From Paul L. Williams' book "The Al Qaeda Connection" :


The beginning of the end took place on Sept. 27, 1991, when President George H. W. Bush Announced that the United States would unilaterally withdraw all nuclear weapons from its forces around the world with the proviso that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev would do likewise. Gorbachev readily agreed. The press and the people of both nations were pleased. The agreement represented a grand display of perestroika -- positive proof that the cold war was over and a new day of mutual trust (if not brotherhood) had dawned. The process of the withdrawal of the nukes was greatly facilitated by the enactment of the Nunn-Lugtar Soviet Threat Reduction Act on December 12, 1991. This act provided Russia with millions in funding to transport its nukes to various sites throughout the fourteen newly created republics of what was once the Soviet Union. This, too, seemed like a sensible measure that would make the world a safer place.

Yet the movement of the twenty-two thousand nuclear weapons occurred when everything in Russia was falling apart. With the closing of the communal plants and industries, more than 30 percent of the workforce became unemployed. Inflation soared over 2,000 percent, fueling crime and corruption. An average of eighty-four murders took place a day, many of which were contract killings. A hit could now be arranged with members of eight Mafia families within Moscow for less than $200. Millions of Russians now stood in lines for hours in order to redeem governement-issued coupons. There was one line for red beets and cabbages; another for eggs and bread; and yet another for vodka and cigarettes. Butcher shops sold blue chickens that had died of malnutrition and pies made from rancid beef and horse meat. The savvy customers soon learned not to purchase the pies that were surrounded by dead flies. In the wink of an eye, the second most powerful nation on earth had become transformed into a third world country.

Undfer the new capitalism, male life expectancy fell to fifty-eight years --- fifteen to seventeen years less than that of males in eastern Europe and the United States. By 1996 the suicide rate had doubled. Along with poverty, inflation, unemployment, and depression, Russians experienced a sharp drop in the birth rate. From 1991 to 2001, the population declined at a rate of 1.2 million a year.

Nowhere was the misery more apparent than within the military, which by 1996 had shrunk to a feeble force of 1.7 million soldiers. Because of chronic food shortages, many soldiers resorted to begging. More than ten Russian soldiers died each day from noncombat causes, including suicide and malnutrition. An estimated 110,000 loacked proper housing and became sheltered in hovels. No one in the military, not even a high-ranking general, was receiving a regular pay check. Russian army and navy officers began to sell almost every item at their disposal. In 1993 there were 6,430 reports of stolen weapons from army arsenals, ranging from assault rifles to tanks.

It is incredible to assume that the twenty-two thousand nuclear weapons were moved from strategic sites to arsenals throughout Russia without a single loss. When President George H. W. Bush announced his plans for a nuclear withdrawal, the then secretary of defense Dick Cheney said that the recovery of 90 percent of the nukes in Russia would represent "excellent performance." Such an "excellent performance" would mean that 220 weapons would have been lost, stolen, or otherwise unaccounted for. But what person in his right mind could expect such an outcome from the poorly housed, malnourished, disillusioned, and unpaid Russian troups of 1991? The temptation for gain would have been too great for an Orthodox saint to suppress when a kilo of chrominum-50 would sell for $25,000, cesium-137 for $1 million, and lithium for $10 million. Prospective buyers included agents from North Korea, Pakistan, Libya, and a well-financed group of Muslim terrorists called al Qaeda.

In the first three years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the black market in nuclear weapons and materials began to boom. Germany reported more than seven hundred attempted nuclear sales. These illegal sales were luckily stopped by the police, but that was not true of every case of smuggling. Other incidents have been more alarming. In January 1992 an Egyptian newspaper reported that Iran bought three Soviet nuclear warheads from Kazakhstan for $150 million. This report was later confirmed by Russian intelligence. In November 1993 two nuclear warheads, sufficient to kill millions in New York and Los Angeles, were stolen by two employees from the Zlatoust-36 Instrument Building Plant, a weapons assembly facility, in Chelyabinsk. Fortunately, the weapons were later recovered in a nearby residential garage, and the two employees were placed under arrest. Later that same month, Russian navy Captian Alexei Tikhomirov broke into a nuclear storage facility at the Sevmorput shipyard near Murmansk and robbed three pieces of a reactor core containing 3.4 kilograms of highly enriched uranium. At the time of Tikhomirov's arrest, the chief Russian prosecutor noted that "potatoes were guarded better" that the nuclear materials at Murmansk.



The Chechen Mafia, the most powerful criminal organization in Russia, now became the most dominant force in the trafficking of nuclear supplies and materials from Russia to rogue nation and terrorist groups. In March 1993 the Chechens seciured an unknown quantity of highly enriched uranium from Kazakhstan. More than six kilograms were transported from Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, to Istanbul, Turkey. Six months later, Interpol officials collared four Turkish businessmen and four agents of Iran's secret service and confiscated 2.5 kilos of the uranium. The remaining kilos had slipped through the proverbial cracks. In September 1993 the Chechen rebels stunned the world by the display of SS-20 missiles during a military parade in Grozny. The missiles, stolen from some Soviet arsenal, possessed a range of 9,500 kilometers and the capability to launch a nuclear warhead.

At the same time, the Chechen rebels began using radioactive isotopes, which had become available at rock-bottom prices, to commit acts of murder. The first victim was Vladimir Kaplun, the owner of a meat packing plant in Moscow. The Chechens planted gamma ray-emitting pellets in Kaplun's office. The businessman was dead within a matter of weeks. At least half a dozen similar cases were reported in the next three weeks.

In November 1994 Dzokhar Dudayev, the leader of the Chechen rebels, petitioned the Uniter Nations to dispatch troops to protect the weapons of mass destruction within the Chechen arsenal. Dudayev's request was taken as an attempt at grandstanding. The UN officials, along with the international press, scoffed at the notion that a group of Muslim dissidents from the backwater Russian province of Chechnya could possess, let alone maintain, nuclear weapons. This forced the Chechens to make a vivid display that would prove to the world that they possessed nuclear capability. On November 23, 1995, Chechen commander Shamil Basayev directed a television crew to a radiological bomb that had been planted in Izmailovsky Park near Moscow. The bomb was made of cesium-137 and, if detonated, would have killed hundreds in a matter of minutes and contaminated thousands more. The incident represented the first case of a dirty nuke to be shown as a weapon of terror.

Shortly after this incident, Dudayev notified the US State Department that he possessed tactical nuclear suitcase bombs. The Chechen leader said that he was willing to sell these weapons to rogue states of terrorist agencies, such as al Qaeda, if the United States failed to recognize Chechnya's independence from Russia. Dudayev's claim was supported by officials from the National Intelligence Council, an unbrella organization for the US analytical community. The officials informed a congressional committee that weapon-grade and weapons-usable nuclear material, including SADMs (small atomic demolition munitions), had been stolen from Soviet stockpiles. "Of these thefts," the officials said, "we assess that undetected smuggling has occurred, although we do not know the extent or the magnitude.

In January 1996 the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of Internation Studies received information from a "senior advisor to Boris Yeltsin" that an unspecified number of small nuclear bombs had been manufactured for the KGB and had never appeared on a list of the Soviet nuclear inventory.

In May 1997, during a closed door session with a US congressional delegation, former Russian Security Council secretary Alexander Lebed said that more than eighty-four SADMs had disappeared from Russian arsenals and could be in the hands of Muslim extremists. General Lebed said that he was able to confirm the production of 132 small nukes but could only account for 48. When asked the whereabouts of the missing nukes, Lebed replied: "I have no idea." He went on to say that he had no idea how many small nukes had been produced by the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Lebed also said that some of these small nukes, with explosive yield of one kiloton of TNT, had been refined so that they could be carried by one person in a case measuring sity by forty by twenty centimeters (twenty-four by sixteen by eight inches) and represented "ideal weapons for nuclear terror."

General Lebed repeated these charges in an interview with the CBS newsmagazine 60 minutes that was aired on September 7, 1997. In the interview, he added that the SADMs were designed to be used in sabotage operations behind enemy lines and lacked the electronic combination locks that had been built into other Soviet nuclear weapons. The following is a sample of the exchange between CBS correspondent Steve Kroft and General Lebed over the matter of the missing nukes:

Kroft: Are you confidant that all of the weapons aqre secure and acoounted for?

Lebed: Not at all. Not at all.

Kroft: How easy would it be to steal one?

Lebed: It's suitcase-sized.

Kroft: You could put it in a suitcase and carry it off?

Lebed: It is made in the size of a suitcase. It is a suitcase, actually. You could carry it. You could put it in another suitcase if you want to.

Kroft: But it's already a suitcase.

Lebed: Yes.

Kroft: I could walk down the streets of Moscow or Washington or New York, and people would think I'm carrying a suitaces?

Lebed: Yes, indeed.

Kroft: How easy would it be to detonate?

Lebed: It would take twnety, thirty minutes to prepare.

Kroft: But you don't need secret codes from the Kremlin or anything like that?

Lebed: No.

Kroft: You are saying there are a significant number that are missing and unaccounted for?

Lebed: Yes, there is. More than one hundred.

Kroft: Where are they?

Lebed: Somewhere in Georgia, somewhere in Ukraine, somewhere in the Baltic countries. Perhaps some are even outside those countries. One person is capable of triggering this nuclear weapon -- one person.

Kroft: So you are saying these weapons are no longer under the control of the Russian military?

Lebed: I'm saying that more than one hundred weapons are not under the control of the armed forces of Russia. I don't know their location. I don't know whether they have been destroyed or whether they are stored or whether they've been sold or stolen. I don't know.




More to come, if you like. It's a great story that is forming up.