Night of the Hawk

WASHINGTON POST, 8 December 1991—The leaders of Russia, the Ukraine and Byelorussia formally announced the dissolution of the Soviet Union today and said they had agreed to establish a “Commonwealth of Independent States” in its place.

The decision to liquidate the 69-year-old Communist-forged union and halt activity of all Soviet government organs came during a closed-door meeting at a Byelorussian hunting lodge near the Polish border in the absence of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev.

There was no immediate comment from Gorbachev, whose constitutional position as president and commander in chief of the 4-million-member Soviet armed forces has now been challenged throughout the Slavic heartland of the former Soviet superpower.

In Washington, Secretary of States James A. Baker III said in a television interview that “the Soviet Union as we’ve known it no longer exists,” but he warned that there is still a risk of civil war amid the ruins of the Soviet empire.

NEW YORK TIMES, 24 December 1991—… The nuclear weapons issue [in the new Commonwealth of Independent Statesi, while the subject of reassuringly worded promises in the Kremlin, remains to be worked out in its critical details by the new commonwealth.

The republic leaders are to gather … in Minsk, the commonwealth headquarters, to try to resolve their differences over how to craft a common defense council that does not smack of the old union. They also will be facing resistance by [many Soviet republics] to a plan under which Russia ultimately becomes the guarantor of disarmament and repository of the entire Soviet nuclear armory.

WASHINGTON POST, 20 February 1992—A classified study prepared as the basis for the Pentagon’s budgetary planning through the end of the century casts Russia as the gravest potential threat to U.S. vital interests and presumes the United States would spearhead a NATO counterattack if Russia launched an invasion of Lithuania.

U.S. intervention in Lithuania, which would reverse decades of American restraint in the former Soviet Union’s Baltic sphere of influence, is one of seven hypothetical roads to war that the Pentagon studied to help the military services size and justify their forces through 1999. In the study, the Pentagon neither advocates nor predicts any specific conflict.

The Lithuanian scenario contemplates a major war by land, sea and air in which 24 NATO divisions, 70 fighter squadrons and six aircraft carrier battle groups would keep the Russian navy “bottled up in the eastern Baltic,” bomb supply lines in Russia and use armored formations to expel Russian forces from Lithuania. The authors state that Russia is unlikely to respond with nuclear weapons, but they provide no basis for that assessment.

An unclassified draft preface to the seven scenarios describes them as “illustrative” of the demands that might be placed on the U.S. military in coming years, adding, “They are neither predictive nor exhaustive.”

The Lithuanian scenario judges the likelihood of war with Russia as “low,” but goes on to say that economic and political tensions “could compel political leaders to make decisions that appear irrational” and asserts that a Russian invasion of Lithuania “is plausible in light of recent events in the former Soviet Union.”

More striking to analysts inside and outside the government has been the Pentagon document’s description of Lithuania as a “U.S. vital interest.” The language of vital interests traditionally describes something that the U.S. government would use military force to protect. Though applying the term to Lithuania, the document, titled “1994–1999 Defense Planning Guidance Scenario Set for Final Coordination,” does not propose to represent current U.S. policy.

National security officials outside the Pentagon sharply disputed the scenario’s premise, noting that the United States never recognized the Soviet Union’s World War II conquest of the Baltic states but steered clear of interference there for fear of nuclear war.

ANNUAL REPORT TO THE PRESIDENT AND THE CONGRESS, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, February 1992—Special operations forces are essential contributors to strategic deterrence and defense. The ongoing proliferations of weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them threaten to erode strategic stability … SOF special reconnaissance and direct action capabilities can help to locate and destroy storage facilities, control nodes, and other strategic assets… SOF are one of the few instruments available to precisely apply measured force to deal with an adversary’s nuclear weapons capabilities.

ASSOCIATED PRESS, 12 March 1992—Russia’s vice-president confirmed Wednesday that nuclear weapons are stored in both Armenia and Azerbaijan, the former Soviet republics embroiled in a vicious conflict over the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave.

… It was not known what kind of nuclear weapons were in the republics, although they are assumed to be tactical — or “battlefield”— weapons.

BEE NEWS SERVICES, 13 March 1992—Ominous new concerns were raised Thursday about the safety of the former Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal when Ukraine said it has stopped returning nuclear weapons to Russia for dismantling.

…Perfilyev [advisor to the Russian vice-president] accused Kravchuk [Ukrainian president] of using nuclear weapons to prove Ukraine’s independence, and said that Russia would react harshly.