At the precise moment of my arrival, a giant crane built with U.S. funds was lifting the lid off a shaft leading down to the sub’s nuclear reactor. Workers with acetylene torches were poised to cut out the deck plates directly above the reactor in order to clear a path for the robotic removal of the ship’s long-ago spent nuclear fuel. After that, the ship would be towed to a specially built drydock cradle, where the reactor would be removed for longterm storage. The rest of the ship would be sliced into forty-tonne hunks of scrap metal ready for shipment by rail to steelyards in central Russia. The workers—who I was told earn about $1.40 an hour—were in a hurry to get the job done fast, Frolov said, because both ships were leaking badly. “If they lose buoyancy and sink with the reactors and fuel still aboard, we’ll have a real mess on our hands.”
Those words came back to me the next day when news broke that another retired Soviet nuclear sub-marine had sunk at sea, with a reactor and fuel aboard, only a few hundred kilometres from Zvezdochka, drowning nine sailors.
While the Canadian involvement in Russian nuclear submarine clean—up goes back no further than the Kananaskis summit, American interest in Zvezdochka stretches back a decade, to the period after the collapse of the Soviet Union. U.S. advisers began arriving to sign contracts to dismantle the former superpower’s fleet of intercontinental missile-equipped sub-marines—a class of warships built during the Cold War to serve as under—sea missile platforms capable of delivering the ultimate Soviet nuclear knockout even after a Third World War had been won or lost on land. Under a $461 million(U.S.) Cooperative Threat Reduction program started in 1996, the U.S. Department of Defense has paid for the demolition of twenty-five such submarines. Another twenty-three are scheduled for dismantlement by 2012. But that’s as far as American largesse goes: U.S. money, at the insistence of Congress, can only be used to dismantle submarines capable of directly threatening the U.S. with intercontinental missiles.
To understand why Congress insists on limiting the way its threat reduction funds are used, there’s no better place to look than Sevmash, Russia’s largest submarine shipyard, which I had seen from the airplane, directly across the Dvina river from Zvezdochka. While standing on the barge talking to chief engineer Frolov, I could easily make out Sevmash’s massive fabrication sheds and slipways on the far bank of the river. There, tied up at the wharves, a long line of service-ready cruisers, submarines, and an aircraft carrier offered ample evidence that the Russian navy has sufficient funds to keep the yard’s 30,000 workers busy.
It is here that the Russian navy is building a new nuclear submarine fleet. In Washington, where suspicion of the former Cold War enemy still runs deep in conservative political circles, awareness that the Russian navy can afford to maintain and build new nuclear-capable submarines and surface ships keeps a sharp brake on financial assistance for efforts to clean up retired ships, regardless of the temptation they present to terrorists, or the risk they pose to the environment. The worry is that American aid for Russian submarine cleanup efforts liberates Russian government funds for the construction of new submarines that could one day be used against the U.S.
Places like Zvezdochka, Sevmash, and a score of other major Russian nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons centres remain almost as closed to outsiders now as during the Soviet period. But, as my visit attested, getting a clear picture of what’s going on inside them is easier than it was in Cold War days. Over the last year, especially, a wealth of information about Russian military budgets and military plans has become available. As if to further inflame the skeptics in Washington, the information all points to a major rearmament program centring on a nuclear weapons revival, and particularly on a new nuclear submarine fleet. Last year, thanks to the efforts of a group of tenacious liberals from the Yabloko party in the Russian parliament, the Kremlin was forced, for the first time in Russian history, to disclose its defence budget for the year ahead.
In October, 2002, Alexei Kudrin, Russia’s deputy prime minister, re—vealed that the 2003 defence budget is $10.9 billion(U.S.), with weapons budgets totalling $3.45 billion(U.S.). Based on his insider’s knowledge of previous years’ budgets, General Andrei Nikolayev, the head of the parliament’s defence committee, revealed that since 1999, Russia’s defence budget has doubled in real terms. Nikolayev said spending on weapons development and procurement, which currently gets a third of the defence budget, is slated to rise to sixty percent in future years, largely thanks to recent Russian government budget surpluses. These are based on a massive surge in oil revenues and on economic growth currently running at 6.6 percent. Vla-dislav Putilin, deputy minister for trade and economic development, said the defence spending increases were all part of Russian president Putin’s “National Security Concept,” introduced in 2000, which emphasizes Russia’s need to have nuclear forces that are capable of inflicting damage on “any aggressor state or coalition of states under any circumstance.” That’s a concept fully in keeping with Russia’s 1993 renunciation of Soviet promises against first use of nuclear weapons.
Trying to get more detailed information on Russian weapons development budgets, however, remains tough. As Pavel Felgenhauer, a former military officer turned Moscow defence analyst, says, “The actual number, specification, and price per unit of weapons to be procured is a state secret. The nature of military R&D programs, the number of such programs financed by the government, and any specifics regarding how much money is allocated to each project, are also closely guarded state secrets.”
Among the many in Congress who worry that U.S. aid frees up Russian rearmament funds, the most persuasive critic is Curt Weldon, a tough-talking, Republican congress-man from Pennsylvania. After the Bush administration took office, Weldon played a major role on the House Armed Services Committee, persuading the Bush administration to freeze “threat reduction” funding in late 2001, while demanding greater candour from the Russians about their rearmament programs. The White House complied, allowing the funds to flow again only in August 2002, and then only under a Presidential waiver that can be revokedat any time. According to many observers, the waiver was granted because the U.S. hoped to gain Kremlin support for the war on Iraq.
In Weldon’s view, Russia and America are on the brink of a new Cold War, and American aid is helping to subsidize Russian rearmament, as well as the war in Chechnya, which is estimated to cost $750 million a year. Speaking to top Russian nuclear weapons designers and officials at a conference arranged by the Washington-based Center for Defense Information at the Moscow Hyatt in December 2002, Weldon gave his stock speech on the topic. He began with a blistering salvo against the Clinton administration for having refused to insist on greater transparency and honesty from Moscow in return for threat reduction aid, and he wound up with a denunciation of Russia and America’s failure to commit to arms reductions. “What I saw during the nineties made me sick,” Weldon told the Russian weapons scientists, “Many of us in Congress have no confidence in the arms control process.”
