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Peace at any cost is a Prelude to War!
Yamantau Mountain is so secret that only a handful of Russian government
officials knows about it, says Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., who speaks Russian
and travels frequently to Russia, chairing a congressional working group that
discusses strategic issues with counterparts from the Russian Duma.
"I ask the Russians about it every time I meet with them," Weldon told WND.
"We've never had a straight answer."
Weldon got interested in Yamantau Mountain in 1995 when he saw a public
report suggesting it was a vast mining project.
"I went to Moscow and spoke with the deputy interior minister who was in
charge of mining," Weldon says. "I asked him if there was any mining activity
there. He just shook his head and said he had never heard of it. So I
mentioned the other name the Russians use for it: Mezhgorye. He said he
hadn't heard of that either. Then he sent an aide out to check. Twenty
minutes later, the aide came back, visibly shaken. He said they couldn't say
anything about it."
Weldon says he also met with Andrei Kokoshkin, a former deputy defense
minister who was put in charge of President Yeltsin's National Security
Council.
"Kokoshkin called it a public works project, and said there was nothing to
worry about, since the Defense Ministry had no involvement in it. So I
brought out a copy of the Defense Ministry's budget -- it's only a few pages
long -- and showed him the line item for Mezhgorye. He smiled and said it
must be for bridges, roads and schools. When I then asked if I could see it,
he said that could only be arranged through Yeltsin. The site was controlled
directly by the president."
So Weldon says he drafted a 3-page letter to Yeltsin in Russian.
"I told him all the things I was trying to do to foster better U.S.-Russia
understanding, but said that I couldn't help if they couldn't clear up
something as important as this," Weldon told WND. "He never replied."
Weldon twice asked Gen. Sergeyev, commander of the Strategic Rocket Forces
about Yamantau.
"He said it was a command center, and that we had the same kind of thing in
our country at Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado. He suggested that eventually we
could be allowed to come visit it. Despite his promise, that has never
happened. Clearly, this is a project that is so secret that only the upper
level of the government know about it."
The work at the Yamantau complex is only part of Russia's current efforts to
modernize and reinforce some 200 deep underground command posts, nuclear
warhead repositories and clandestine missile sites. Some CIA and Joint Chiefs
of Staff analysts believe these assets will give Russia a strategic advantage
over the U.S. in the event of nuclear war.
The U.S. intelligence community has been observing Sherapovo for many years.
Initially built in the 1950s, it was modernized a first time in 1978, at the
height of d�tente, then again in the mid-1980s. This declassified U.S.
intelligence photograph shows surface support areas and secret above-ground
entrances to the underground bunkers. In time of war, Russia's civilian
leadership can be evacuated from Moscow along a secret subway line. Once at
Sherapovo, they can conduct the war effort using a highly redundant
communications system "allowing the leadership to send orders and receive
reports through the wartime management structure," according to a 1988
Pentagon report. Over the past six years, the Russian Federation has again
upgraded Sherapovo, intelligence sources tell WorldNetDaily.
Among these Russian sites is the Sherapovo command and control center, south
of Moscow.
This site, which is large enough to house 30,000 people, is the civilian
command center the Russian government can use in time of war. It is connected
to a network of deep underground bunkers built beneath the Kremlin, and
linked to Moscow by a secret subway line.
Russia's general staff has a similar facility some 20 kilometers away from
Sherapovo, known as Checkov, which can also accommodate an estimated 30,000
people.
A separate facility, located 850 miles east of Moscow at Kosvinsky Mountain
in the Urals, has been designed as the Russian equivalent of the Cheyenne
Mountain Operations Center in Colorado, where the United States can track
incoming ballistic missiles.and command U.S. forces to counter-attack.
Altogether, the CIA now estimates that these sites can house some 150,000
Soviet civilian and military leaders and are impervious to direct nuclear
strikes.
By contrast, the three U.S. nuclear war-fighting command centers (Cheyenne
Mountain, Fort Richie, Maryland and Mount Weather, Virginia) were designed in
the 1950s to withstand first generation atomic weapons. They have not been
upgraded, despite the fact that Russia's arsenal is composed of large
"city-busting" thermonuclear weapons. Only Air Force One is considered to be
invulnerable in the event of a nuclear strike, intelligence sources told WND.
This CIA artist's conception shows a simple underground bunker, before the
recent upgrading. These bunkers are now believed to be linked via secret
subway lines to command centers outside Moscow.
Under the START II agreement, the U.S. and Russia are supposed to reduce
their nuclear arsenals to 3,500 warheads each. Since then, Presidents Clinton
and Yeltsin agreed to a further reduction to 2,500 warheads. Administration
officials are now talking about a START III agreement that would bring the
levels down to around 1500 warheads.
In an unusual move, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, not a source of opposition to
administration plans until now, recently told the administration that they
could not recommend such deep reductions, the Washington Times reported last
month.
Intelligence sources familiar with U.S. and Russian nuclear-war fighting
scenarios explained why: The U.S. must keep back a "strategic reserve" of 400
megatons to deter Russia from attacking U.S. cities, where 80 percent of the
U.S. population lives. By contrast, only 25 percent of Russia's population
lives in cities.
Given the smaller size of current U.S. warheads -- around 300 kilotons --
this task alone would require more than 1,200 warheads, leaving only 300
warheads for strategic targeting, the sources said.
The 200 deep underground sites in Russia are considered "weapons sinks" by
the CIA and JCS targeting analysts, and require multiple warheads each.
"In other words, at 1,500 warheads, the U.S. would have to choose between
attacking missile silos or command and control centers, a dilemma the
Russians wouldn't face," one analyst told WND.
Russia's track record of cheating on previous arms control agreements and its
massive underground building program in recent years provide an ominous
backdrop to President Clinton's negotiations with Russian President Putin in
Moscow.
Putin's brave
new Russia
Intent on resurrecting Soviet power,
renewing strategic ties with China
By Kenneth R. Timmerman
� 2000, WorldNetDaily.com, Inc.
WASHINGTON -- It was supposed to have been the grand finale: a strategic
"grand bargain" worthy of President Reagan's momentous summit meetings with
Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. Instead, it became a discussion
of "moose lips" and plombir, a Russian ice cream dessert.
After a two-day summit in Moscow, President Bill Clinton and President
Vladimir Putin -- a former KGB operative -- issued a Joint Statement on
Principles of Strategic Stability that reaffirms with Cold-War certainty the
centrality of nuclear weapons and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. But it
fell far short from the type of sweeping arms-control agreement the
administration had been hoping to achieve just a few months ago.
Earlier this year, congressional leaders were getting briefed by the White
House on a "grand bargain" the president wanted to leave as his arms-control
legacy: Russian "approval" of U.S. plans to deploy a limited National Missile
Defense, or NMD, in exchange for START III cuts to bring our strategic
arsenal down to 1,500 or even 1,000 nuclear warheads.
The White House argued that it was a "two-fer," since it gave Republicans in
the Senate what they wanted on missile defense while moving toward further
nuclear arms reductions. But the president and his arms controllers ran into
a brick wall.
To reassure the Russians, the administration had agreed to impose technical
limitations on the speed of anti-missile interceptors, known as the
"demarcation agreement," so no ABM system eventually fielded by the United
States would be effective against a Soviet strategic strike.
We must advise you that in our judgment any agreement along the lines you
have proposed to Russia would have little hope of gaining Senate consent to
ratification. -- April 17 letter to President Clinton signed by 25 U.S.
senators.
An S-400 anti-missile interceptor undergoing test-launches in 1999.
But missile defense advocates argued that the new limits prevented the U.S.
from developing effective defenses against virtually any missile. Now it
appears to many that the administration got snookered, pure and simple.
"At the same time they were negotiating the new limits with the Clinton
administration, the Russians were developing a new anti-ballistic missile
system that they were seeking to sell on world markets," Rep. Curt Weldon,
R-Pa., told WND. "And guess what: That new system, the S-400, falls right
below the threshold of the demarcation agreement."
The upgraded S-400 system can be fitted with anti-ballistic missiles capable
of intercepting targets at distances up to 400 kilometers. Shown here is the
A-2500 missile, with a range of approximately 150 kilometers. The S-400
system was designed to fall just below the threshold of the ABM Treaty
modifications championed by the Clinton administration. What the
administration outlined to us was extremely cynical. -- Congressional
arms-control specialist
The new Russian system will employ a new interceptor capable of reaching
targets up to 400 kilometers away, far beyond the capabilities of the U.S.
Patriot or the Israeli Arrow, the only anti-missile systems currently on the
market.
But that wasn't the only reason the Senate opposed Clinton's proposed grand
bargain with Russia. On April 17, twenty-five senators wrote Prsident Clinton
after receiving administration briefings on the proposed new arms-control
agreement.
"We must advise you that in our judgment any agreement along the lines you
have proposed to Russia would have little hope of gaining Senate consent to
ratification."
The problems were several. First, the senators saw no interest in reaffirming
the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972, which lapsed in 1991 with the
collapse of the Soviet Union and has never been resubmitted. But more
importantly, they did not want to give Russia a "veto" over U.S.
missile-defense plans.
The SA-10 is one of several versions of Russia's S-300 high-altitude air
defense missile, the first of a series of new Russian tactical anti-ballistic
missile systems. The SA-10 is roughly comparable to the Patriot.
"What the administration outlined to us was extremely cynical," one top
congressional arms control specialist told WND. "In effect, they were saying
they would withdraw the ABM Treaty demarcation agreement, which the Senate
has repeatedly indicated it would reject, in favor of a new Treaty that would
include the same provisions under the guise of new strategic arms
limitations."
One week after the Clinton letter, Sen. Jon L. Kyl, R-Ariz., and 29 other
senators wrote to Defense Secretary William Cohen urging him not to limit the
Pentagon's national missile-defense plans, because of the growing missile
threat from countries such as North Korea, Iraq, and Iran.
Phased-array radar used for long-range tracking of incoming ballistic
missile, as part of the S-300 system.
"We believe that the ground-based system proposed by the administration is by
itself inadequate and therefore should be seen as a first step toward a more
comprehensive defense that also includes sea-, air- and space-based assets,"
the senators wrote.
Under the START II agreement, which the Russian Duma finally ratified this
April after years of hesitation, the U.S. and Russia agreed to cut their
arsenals to 3,500 each. But the Russians themselves now admit they are
financially incapable of maintaining such a large nuclear arsenal in any form
of battlefield readiness.
Alexei Arbatov, deputy chairman of the Committee on Defense in the Russian
Duma, explained the calculus to a Washington audience at the Carnegie
Endowment on May 18.
"If Russia were to preserve its forces at the level of START I, which is
6,000 nuclear warheads, then over 10 years Russia would have to spend about
$33 billion only on strategic nuclear forces and C3I systems. It would mean
spending 65 percent of its total defense budget yearly on strategic nuclear
forces," he said.
The SS-25 was deployed in the late 1980s. A newer version, the SS-27 (or
Topol-M) was first deployed in December 1999, and is the first ICBM of the
post-Cold War era. It has a range of 10,000 kilometers and carries a single
warhead, but Russian officials say it could be converted to carry as many as
10 MIRVs if Russia chose to break out of the START II limits. President Putin
has threatened to abandon START II if the United States abrogates the ABM
Treaty, according to Duma defense expert Alexei Arbatov.
Similarly, Arbatov added, going down to the START II levels would require $26
billion in expenditures. At these levels, "nothing will be left for the
conventional forces and for all other functions for Russian armed forces."
If so, why are they building new weapons, including a new generation of
ICBMs, and plunging billions of dollars into sites such as Yamantau Mountain?
The secret, according to former CIA strategic analyst Peter Pry, lies in
the unrestructured Cold-War mentality of the Russian military and of top
civilian leaders such as Putin who rose from the ranks of the KGB.
"Russia's military leaders still believe that the United States is capable of
launching a pre-emptive nuclear strike out of the blue," Pry believes.
As proof, Pry pointed to a dramatic incident that occurred on Jan. 25, 1995,
when the United States and Russia came closer to all-out nuclear war than at
any time in its history -- and all because of a mistake.
Triggering the crisis, which lasted a scant 24 minutes, was the launch of a
scientific rocket by Norway, which the Russians mistook for a surprise
nuclear launch by the United States.
"Norway's missile launch would have gone more smoothly had someone bothered
to forewarn the Russian military about it," Pry wrote in a 1999 book called
"War Scare: Russia and America on the Nuclear Brink."
Instead, the Clinton administration - whether arrogantly or carelessly is
debated -- never thought the Russians would be paying any attention. When the
four-stage Black Brant XII rocket went up, Russian early-warning radar picked
it up almost immediately, classifying it as a possible U.S.
submarine-launched missile.
"The Russians feared it was a surprise strike by a single missile carrying an
Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) warhead," Pry told WND. "They believed the United
States intended to take out their command and control and render them
vulnerable to a massive follow-on strike of U.S. bombers and missiles."
Within minutes, the Russians had activated all three nuclear briefcases, with
Defense Minister Pavel Grachev and Chief of the General Staff Gen. Mikhail
Kolesnikov advising President Yeltsin to launch Russian ICBMs against
America.
"They had 12 minutes to make up their minds to launch a pre-emptive attack,"
Pry says. "They watched the Norwegian rocket go all the way up, then saw that
it was heading away from them. But they waited until it actually landed
before standing down."
Back in Washington, D.C., no one was the wiser until the next day, when
President Yeltsin mentioned the incident during a routine speech.
"Yesterday, I used my 'attach� case' for the first time," he told an audience
at the Novolipetsk Metallurgical Combine in Lipetsk. "I called the defense
minister and the relevant services and asked them what kind of missile it was
and where it had come from. Within a minute I had the information -- the
entire flight of the missile had been monitored from start to finish. They
[who launched the missile] clearly did not expect us to detect the missile on
our radar. Maybe someone had decided to test us out? In short, we had cause
to thank our military. The army has shown that it is not weak, as the mass
media are claiming."
Deployed in the mid-1980s, the SS-24 uses "cold launch" technology that
ejects the missile from the launch tube using compressed gas, before its main
rocket motor ignites. This allows Russian launchers to be reloaded several
times. Several Russian ICBMs use cold launch technology. Most U.S. missiles,
except for the Peacekeeper, are "hot-launched," burning up the silos so they
cannot be re-used. The SS-24 was the first rail-mobile ICBM, a deployment
mode considered but finally abandoned by the United States.
NASA and Norway launched an identical missile in January 1999, and once again
failed to inform the Russian General Staff. This time, Pry says, he learned
of the launch before it occurred, and managed to convince the State and
Defense Departments to inform the Russians.
"Nonetheless, our lapse in initially failing to take extra steps to warn the
Russian military about another missile launch from Norway -- given what
happened the last time -- is an astounding oversight," Pry wrote.
These two incidents are what prompted the U.S. and Russia to agree to set up
a joint early warning center in Moscow during this latest Moscow summit. "If
Russians are strategic paranoids, we are strategic optimists," Pry says.
Duma member Alexei Arbatov supported Pry's gloomy assessment just last month.
"START II was primarily ratified because the Russian public and political
elite think that the nuclear threat is great, that the United States is keen
on achieving superiority, and that nuclear weapons are still relevant as ever
for Russian security and U.S.-Russian relations," he said.
For Richard Perle, the former Pentagon administration official who helped
devise the successful strategy that ended the Cold war, Russian behavior
during the January 1995 incident "shows that the Cold-War mentality is highly
resistant. The sooner we get out of it, the better."
Perle believes that the Clinton-Putin summit was "an unwitting conspiracy to
keep the Cold War going. Neither one thinks that is what they are doing. But
years after the end of the Cold War, they are still obsessed by nuclear
weapons. Who is the enemy? Are the Russians going to attack us with nuclear
weapons? Are we going to attack them? Nuclear weapons are the least important
subjects to be discussing at a summit.
"Instead, we should be talking about corruption, about getting the Russian
economy going, about investment. We should be talking about our relations in
the trans-Caucuses, and about Russia's relationship with Iran, where we have
real differences."
Perle's views were echoed by Texas Gov. George W. Bush in a recent speech on
U.S. strategy.
"It is time to leave the Cold War behind," Bush said, "and defend against the
new threats of the 21st century."
Another area of concern is Russia's growing strategic relationship with
China.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991 through early 1999,
China purchased at least $6.5 billion in weapons from Moscow, according to
official Russian statistics. But according to Russian researcher Dr.
Alexander V. Nemets, "the actual figure is probably two to three times
higher." China currently employs some 7,000 Russian defense scientists and
engineers, Nemets says, and has made extensive semi-covert purchases of
Russian technology, including missile production equipment, an entire
uranium-processing plant and assistance for strategic programs including
nuclear missile submarines.
Following the December 1999 summit in Beijing, Yeltsin and Jiang Zemin
formalized the Chinese-Russian military alliance and concluded an agreement
to sell $20 billion in weapons and technology to China over the next decade,
Nemets says.
"There is no area of Russian military technology which is off limits to
China," he added.
Some U.S. analysts believe Russia is shooting itself in the foot, but Nemets
says the view in Moscow is quite different.
"Both Russia and China have become anti-Western powers, and are expanding
their ties to so-called rogue regimes, such as Iran, Iraq, Sudan, and Libya,"
Nemets says.
"The U.S. is wasting its time trying to engage the Russian government in
Moscow," Nemets believes. "Instead, you should be looking to the regions
outside Moscow, and engaging regional leaders."
16 ways to cheat on arms control
Russia's continual violations
disregarded by Clinton team
By Kenneth R. Timmerman
� 2000, WorldNetDaily.com, Inc.
The Soviet Union had a long history of arms-control violations. As
WorldNetDaily revealed on Monday,the United States discovered a secret cache
of SS-23 nuclear missiles left behind by the Red army in Eastern Europe at
the end of the Cold War. After persistent U.S. criticism, the Soviets
eventually were forced to dismantle a giant missile defense radar at
Krasnoyarsk, built secretly in the 1980s.
In a recent book, authors Tom Mangold and Jeff Goldberg reveal an even more
terrifying Cold-War discovery: In the late 1980s, the Soviet Union had built
and was actively testing biological warheads for their multiple-warhead SS-18
ICBMs. ("Plague Wars: The Terrifying Reality of Biological Warfare")
U.S. intelligence analysts first noticed signs of this alarming development
while examining satellite photographs of a Soviet nuclear test site in
Kamchatka in November 1987. The early photos showed an odd series of "tubes
and hoses that were connected to the missile warheads in storage silos and at
the launch sites." It took the analysts nearly a full year to realize that
the tubes were refrigeration units.
"Since it was unlikely that the Soviets were going to launch an
intercontinental ballistic missile attack on the West using iced-beer
warheads," the authors wrote, "a serious and gloomy atmosphere settled over
the analysts. ... The refrigerating units were keeping something cool,
therefore alive, for the journey through space. And, if it was living, and
offensive, it had to be bacteria or viruses."
Their hypothesis was verified with telemetry data from Soviet missile tests
in 1988, which showed "clear flight anomalies" only attributable to
biological warheads.
"The Soviets knew their BW warheads would work because they had thoroughly
and secretly tested their rockets and warheads, using bio-simulants." All
this occurred in total violation of the joint Soviet-U.S. pledge in 1969 to
abandon all research and development of offensive biological weapons, as well
as the Biological Weapons convention.
But all that occurred during the Cold War. In November 1989 the Berlin Wall
came down, in July 1990 the Red army retreated from Eastern Europe, and in
December 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed.
The Cold War may be over, but Russian arms control violations continue.
In the early 1990s, reports began to surface of Russian missile technology
appearing in India, Iran and China. In 1995, the United Nations discovered
that guidance kits taken from SS-N-18 strategic missiles had been transferred
by Russian companies to Iraq.
Despite numerous news reports and repeated inquiries from Congress, the
Clinton administration consistently refused to apply U.S. legislation that
would have imposed sanctions on the Russian companies involved in these
deals, or cut off U.S. aid to the Russian government.
In 1998, Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., asked the Congressional Research Service to
compile a list of illicit Russian transfers of weapons and weapon-related
technology since the end of the Cold War that violated treaty arrangements or
various provisions of U.S. law.
In all, the Congressional Research Service found 16 such cases :
Most of these Russian transfers violated international agreements such as the
Missile Technology Control Regime or the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of
Nuclear Weapons.
But they also violated U.S. nonproliferation laws, which required the
administration to impose economic sanctions, and in some cases to cut off
aid.
Since the list was compiled, Russia's missile transfers to Iran have
continued unabated. Without Russian help, Iran would never have been able to
develop its Shahab-3 medium-range missile, which was deployed last year and
arrayed against Israel, or the 4,500 kilometer-range Kosar, which is still
in development.
President Clinton vetoed legislation in 1998 that would have sanctioned
Russia for the Iran missile transfers, only to sign it into law last year
when the same bill passed both houses of Congress almost unanimously.
"Clinton stuck his finger in the air and felt which way the wind was
blowing," recalls Weldon. "This administration has the worst record on arms
control of any administration in 50 years, which is why Congress will not
approve any new arms control agreement if they have the audacity to present
one."
Abbreviations used in CRS report:
Regimes:
BWC Biological Weapons Convention
MTCR Missile Technology Control Regime
U.S. Laws:
AECA Arms Export Control Act
EAA Export Administration Act
FAA Foreign Assistance Act
FOAA Foreign Operations Appropriations Act
IIANPA Iran-Iraq Arms Non-Proliferation Act
NPPA Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Act
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