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Far too often, governments behave like toddlers. They’re fickle. They don’t like to share. And good luck getting them to pay attention to any problem that isn’t directly in front of them. They like to push each other to the brink, and often do. But when they don’t, it’s usually because other people enter the proverbial room. Private citizens who step up and play peacemaker when their governments won’t or can’t. People who strive for collaboration and understanding, and sometimes end up finding it in unlikely places. Those people and the work they do, they’re the reason we’re all still here.
This season, we’ll hear from scientists, analysts, and idealists who have gone to crazy lengths just for a shot at making peace and building understanding From smoke-filled rooms in North Korea to secret labs in the Soviet Union… to the lawless seas, and even to the depths of outer space (or, at least, the conference rooms where they talk about the depths of outer space). This podcast tells the stories about the people holding us back from the brink.
Hosted by Dr. Jeffrey Lewis, a professor and scholar at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies on the Nonproliferation and Terrorism Studies faculty. Previously, he served as Director of the Nuclear Strategy and Nonproliferation Initiative at the New America Foundation and Executive Director of the Managing the Atom Project at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. He is the founder of ArmsControlWonk.com, a leading resource on disarmament, arms control and nonproliferation issues.
Produced by Gilded Audio and the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies.
OPEN
I. Skinny Dipping in the Soviet Union
[00:00:00]
In July 1989[1], nuclear physicist[2] Tom Cochrane found himself in an unlikely scenario.
TOM: for me, it was overwhelming, I would say [chuckles].
Tom was in the Soviet Union with a group of American Congressmen and a couple reporters from the New York Times and the Washington Post.[3] They had spent the day visiting one of the main sites where the Soviets produced plutonium[4] for their stockpile of 30,000[5] odd nuclear weapons. It was also the site of what was the world’s worst nuclear accident, before Chernobyl.[6]
TOM: We had a very interesting tour. You know, the people were seeing Americans for the first time.
“Interesting” is an almost laughable understatement. The Cold War was not over yet. This was an unprecedented look inside a Soviet nuclear facility.
And to the group’s surprise, after they walked through the facility, [00:01:00] they got on a boat.
TOM: Many of the lakes there are heavily contaminated but if you went upstream, there was a lake that wasn't contaminated.
And it was that lake that they were headed to because the Soviets, they had something planned…
TOM: They had set up a picnic on an island.
It was there – on an island in the… less contaminated… Lake Irtyash [UR-tee-ASH] – that this unlikely group sat down to eat – Having just visited a place no one thought foreigners would ever see.
There was a stand of birch trees, a long table, place settings, white linen, lots of food and…[7] Tom, idly chatting with his companions about the plutonium production site they had just toured.
[00:02:00] It was summer, it was warm, the mood was celebratory.
TOM: Head of that laboratory was an 86 year old gentleman.
Our fact checker says he was only 73 but I’m sure to a much younger Tom, he seemed quite old…
TOM: He took off all his clothes and jumped in the lake, went swimming, and a couple of us did the same, but the congressman kept their clothes on cuz the reporters were there.
BEAT
And that’s how... Tom found himself skinny dipping with the number one enemy of the United States... Only days after conducting a nuclear experiment that everybody had thought was impossible.
TOM: 95% of the time you're doing your day job, [00:03:00] spend 5% of the time trying to figure out how to change the world. And most of those, 9 out of 10 of 'em are not going to work. But if you can hit on one of 'em, it works.
This episode, a group of scientists hatch a plan to board a Soviet warship with a nuclear weapons detector to show the US government it can be done: The Black Sea Experiment.
REAGAN: I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes…
TRUMP: The Iran deal is a disaster. They're testing missiles. And what is that all about?
BUSH: I wish we'd have found weapons of mass destruction.
REAGAN: The maxim is doveryai, no proveryai, trust but verify.
GORBACHEV: (Translated from Russian) You repeat that at every meeting!
[00:04:00]
In the 1980s, the idea of a nuclear war had become so ever-present in our culture.[8]
When I was 8, I asked my Dad if the Russians nuked the factory he worked at. Would we all die? He told me no, and that was the first time I realized he was capable of lying to me.
REAGAN: During the past decade and a half, the Soviets have built up a massive arsenal of new strategic nuclear weapons, weapons that can strike directly at the United States.
The Cold War was ramping up. And it showed no signs of abating. Because the US government and the Soviet government were not working with each other. Instead, they were in a game of nuclear chicken.[9]
FRANK: Reagan brought in with him the view that the Soviet Union thought [00:05:00] it could fight and win a nuclear war. Therefore we have to posture ourselves so we can fight a nuclear war.[10]
This is Frank von Hippel. He’s also a physicist.[11] Frank was at that picnic with Tom on Lake Irtyash [UR-tee-ASH]. I don’t know if he skinny dipped and I don’t know if I wanna know…
FRANK: I think probably the Assistant Secretary of Defense[a], who started saying, you can survive. All you need is a shovel, uh, dig a hole and, I don't know, cover with boards and with some dirt and, and you can survive the, the, uh, radioactive fallout from a, a nuclear war.[12]
It was actually the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering and the original quote is even worse than that. But just believe me when I say a shovel and some boards are not gonna get you out of this.
Reagan called the Soviet Union an evil empire.[13] He joked about bombing the Soviet Union out of existence. [00:06:00]
REAGAN: Would outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes…
END CUE
Both countries were building more and more and more nuclear weapons.[14] And also talking openly about the prospect of a nuclear war.
Which made it all the more exciting that a group of American scientists would soon receive an invitation. To meet with the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow.
FRANK: In Moscow, the image was that the US was controlled by a military industrial complex.
At the time, Frank was the head of the Federation of American Scientists.
FRANK: It sounded good. In, in a way I was being used to, uh, give credibility.
The name “Federation of American Scientists” is actually a bit grandiose – for what it is. The Soviet Union had the Academy of Sciences - which literally controlled Soviet science.[15] The Federation of American Scientists, on the other hand, is more of a lobbying group or interest group.[16]
[00:07:00]
American scientists were afraid of where things were headed and he intended to do something about it. Frank accepted the invitation to Moscow.
FRANK: And we met. What they called themselves was the uh, Committee of Soviet Scientists for Peace and Against The Nuclear Threat.[17]
FRANK: The chairman was Evgeny Velikhov, who was a vice president of the Academy of Sciences[18] and we only learned two years later, was an advisor of Gorbachev.[19]
Frank may not have known it at the time, but ‘Evgeny Velikhov’ would change his life.
Velikhov and Frank decided that maybe they could work together and figure out some way to make a difference in the Cold War.
Over the next few years, they would keep meeting to brainstorm.[20] They had to bide their time and wait for the right moment to act. In the meantime, though, they started what would become a lifelong friendship.
FRANK: They visited Washington, had the meeting with Kennedy and Velikhov had a very heavy suitcase. It turned out that, that Teddy Kennedy [00:08:00] had given him a bust of John Kennedy. And then we took took Velikhov to, uh, ‘The Right Stuff, which is, which was playing in the theaters at the time, and gave him a big, big bucket of popcorn which kept him awake, I think. We all watched it with, and, and, and had a good time.[21]
CLIP: (The Right Stuff): You are way out of line here!
I’m out of line?
Yes Sir
I’m running the show here.
Yeah?
We’ll see about that.
Yeah?
Frank and Velikhov's budding friendship did NOT reflect where things stood between the US and the Soviet Union at the time. Real diplomacy was dead in the water.
RESOLVE MUSIC CUE
FRANK: The way the debate goes is yes, yes, it would be great to, uh, end the nuclear arms race, but it's not feasible for technical reasons. You know, you can't verify it.
REAGAN: I think I could sum up my, my own position on this with the recitation of a very brief, uh, [00:09:00] Russian proverb: doveryai, no proveryai. It means trust, but verify.
“Trust but verify” sounds great, but in practice, it was usually used as a cop-out. Like in 1985– when the new Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev said the Soviets would stop nuclear testing, at least for a time. The Americans refused to do the same.[22] Because, as they said, it wasn’t verifiable.
FRANK: And one of the things they said is, well, maybe they're still testing. How do, how do we know that they're not still testing, maybe small tests that we can't detect?
In other words, banging on about verification was really just an excuse for the US to keep testing nuclear weapons because according to the Reagan administration, it was impossible to verify whether the Soviets were keeping their word.
FRANK: At that time the negotiations of the START Treaty were ongoing[23]
START is the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. Strategic just means the really long [00:010:00] range missiles and bombers, the ones that can reach the US from Russia and vice versa. There were tens of thousands of these weapons that the two sides would've used to fight a nuclear war.
FRANK: And one thing that the Soviets wanted to include in the START Treaty were sea launched cruise missiles. Nuclear Armed Sea Launch Cruise Missiles.
In the eighties, there were a lot of nuclear armed cruise missiles, especially on US ships and submarines. We call them sea-launched cruise missiles or SLCMS for short.. At one point, there was a proposal to ban nuclear-armed SLCMS, a brand new technology that was accelerating the already pretty vigorous arms race. But Reagan disagreed. Again, saying there was no way to verify that the Soviets were complying.[24]
It’s unclear if Reagan believed this, or if he just wasn’t ready to make a deal with the Soviets. This was the kind of seemingly tiny detail that, along with a bunch of others like it, was holding up the entire START treaty.[25]
FRANK: And the American objection was you can't tell the difference between [00:11:00] the nuclear armed and a, and a non-nuclear armed sea-launched cruise missile. We've got both of them, both types.
The thing is you can tell the difference.
MUSIC
Frank and Velikhov knew this. All they had to do was prove it. Enter Tom Cochran.
TOM: We discussed several proposals, but one that was sort of at the top of the list verification of the presence or absence of nuclear weapons on surface ships because at the time, that was a hot topic.
Frank and Velikhov and Tom had worked together before, proving that you could detect nuclear explosions.[26] But verifying the presence of un-detonated nuclear weapons, just sitting on a ship, wouldn’t be nearly as easy because you needed to be CLOSE to the weapon. And everyone assumed – unsurprisingly – neither the US or the Soviet Union would let a bunch of scientists onto their war ships, certainly not the ones loaded with nuclear weapons. [00:12:00]
But if Frank and Tom could prove the Soviets were actually open to scientists boarding their war ships, maybe they could pave the way for nuclear verification and nuclear arms control.
FRANK: And so then Tom suggested to Velikov, well, why don't we do a demonstration?
A demonstration aboard one of those war ships, to show it was possible.
TOM: But Velikhov was at the center of this and made everything happen, and he was a risk taker. He would make decisions even when he didn't have permission.[Laughs].
Velikhov's proposal was unthinkable. Someone would've called you crazy if you had suggested that the Soviets were going to provide American scientists with access to one of their ships with nuclear weapons on it. Up to this point, the Reagan administration had bet that the Soviets would never agree to something like that.
[00:13:00]
But Velikhov had an in with Gorbachev. They just called Reagan's bluff.
MUS resolves
MIDROLL
STEVE: I'm not sure how many Americans have ever sat on top of a Soviet nuclear weapon but I had no reservations or hesitations. I absolutely wanted to do this.
STEVE: Who wouldn’t wanna do that? It was something that's never been done before.
This is Steve Fetter. He's also a physicist. You can't swing a Schrodinger's cat in this podcast without hitting a physicist.[27]
STEVE: 1989. I was, uh, 29 years old.
Steve was a professor of mine at the University of Maryland. When I asked him about this trip, he gave a very professorial answer.
STEVE: I really thought [00:14:00] it might contribute, you know, the idea that I could play even a small part in leading to reductions in nuclear weapons. That's, that's a real powerful motivation.
Yeah, yeah, yeah… I am sure Steve wanted to play a small part in reducing the danger of nuclear weapons. I also think 29-year-old Steve was psyched to go on a Soviet warship with the bomb.
JEFFREY: I'm wondering if you could talk to me a little bit about the preparations that led up to it. I presume you had to get the equipment, you had to get a visa. I don't know how many pairs of clean underwear you planned to take.
STEVE: Tom Cochran took charge of buying the equipment and procured a slug of depleted uranium for the testing, which we, uh, brought up to Brookhaven. Tom put this slug of uranium about the size of a [00:15:00] can of Coke, but it weighed 10 pounds and he put it in a suitcase and he put, I think, rolls toilet paper all around it so it wouldn't roll around. And uh, we flew up to LaGuardia and got a car and went to Brookhaven and checked out all of the equipment, made sure that we knew how to operate everything.
STEVE: And then flying back at LaGuardia, we look around and it, it looks like we're surrounded by the Port Authority Police Department and they want to know: Who is Tom Cochran and what is that thing in the suitcase? You know, he explained it was a piece of uranium that he, of course, we were in compliance, we were carrying a permitted amount of radioactivity, but Tom had to take the train back with this slug of uranium. We did not take the uranium to the Soviet Union. [00:16:00]
JEFFREY: They have plenty.
With the equipment all tested, the team departed for the Soviet Union with some members of Congress in tow
TOM: Congress doesn't deal with an issue until they've read about it in the front page of the newspaper. But I realized if you bring some congressmen and you bring some reporters, you get front page coverage and people start paying attention.
Appropriately the Americans arrived in Moscow on the 4th of July, 1989.
JEFFREY: Did you bring gifts? I mean, I, I noticed in all the pictures you're wearing jeans and sunglasses, you know, and then I, this has to, I mean, there's an enormous juxtaposition, right? In an era in which you like, can't even get jeans in the Soviet Union. I mean, they're like a luxury good.[28] [00:17:00] And here you are. Rolling up all of 29 years old and jeans and sunglasses and like, Hey dude.
STEVE: In retrospect, I should have brought more gifts. I think Tom Cochran brought t-shirts. You might have seen a picture of me wearing this red t-shirt with Black Sea Experiment on it.[29] I think Tom brought a whole box full of shirts to give away.
JEFFREY: Did you save yours?
STEVE: I think I have it somewhere in a drawer. I'm not really a t-shirt wearing person normally…
JEFFREY: You're not allowed to throw it out. I'm just telling you now.
As they prepared for the experiment, Tom got some surprising news.
TOM: They came to me and said, you're only gonna be allowed to take measurements for 10 minutes, which sort of shocked me in terms of getting useful data.
The Soviets were worried that running the gamma detector for too long would reveal top secret information about how the warhead was made. [00:18:00] In fact, top Soviet leaders had gotten wind of the experiment and attempted to stop it.
TOM: The Khariton had opposed the idea and told Gorbachev not to do it, and Gorbachev overruled him. So Velikhov got us a ship.
He wasn't going to let anything get in the way of this experiment.
JEFFREY: I am wondering if you could describe for me the actual experiment
STEVE: The Soviet Union supplied a ship, the Slava, a guided missile cruiser,[30] and they placed a sea launch cruise missile armed with a nuclear warhead in one of the tubes. And, uh, they brought that into port near Yalta.
STEVE: So in our case, the main detector was this, actually a small thing, just, um, a few inches in diameter, but it's very efficient. You can detect the distinctive fingerprints of Plutonium. Or high enriched uranium that are emitted.[31] [00:19:00] They're very distinctive.
To get an accurate reading Steve had to get close to the bomb. Like REALLY close.
STEVE: We climbed up on top of the launch tube right above the warhead. And put the detector there and recorded the radiation that was emitted.[32] Now we were only supposed to do it for 10 minutes…
STEVE: But I had been encouraged to keep on going as long as they would let us. We eventually took about 24 minutes of measurement.[33]
This was an unprecedented look inside a Soviet nuclear weapon. Twenty four minutes was more than enough to determine that there was a nuclear weapon on board. Perched precariously atop a nuclear warhead, Steve proved that verification was possible.
Steve's technique worked very well if you were close to the bomb. But what about detecting it from further away? The Soviets [00:20:00] conducted an even more practical test for that.
TOM: They could see the neutrons come in off the plutonium in the warhead flying by in a helicopter at about 70 meters away.[34] It was very effective.
The American scientists packed up their equipment and a few days later enjoyed that picnic on Irtyash [UR-tee-ASH], followed by that celebratory skinny-dip.
MUSIC RESOLVES/SCENE CHANGE
The success of these experiments surprised no one in attendance. No one, but maybe the members of Congress and their constituents who heard about it in the news. But then again, that's why those congressmen were invited–to see that the obstacles we were facing weren't technical. They were political.
BEAT
STEVE: Although we call this an experiment, it was really a demonstration. There was really no doubt that you could detect [00:21:00] a nuclear weapon, that you could verify that it was a nuclear weapon by identifying certain amounts of plutonium and high enriched uranium. That was never in doubt. What was in doubt was the sincerity of the Soviet government having a new relationship with the United States.
STEVE: We published the gamma ray spectrum in Science Magazine.[35] To my knowledge, it is the only gamma ray spectrum of a nuclear warhead that's ever been openly published.[36]
Anyone can go on the internet now and find tons of information about how nuclear weapons are made. But not this level of detail. I cannot stress enough how insane it would be if a group of scientists were to publish something like this today.
STEVE: Not just the Black Sea experiment, but that whole era that we were living through, there was so much change happening, and it just seemed like so much was possible that had not been possible [00:22:00] for a long time. So it really was a, you know, special moment in history.
In the end, the START treaty didn’t limit SLCM’s like they’d hoped. The official position of the US government remained that it was too hard. A few years later though, after the breakup of the USSR, Washington and Moscow removed all nuclear-armed SLCM’s from their naval ships.[37] Just not as part of a treaty. They decided to trust one another. Neither Navy really wanted inspectors with their gamma ray detectors crawling around on their ships.
And just like that, 'trust but verify' gave way to something simpler: trust.
BEAT (MUSIC TRANSITION)
That ship in the Black Sea Experiment remained in the Soviet and then the Russian Navy for decades.
NEWSCASTER: The Moskva seen here in its prime was Russia's [00:23:00] Black Sea Flagship, but it was destroyed by Ukrainian forces in April. Moscow is fighting back
TOM: The Moskva was the ship that the Ukrainians sunk last year. It was the same ship.
And now, this symbol of Cold War cooperation is lying on the seafloor, another casualty of Vladmir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.[38]
Things look pretty bleak with Russia right now. It seems impossible to imagine ever working constructively with them on anything again.
We are enemies now. But we were enemies then too.
Ronald Reagan had called the Soviet Union an evil empire but inside that empire, [00:24:00] there were lots of people who weren't evil. They also wanted to change things, to build something different, something better. They were just waiting for their moment
TOM: You had to be in the right climate and dadadadada, to make it all, take some chances, and in my case, work with somebody like Velikhov, who was willing to take chances on the other side and make decisions when he didn't have permission from the politburo, he'd just do it. And he was… my hero.
An opportunity like the Black Sea Experiment doesn’t come around very often. So when it does...it's nice to know that there are people like Frank and Velikhov, and Tom and Steve, willing to take a chance.
BEAT
TOM: You need to be prepared to lose. You need to be prepared to spend a decade. You need to create coalitions [00:25:00] cuz you can't do it by yourself. These issues are too big.
TOM: Try to figure out how to change the world.
Thanks for listening - I’m Jeffrey Lewis and this is The Reason We’re All Still Here. It's executive produced by me, Andy Chugg and Whitney Donaldson. Special thanks to the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. This episode was produced by Kelsey Albright, Olivia Canny and Stephen Wood. It was written by Kelsey Albright and me.
Story editing from Sara Joyner. Additional editing from Whitney Donaldson. Technical direction and engineering by Nick “The Wizard” Dooley. Music and sound design by Andy Chugg. Fact-checking by Charles Richter. Additional production support from Gemma Castelli-Foley. [00:26:00] Show Art by Ronin Wood and Anton Maryniuk.
Special thanks to Jessica Varnum, Christine Ragasa, Megan Larson and Maggie Taylor.
[26:56]
________________
[1] BSE on July 5, 1989: Cochrane, “The Black Sea Experiment,” 1.
[2] Nuclear physicist
[3] Delegation included Congressmen plus reporters from NYT and WaPo: Cochrane, “BSE,” 3.
[4] Visited Chelyabinsk-40/65 on July 7.
[5] 39,000 Soviet nuclear warheads in 1989.
[6] Kyshtym Disaster, 9/29/57: Hoffman, The Dead Hand, 320-321.
[7] Photo of picnic table
[8] Don’t really think this needs a citation, but here are 44 songs from the 80s about a looming nuclear war.
[9] 80s were a time of renewed and increasing Cold War tensions.
[10] Accurate assessment of Reagan’s nuclear policy.
[11] Also a physicist.
[12] “Ënough shovels to go around” quote is from Thomas K. Jones.
[13] “Evil Empire” speech
[14] Technically, US stockpiles of nuclear weapons were stagnant or going down slightly during the 80s, but it is true that we were still building more warheads to replace older weapons.
[15] Soviet Academy of Sciences plans, coordinates, and performs Soviet R&D on national scale.
[16] About the FAS
[17] CSS
[18] Velikhov as Chair of CSS and at SAS
[19] Velikhov as advisor to Gorbachev
[20] Von Hippel, “Citizen Scientist, part 4” 3.
[21] Assuming this is Velikhov’s May 1984 visit, The Right Stuff was still playing in some DC-area theaters despite bombing at the box office.
[22] Gorbachev announces moratorium in 1985; lifts it in 1987 because US has not stopped testing
[23] START talks begin in 1982, continue throughout decade
[24] SLCMs left out of INF Treaty
[25] SLCMs the major START-blocker
[26] Cochran, “BSE,” 1.
[27] Fetter’s credentials
[28] Jeans a smuggled luxury good in 80s USSR
[29] Red t-shirt
[30] Slava a guided missile cruiser
[31] Detected signatures of plutonium and uranium: Fetter & von Hippel, “The Black Sea Experiment,” 325.
[32] Directly over the warhead: Fetter & von Hippel, “The Black Sea Experiment,” 324.
[33] Told 10, allowed 24: Cochran, “BSE,” 4.
[34] Soviet helicopter test detected at 76 meters: Fetter & von Hippel, “The Black Sea Experiment,” 327.
[35] Science article
[36] Could not find any other published gamma ray measurements of a nuclear weapon.
[37] Bush-Yeltsin talks of 91-92 effectively removed SLCMs from both sides.
[38] Slava was renamed Moskva.
[a]Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1982/11/15/chilling-talk-of-a-secret-plan/cf9f693d-8e6d-4a48-86e8-10f59a00ec8d/