Where Was the Black Box?

One of the most chilling aspects of last week's coup attempt is that -- for 76 hours -- the Soviet Union's top-secret nuclear release codes were in the hands of men later denounced as "adventurists" by Mikhail Gorbachev. According to the Washington Post, a member of the Russian delegation that accompanied Gorbachev back to Moscow said the men who put the Soviet President under house arrest in his Crimean dacha also seized the "black box" (actually a briefcase) containing the codes. Could the coupmakers have launched or threatened a nuclear attack? Or was the Soviet deterrent effectively paralyzed for three days?

The answers are not entirely clear. Under the Soviet command-and-control ! structure, the decision to launch any of the country's estimated 27,000 nuclear warheads cannot be made by a single individual. U.S. experts say Moscow's strategic nuclear "button" is in reality a two-part system, in which the Minister of Defense controls one half and the President the other. If Gorbachev's codes had wound up in the hands of Defense Minister Dmitri Yazov, a member of the junta, he would theoretically have had the wherewithal to order the missiles to be launched. But the codes are no more than a release authority, and the actual firing would still have required the cooperation of many people.

Even if it had been physically possible for the junta to launch strategic weapons, it would have done them no good in putting down internal resistance: the missiles are aimed at foreign targets, and there would have been no time to reprogram them. Had the junta tried to use tactical or battlefield nukes, they would probably have faced the same internal military resistance that kept Soviet tanks from moving against Boris Yeltsin. As it turned out, President Bush later told reporters gathered at his vacation home in Kennebunkport, Me., that U.S. intelligence detected no signals or movements indicating "a nuclear threat of any kind" during the interregnum. By Wednesday, the infernal briefcase was back in Gorbachev's safekeeping, and the world could breathe a little easier.