Abstract
Here's nothing quite like so-called news stories filled with inside dope from unnamed government officials. These politically motivated tall tales reward those who spin them twice: first, by making an immediate splash; and second, having made it into the public record, they can always be cited later, by date and publication. No need to explain they're untrue.
Consider the story an “unnamed U.S. official” floated to a Guardian reporter in mid-July. The source claimed that Chechens had stolen weapon plutonium from a Russian reactor at Volgodonsk. The stolen material, he said, was taken some time in the last 12 months and could be on its way to Iraq, or maybe Libya.
Now, Mr. Anonymous may have a personal foreign policy of hostility toward Russia, or he may want to reinforce the idea that the United States is about to be hit with a “dirty bomb.” But his story is strictly for suckers.
As Paul Josephson writes in “Minatom: Dreams of Glory,” the reactor at Volgodonsk is a brand new power reactor—the showpiece of future nuclear energy in Russia. It has no weapon plutonium to steal (you wouldn't find any at a U.S. power reactor, either).
Someone might say, in Unnamed's defense, that by “plutonium” he really meant spent fuel. But there wouldn't be much of that at a brand new facility, either, and it's no picnic extracting plutonium from spent fuel. In any case, according to Volgodonsk spokesman Yegor Obukhov, “Not a single gram of radioactive substances has ever gone missing in the plant's 16-month operation.”
Then there's the periodic story that Russia is preparing to renew nuclear testing on the island of Novaya Zemlya. As Charles Ferguson details in “Just a Coincidence?” on page 62, that tale conveniently surfaces not in tandem with tests, but with U.S. nuclear policy debates.
On July 8, Defense Week quoted a “knowledgeable congressional aide” to the effect that Yevgeny Velikhov of the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow suggested that the United States and Russia should work together to develop new nuclear weapons, for use in a jointly developed missile defense.
If true, this story would have been a bombshell. But there was something fishy about it, too. First, Ve-likhov served as Mikhail Gorbachev's arms control guru in the 1980s, and there is no reason to believe he's had a change of heart. Second, to lend weight to the claim, the story identified the Kurchatov as “Russia's premier nuclear-weapons laboratory.” In fact, the institute got out of the weapons business in the late 1940s.
So I e-mailed Defense Week author John Donnelly, asking him if he had made any attempt to reach Ve-likhov to confirm. When I heard nothing back, I talked to physicist Frank von Hippel, who has known Velikhov since the Gorbachev days. Von Hippel had read the story and talked to Velikhov about it. It seems, in a meeting with missile-defense-loving Republican Cong. Curt Wel-don, Velikhov pointed out (as other critics have before him), that unlike kinetic-kill vehicles, nuclear-armed missile defenses wouldn't have to hit their targets, they'd just need to get close. But he did not endorse nuclear weapons in space, nor did he suggest any new nuclear projects, joint or otherwise.