the ultimate responsibility of launching the missiles.
Command Post 97690 is a launch control center for the new Topol-M missiles.
It is inconspicuously located in the countryside, about an hour's bumpy ride from Svetli base.
During each three-day spell of duty, this will be the Rokechiki Command Center and temporary home.
This luxurious refuge for the off-duty Rokechiki had never before been visited by foreigners, so it clearly was not built to impress us.
From here, two-man crews go out to the underground launch centers, where they serve rotating six-hour shifts, keeping watch over the Topol-M missiles.
The ten Topols commanded by this control center are poised in remote silos connected by networks of underground cables.
Multiply the Hiroshima bomb by 350, and you get the total power packed into the nuclear punch of those ten missiles.
The launch centers for the older SS-18 and SS-19 missiles, with their network of subterranean tunnels, have a menacing feel.
At least that's how it seemed to me as I followed a two-man crew on their way to the launch capsules buried deep enough to withstand a direct nuclear strike.
Over the years, the working routines of the Rokechiki have never changed. They ceaselessly check the readiness of the missiles under their control.
The missiles are not currently targeted, but they can be aimed in minutes by commanders in Moscow.
The Rokechiki would never know where their missiles are heading.
For Lieutenant Pavlov, the ultimate challenge lies at the end of the tunnel, the unthinkable moment so often rehearsed in the simulator.
Attention! We have received an order to launch the missiles.
The time of the order is 16 hours and 52 minutes.
The order is to prepare for joint action to launch the missiles.
Attention!
Launch!
First, 16 hours and 52 minutes. The launch has begun from the launch pad of the rocket regiment.
Report accepted.
There's no question that nuclear missiles are not weapons of war. They are political weapons to solve problems.
And these political weapons are still too significant in resolving disputes and conflicts.
We must follow the path of reducing nuclear weapons, but making that reduction in a way which will preserve the current strategic stability.
But for all the geopolitics, the job of the Rokechiki comes down to one act, as simple as it is unthinkable.
I think at the moment when the order comes, I won't even spare a thought whether to carry it out or not. I will carry it out.
Maybe thoughts will come afterwards, but when the order comes, I will carry it out. At once.
Sometimes I've had thoughts about it, but you can't think about that all the time, so after a while it recedes into the background.
But when you're on duty, when you sit at the control console, next to the key, then of course you realize what power you hold in your hands.
How many victims, how many cities would be destroyed, how many people would die.
But if an order is given, it will be carried out. And only after it has been carried out will the Missileer start thinking about what he has done.
But the job will be done, one hundred percent.
How did NOVA gain access to the command and control center of Russia's largest missile base?
Find out on NOVA's website at pbs.org or America Online Keyword PBS.
To order this show or any other NOVA program for $19.95 plus shipping and handling, call WGBH Boston Video at 1-800-255-9424.
Next time on NOVA, germ warfare.
This is a perfect weapon for Osama bin Laden.
Do they have what it takes to make one? Do we have what it takes to survive?
NOVA and the New York Times reveal the untold story, bioterror.
NOVA is a production of WGBH Boston.
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