Russia mercenary threat revives concern over nuclear arsenal security

WASHINGTON -

The Wagner mercenary group’s march on Moscow

has revived an old fear in Washington: What happens to Russia’s nuclear stockpile in the event of domestic upheaval.

An agreement on Saturday by Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin to

order his fighters back to their camps

quelled immediate worries of major conflict inside Russia.

But the episode signalled that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s grasp on power is weakening.

Images of tanks on Russian streets brought to mind the failed 1991 coup by communist hardliners that raised concerns about the security of the Soviet nuclear arsenal and the possibility of a rogue commander stealing a warhead, said former United States intelligence officials.

“The IC (intelligence community) will be super-focused on the (Russian) nuclear stockpile,” said Mr Marc Polymeropoulos, a former senior Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer who oversaw the agency’s clandestine operations in Europe and Eurasia.

Mr Daniel Hoffman, a former senior CIA officer who served as the agency’s Moscow station chief, said: “You want to know who has control of the nuclear weapons because you’re worried that terrorists or bad guys like (Chechen leader Ramzan) Kadyrov might come after them for the leverage they can get.”

Mr Kadyrov dispatched thousands of his own militiamen to Rostov-on-Don, the southern city seized and then abandoned by Prigozhin’s fighters, vowing to help put down the revolt.

US officials say they do not see an immediate threat to the security of Russia’s strategic and tactical weapons.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the deal that sent Wagner fighters back to their camps was aimed at avoiding confrontation and bloodshed.

In response to questions from Reuters, a US National Security Council spokesman said: “We have not seen any changes in the disposition of Russian nuclear forces.

“Russia has a special responsibility to maintain command, control and custody of its nuclear forces and to ensure that no actions are taken that imperil strategic stability.”

But the safety of these weapons is a persistent worry for Washington. US intelligence agencies said in their 2023 annual threat assessment that “Russia’s nuclear material security… remains a concern despite improvements to material protection, control and accounting at Russia’s nuclear sites since the 1990s”.

Nuclear chain of command

A US congressional aide noted that the Kremlin has pumped extra resources into modernising its arsenal in recent years, adding that “Russia’s strategic forces have generally been in shipshape”.

The scenario worrying planners now may be the possibility of a rogue military faction gaining decision-making ability over some of the weapons, should divisions over the war in Ukraine exposed by Prigozhin’s mutiny erupt anew.

The US and its allies would be left to wonder how any new authority would use the weapons, said Mr Hoffman.

“It’s the ability to extort the West for whatever you want. And they might not play by the same sort of rules that Putin has,” he said, noting how the Russian leader has not acted on nuclear threats he has made in response to the West’s support for Ukraine’s fight against Russian occupation forces.

Russia’s nuclear arsenal is the world’s largest, estimated in 2022 at 5,977 warheads by the Federation of American Scientists, compared with an estimated 5,428 held by the US.

Collecting information on Russia’s strategic forces command structure, and the security and other aspects of the stockpile, has long been among US spy agencies’ highest priorities, the former CIA officers said.

That work became harder with Mr Putin’s August 2022 decision to

halt US inspections of Russia’s nuclear sites under the New Start treaty,

which allowed the two sides to inspect and monitor each other’s strategic nuclear forces.

That decision left Washington highly dependent on spy satellites to assess the security of nuclear weapons sites and movements of warheads, and communications intercepts to monitor the loyalty of Russian commanders, said Mr Polymeropoulos.

Said Mr Hoffman: “This has always been a super-high (US) intelligence collection priority… the command and control of nuclear weapons in Russia.

“We all know it’s dangerous, which is why we had all these treaties, where we had a lot of transparency, which is now gone.”
REUTERS