Five Minutes to Nuclear War
The sad state of the Russian early warning system
PRESIDENT YELTSIN activated his "nuclear briefcase" for a retaliatory attack against the West in 1995 when Russian early warning stations picked up what they thought was an approaching American Trident ballistic missile, according to a television documentary.
A Moscow news agency report at the time announced that Russia had shot down an incoming missile launched from northern Europe. It turned out to be a Norwegian weather research rocket.
However, in a reconstruction of the incident, including interviews with key Russian military officials, Channel 4's Equinox programme has discovered how close the world was to a ballistic missile launch by Moscow.
After the approaching missile was spotted, Moscow began a ten-minute countdown to launching a retaliatory strike in the belief that an American Trident submarine operating in the Norwegian Sea or Barents Sea, had launched a missile.
At six minutes to impact, the Russians switched on a special communications circuit which connected military headquarters with silo-based missiles, missile-carrying trains and submarines. At five minutes to impact, President Yeltsin would have had to make a decision about transmitting "unblocking codes" to make a launch possible.
Colonel Robert Bykov, a former commander of a mobile missile regiment, part of the Russian Strategic Rocket Forces, says in the documentary, Russian Roulette, which will be shown tomorrow: "These first few minutes caused a lot of alarm and a lot of tension." He reveals that orders were given to Russian ballistic missile submarines to go on battle stations.
Bruce Blair, a former American nuclear forces commander and now a member of the Brookings Institute in Washington, says: "The military actually issued orders to the Strategic Rocket Forces to prepare to receive the next command which would have been the launch order."
A decision to launch Russian missiles has to be made by three men, the President, the Defence Minister and the Chief of the General Staff. The nuclear briefcases, containing communication and missile launch terminals and carried by aides for all three, were activated "for the first time ever", the programme claims.
The launch of the Norwegian Black Brent XXII rocket which took place on January 25, 1995, ended "successfully" when it crashed into the ocean near the Arctic archipelago of Spitsbergen, more than 600 miles from Russian territory. It was part of a joint Norwegian-American project investigating the Northern Lights.
The Moscow news agency was wrong when it claimed that the missile had been shot down. However, as its burners fell to Earth, the Russians thought they were warheads heading south. Moscow abandoned the countdown when it realised the missile's trajectory was not on its territory.
The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs had been forewarned by the Norwegian authorities six weeks earlier, but the information was not passed on to the appropriate military commanders.
Colonel Bykov says the incident underlined the potential dangers posed by Russian missile forces because of the poor state of the early warning systems.
The London Times, July 13, 1998 |
