N. C. O. I. C.
CIVIL INTELLIGENCE ASSOCIATION
DEFENSE OVERSIGHT GROUP
The Cold War with Russia not over? Of course it's over, all of the news reports, political speeches, and campaign rhetoric since 1991 have been telling us repeatedly that the Cold War is over. The Soviet Union is gone, dead, defunct. The former Soviet Republics are now independent states and Mother Russia is a thrashing carcass, bankrupt, begging the West for monetary support. Trade with Russia and the former members of the Soviet empire is making money for Western investors hand over fist. We are enjoying the peace dividends of the end of the Cold War, closing military bases, and reducing American military forces to the smallest they have been in terms of effective manpower and capabilities since before the beginning of World War Two.
The premise of this paper must be sheer war mongering hyperbole, the paper it is written on good only for the lining of the bottom of a bird's cage, right? Until I heard a guest on a radio talk show, a Mr. Jeffrey R. Nyquist, I too would have made these same assumptions about anyone flatly stating that the Cold War was not over, but Nyquist’s calm and certain delivery of his evidence and his previous employment as a Russian analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency lent such a degree of credibility to his assertions that I felt compelled to locate his article Yeltsin’s Russia Prepares for War and examine it for myself.
After perusing his article, I began using many of the keywords and sources that he provided in the article, most notably Yamantau Mountain, and found myself dumbfounded by the sheer volume of information regarding Russia's preparations to not only fight, but to also survive a nuclear confrontation with America and her NATO allies.
In this paper I shall prove, beyond any reasonable doubt, that the Russian government continues to acquire such technologies, construct such facilities, modernize its strategic arsenals, and stockpile sufficient logistical materials as to enable its goverment, military leadership, and an adequate number of its most critical civilian population to be able to not only prosecute but to survive an all out nuclear exchange with America and her NATO allies. The Cold War with Russia is not over.
Since prior to hearing Mr. Nyquist’s radio interview I naively assumed that the Cold War was over and because I rely heavily upon the investigations that Mr. Nyquist has conducted, I consider it only proper that I present the biographical data that I have gathered about Mr. Nyquist himself so that those reading this paper will perhaps agree that he is sufficiently qualified to be a reliable source: J.R. Nyquist received his B.A. from the University of California at Irvine where he also attended graduate school, working in the Politics and Society Group. Since leaving the program Mr. Nyquist has continued research in Soviet strategy, Cold War history, and social theory. Mr. Nyquist was contracted with the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency from 1988 until 1992 in the Soviet / Russian analysis group. Nyquist has published articles in Conservative Review, and The New American, and is editor of The Final Phase newsletter (5). Mr. Nyquist was considered a reliable source by the Defense Intelligence Agency and I agree.
Prior to engaging in a conflict with thermonuclear weapons the leadership of any country will of course take measures to ensure continuity of government regardless of whether there is any significant surviving population to be governed. Russia has a long history of considering its own people to be expendable as is most recently illustrated by Stalin’s deliberate starvation and whole sale slaughter of millions of the Russian peasantry during the 1920’s. The most certain way of ensuring the survival of a core leadership is a nuclear proof foxhole (Hackett 62, 67, 129).
Yamantau mountain is a gigantic underground base in the Urals whose construction was started during the Brezhnev period. Russia’s 1997 federal budget lists the project as a closed territory containing installations of the Ministry of Defense. On April 16, 1996, the New York Times reported on a mysterious military base being constructed in Russia: In a secret project reminiscent of the chilliest days of the Cold War, Russia is building a mammoth underground military complex in the Ural Mountains, Western officials and Russian witnesses say. Hidden inside Yamantau mountain in the Belorestsk area of the southern Urals, the project involved the creation of a huge complex, served by a railroad, a highway, and thousands of workers. The complex, being built inside Yamantau mountain by tens of thousands of workers, covers an area the size of Metropolitan Washington D.C. (Yamantau 1).
The revelation that Russia's Ministry of Defense is spending billions of dollars to construct a nuclear bomb proof facility deep under some of the toughest geological formations of rock in the world, composed primarily of granite and basalt, is disturbing in and of itself but what is more disturbing is that the U.S. taxpayer is actually helping to pay for it through currency supports and loans to bolster the sagging Russian economy. The current Legislature and Presidential administration continuously refuses to withhold taxpayer dollars from being used by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for such bailouts even after House intelligence oversight hearings reported the following:
(1) The United States and Russia have been working in the post-Cold War era to establish a new strategic relationship based on cooperation and openness between the two nations.
(2) This effort to establish a new strategic relationship has resulted in the conclusion or agreement in principle on a number of far-reaching agreements, including START I, II, and III, a revision in the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty, and a series of other agreements (such as the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the Chemical Weapons Convention), designed to further reduce bilateral threats and limit the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
(3) These far-reaching agreements were based on the understanding between the United States and Russia that there would be a good faith effort on both sides to comply with the letter and spirit of the agreements, that both sides would end their Cold War competition, and that neither side would seek to gain unilateral strategic advantage over the other.
(4) Reports indicate that Russia has been pursuing construction of a massive underground facility of unknown purpose at Yamantau Mountain and the city of Mezhgorye (formerly the settlements of Beloretsk-15 and Beloretsk-16) that is designed to survive a nuclear war and appears to exceed reasonable defense requirements.
(5) The Yamantau Mountain project does not appear to be consistent with the lowering of strategic threats, openness, and cooperation that is the basis of the post-Cold War strategic partnership between the United States and Russia.
(6) Russia appears to have engaged in a campaign to deliberately conceal and mislead the United States about the purpose of the Yamantau Mountain project.
(A) General and Bashkortostan, People's Deputy Leonid Akimovich Tsirkunov, commandant of Beloretsk-15 and Beloretsk-16, stated in 1991 and 1992 that the purpose of the construction there was to build a mining and ore-processing complex, but later claimed that it was an underground warehouse for food and clothing.
(B) M.Z. Shakiorov, a former communist official in the region, alleged in 1992 that the Yamantau Mountain facility was to become a shelter for the Russian national leadership in case of nuclear war.
(C) Sources of the Segodnya newspaper in 1996 claimed that the Yamantau Mountain project was associated with the so-called "Dead Hand" nuclear retaliatory command and control system for strategic missiles.
(D) Then Commander-in-Chief of the Strategic Rocket Forces General Igor Sergeyev denied that the facility was associated with nuclear forces.
(E) R. Zhukov, a Deputy in the State Assembly, in 1996 claimed that the Yamantau Mountain facility belonged to atomic scientists' and posed a serious environmental hazard.
(F) Russia's 1997 federal budget lists the project as a closed territory containing installations of the Ministry of Defense, while First Deputy Defense Minister Audrey Kokoshin recently stated that the Ministry of Defense has nothing to do with the project.
(7) Continued cooperation and progress on forging a new strategic relationship between the United States and Russia requires that both nations make transparent to one another major projects underway or plans under consideration that could alter the strategic balance sought in arms control agreements or otherwise be construed by the other side as an important new potential threat.
(8) The United States has allowed senior Russian military and government officials to have access to key strategic facilities of the United States by providing tours of the North American Air Defense (NORAD) command at Cheyenne Mountain and the United States Strategic Command (STRACOM) headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska, among other sites, and by providing extensive briefings on the operations of those facilities (HR1119; H3943). One must conclude, after these findings, that the Russian government is not only being dissembling about their activities at Yamantau Mountain, but are actively seeking a strategic advantage as regards survivability of command and control during a nuclear exchange. This is definitively a continuation of the Cold War contest since, from the writings of Russian military and geopolitical strategists, whoever can have the largest number of critical personnel survive a nuclear war wins that nuclear war. I base this last statement on the following quotations:
"There is profound error and harm in the disoriented claims of bourgeois ideologues that there will be no victor in a thermonuclear war."
-A.S. Milovidov, Russian Military Theorist
"The principle of the employment of nuclear weapons in combination with other means of destruction follows from the fact that it is impossible to destroy all varied objectives on the battlefield with nuclear weapons alone. It is believed that nuclear weapons, as the main means of destruction, will be employed only for the destruction of the most important objectives; all other targets are neutralized and destroyed by the artillery, aviation, and the fire of tanks and other weapons. "
Colonel A.A. Sidorenko, Soviet Strategist (Hackett 62-66).
"Furthermore, it is inescapable that the Russian military has been taking advantage of American invitations to tour and be instructed in American methods of nuclear command and control, while at the same time denying American military representatives access to anything other than their most out-of-date facilities. This is intelligence gathering for the purposes of gaining a strategic advantage; for if you know how something works it makes it far easier for you to compromise and destroy it. To add insult to injury, it isn't just the mysterious Yamantau Mountain nuclear command and control facility that has forced me to conclude that the Cold War is not over, it is the further evidence that Russia is spending billions of dollars to modernize and upgrade its nuclear submarine force which, with over eighty submarines currently active, is the largest nuclear submarine force in the world, definitely outnumbering America's fleet of twenty four ballistic missile submarines."
(Intelligence Related Excerpts 21-23).
The West continues bolstering the Russian economy with currency supports in billions of dollars while simultaneously denying its own militaries the minimum budgetary allotments required to maintain credible defense capabilities and yet meanwhile:
Though Russia has been in economic turmoil, Moscow has been spending billions on vast underground nuclear war bunkers, new biological and chemical weapons, as well as road and rail-mobile ICBMs. Yeltsin's military continues to deploy 10,000 to 12,000 ABMs (Anti-Ballistic Missiles) and 18 battle management radar's, even though such deployment violates the 1972 ABM Treaty. At the same time, the Russian Navy continues to improve its surface and submarine forces, deploying the largest ballistic missile cruiser of its kind , named " Peter the Great". (Nyquist 3).
Where is the supposedly bankrupt Russia getting money for this military buildup? Could it be that Nikita Kruschev was correct when, as I understand it, he stated in his May 5, 1962 speech before the Soviet Union’s Party Congress that the World Soviet could "bury the Capitalists of the West" and that there would be no need for Soviet forces to engage America and her NATO allies in an all-out nuclear conflict because capitalistic greed and avarice would provide all of the advantage that the Soviet forces would require? Is all this trade going on between Western investors and Russian entrepreneurs, as well as the billions in nuclear disarmament dollars carelessly donated by the American government, actually sowing the seeds for the future destruction of America and her NATO allies? It is hard to fathom that we, in the West, could be so foolish. But Mr. Nyquist asks the obvious question and gathers some chilling answers from former members of the Russian military machine:
Why is a supposedly bankrupt country spending its precious capital on war preparations?
A recent defector from the main intelligence directorate of the Russian General Staff, Colonel Stanislav Lunev, says that "Russians are terrified of the power of America". Lunev points to recent Russian military exercises as evidence of this paranoia. Earlier this year, the Russian Air Force practiced nuclear bombing runs over the Polar ice cap. These bombers would take such a route if they attacked the United States in a nuclear war. What is the thinking behind these exercises? According to Colonel Lunev, Russia's military is doing everything it can "to prepare for a war that it considers inevitable" (1).
To prepare for a nuclear war that the Russian military considers inevitable. Think about that statement. From a former member of the Russian military intelligence services (GRU), it is chilling, to say the least. Perhaps it is time for the American people to start demanding some truth out of their government, rather than continuing to blithely accept the "feel good" rhetoric they are being spoon fed so callously.
The Cold War is clearly not over, in the minds of the commanders of the Russian strategic rocket forces. I conclude that it is the height of folly for America to continue fantasizing that it is. Yet another indication that, as far as Russia is concerned, the Cold War is not over cannot be overlooked. The Russians are buying American and Canadian grain and, rather than feeding it to their clearly impoverished peasantry, they are stockpiling it.
According to Richard F. Staar, former U.S. Ambassador to the Mutual and Balanced Force Reduction Negotiations in Vienna, the "former" Soviet Union has stored at least 362 million metric tons of grain in nuclear blast and fallout shelters.
University of North Carolina economist Steven Rosefielde estimated that these supplies could feed the entire population of Russia and its CIS partners for three years (Nyquist 2).
Furthermore, the Russian military is providing civil defense shelters for a significant part of the population of Moscow, something that the United States has never completely accomplished, and which has now fallen into complete disrepair. When President Nixon canceled the SAFEGUARD ABM system in 1972 and established the principle of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) he deliberately placed the American populace totally at the mercy of the Strategic Rocket Forces of the Soviet Union. The Soviet leadership never bought into the ridiculous concept of MAD, and violated the ABM treaty at every opportunity presented, just as they are not buying into the SALT I, II and III treaties or the missile retargeting nonsense either:
In a move that defies Russia's bankrupt image, the Kremlin is upgrading Moscow's civil defense network of underground towns, tunnels and bunkers. This network includes a nuclear-proof city built beneath Moscow's Ramenki district, capable of housing 30,000 people (Nyquist 2).
Richard Nixon also disbanded all Civil Defense programs, including all funding to maintain essential supplies in the already constructed fallout shelters under many of the buildings throughout our larger urban centers. There is little or no food and water, let alone medical and radiological supplies, currently stockpiled in the basements of all those office buildings despite the fallout shelter signs still being posted. Perhaps this is to give a false sense of security to the average American citizen. For America the Cold War may be over, but not for Russia.
After digging my way through the Congressional records for many hours I finally came across confirmation of yet another of Mr. Nyquist’s assertions, that super computers had been illegally sold to Russia. I found the following references while researching for another article on encryption technologies and they apply directly to Mr. Nyquist’s article:
[Mr. Weldon of Pennsylvania] "It is also a loophole, Mr. Speaker, in H.R. 695 that, in effect, would allow super computers to be sold overseas if, in fact, they have encryption built in. Now, this is kind of an ironic twist here, because many of the cosponsors of this bill voted for an amendment that criticized the administration for allowing Cray super computers to be sold to China and Russia. Yet, Mr. Speaker, in this very provision that some of them have unknowingly cosponsored, there is a loophole that would allow those same super computers, if encryption is contained in those super computers, to be sold overseas with no restrictions. I do not think that is the intent of most of our colleagues, and the amendment that I will be offering on Tuesday will correct that." (National 3).
It is interesting to note that the encryption policy was adopted, without Weldon’s amendment.
Subsequent to this speech by Mr. Weldon of Pennsylvania, it was determined that the previous sales of three Cray YMP and two Cray XMP super computers to Russia had been carried out improperly, and that they should be returned to the manufacturer immediately. Russia not only has failed to comply with this request, but has moved them from where they were originally being installed at the University of Moscow, ostensibly for weather forecasting, and their whereabouts cannot now be ascertained. Perhaps they are even now operating deep inside of the nuclear command and control center under Yamantau Mountain? Could it be that Russia’s Dead Hand system, their "Doomsday Machine", is now modernized and improved with American made super computers? I cannot determine with any certainty, but it is rumored that America's own "Doomsday Machine", called Last Dance , is not equipped with even one super computer, but relies on an out-dated network of (early 1970’s) VAX 11780 mainframes, which is about as far away from a Cray super computer as an abacus is from a 1990’s desktop personal computer.
The Cold War with Russia is not over. A nuclear bomb proof facility the size of Metropolitan Washington D.C., ideally suited as a last redoubt for the Russian government to prosecute and survive a nuclear war from. Nuclear submarine forces being upgraded and modernized. Deployment of tens of thousands of Anti-Ballistic Missiles, and the Battle management radar's required to direct them, as well as super computers to command and control them being illegally acquired. Stockpiling of hundreds of metric tons of grain and other food stuffs, safely storing them in nuclear blast and fallout proof shelters. Expansion and improvement of nuclear blast and fallout shelters around Moscow, sufficient to house and protect 30,000 plus of the Russian leadership.
Congressional investigations find this all to be true and factual.
Defense intelligence analysts find all of the above to be true and factual.
Civilian news investigators uncover and report that all of the above are true and factual.
It is time for the American people, to demand that all further trade and monetary subsidies to the Russian government, as well as the other CIS member states, come to a screeching halt.
The current Presidential administration, and the Legislative branch as well, owe the American people a long overdue explanation of exactly why disarming ourselves, while arming our self-avowed enemies, is in keeping with their oaths to uphold, protect, and defend the Constitution, and the People of the United States, from all enemies both foreign and domestic.
Works Cited
"Yeltsins’s Russia Prepares for War". Jeffrey R. Nyquist. February 15, 1999
http://38.201.154.103/articles/?a=1999/2/15/34330
(17 February, 1999)
"The Third World War"Hackett, John, Sir, General, and McGeoch, Ian, Sir, Vice-Admiral., August 1985. 1st Edition. New York: Macmillan, 1978.
ISBN 0-02-547160-0.
"Yamantau- Russian and Soviet Nuclear Forces." Federation of American Scientists Database. February 03, 1999
http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/russia/facility/c3i/yamantau.htm
(18 February, 1999)
"Providing for consideration of H.R. 1119, National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 1998". (House of Representatives - June 19, 1997)
Lkd. Federation of American Scientists Database.
http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/congress/1997/h970619_a.htm
(16 February, 1999)
"National Security and Defense Issues" (House of Representatives - September 04, 1997)
Lkd. Federation of American Scientists Database.
http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/1997_cr/970904-cr.htm
(16 February, 1999)
"Intelligence-Related Excerpts". National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1998 Conference Report to accompany H.R. 1119. October 23, 1997 105th Congress 1st Session House of Representatives (Report 105-340).
http://lcweb.loc.gov
(17 February, 1999)