Volume 45, Number 2 · February 5, 1998
Russia's Leaking Nukes
By Jack F. Matlock
One Point Safe: A True Story
by Andrew Cockburn, by Leslie Cockburn
Anchor, 288 pp., $23.95
Avoiding Nuclear Anarchy: Containing the Threat of Loose Russian Nuclear Weapons and Fissile Material
by Graham T. Allison, by Owen R. Coté Jr., by Richard A. Falkenrath, by Steven E. Miller
MIT Press, 292 pp., $16.00 (paper)
The Peacemaker
a film directed by Mimi Leder
In September, General Alexander Lebed, the defeated presidential candidate who was briefly the head of Russia's Security Council, said in a television interview that more than a hundred suitcase-sized nuclear bombs were missing from Russian military inventories. Earlier, in May, he had told an American congressional delegation that the Soviet Union had produced 132 portable nuclear weapons and that 84 were missing. The statement he made on television was immediately denied by Russian military authorities. Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev assured the public that Russia's nuclear arsenal was under firm control. General Igor Volynkin, who heads the department in the Defense Ministry responsible for nuclear security, denied that nuclear 'suitcase bombs' of the sort described by General Lebed exist in Russia.
Review, 4758 words
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