CNS Reports
Are Suitcase Nukes on the Loose?
The Story Behind the Controversy
By Scott Parrish
November 1997 View the summary version. Former Russian Security Council Secretary Aleksandr Lebed has stirred controversy in both Russia and the United States with his allegations that the Russian government is currently unable to account for some eighty small atomic demolition munitions (ADMs) which were manufactured in the USSR during the Cold War. Lebed originally made the allegations in a closed meeting with a US congressional delegation in May 1997. His charges generated public controversy three months later when he repeated them in an interview with the CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes, which was broadcast on 7 September 1997.1 Russian officials initially dismissed Lebed’s charges, saying all of the country’s nuclear weapons were accounted for and under strict control. Top-ranking Russian defense officials later went further and denied that any such weapons had ever been built by the USSR, claiming that they would be too expensive to maintain and too heavy for practical use. Lebed has stood by his statement, however, and his charges have been backed by a former advisor to President Yeltsin, Aleksey Yablokov, who told a US Congressional subcommittee on 2 October 1997 that he was “absolutely sure” that such ADMs had been ordered in the 1970s by the KGB. |