To be sure, 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.
“We have not seen any changes in the disposition of Russian nuclear forces,” said a National Security Council spokesperson in response to questions from Reuters. “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 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 ship-shape.”
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 United States and its allies would be left to wonder how any new authority would use the weapons, said 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 to 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 long has been among US spy agencies’ highest priorities, the former CIA officers said.
That work became harder with Putin’s August 2022 decision to halt US inspections of Russia’s nuclear sites under the New START treaty, which allowed the 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 Polymeropoulos.
“This has always been a super-high (US) intelligence collection priority and the command and control of nuclear weapons in Russia,” said Hoffman. “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.”
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