The Bush Administration's expectation evidently is that such weapons will then be dismantled or better safeguarded by the Russian authorities. Unfortunately for the Administration, neither its diagnosis of the problem nor its prescription for remedying it are sound. Unless President Bush recognizes this reality swiftly, he stands to compound the damage already done to future relations with the emerging powers in the old Soviet empire by his past overinvestment in the Gorbachev regime. As a practical matter, the fractures and fault lines that have riven the Soviet state have also begun to manifest themselves in the imperial military establishment. Loyalties are being divided along ethnic, geographic and organizational lines.
Paychecks once issued by Moscow center are, for the moment, now being cut by the Russian republic.
There is little willingness on the part of the non-Russian republics to entrust the state that has kept them in thrall for centuries with exclusive possession of nuclear weapons . Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev actually went so far yesterday as to tell Secretary Baker explicitly that his nation would retain its nuclear weapons as long as the Russian republic did so. The picture is even more confused with respect to the far larger number of republics that have short-range, tactical weapons on their soil. It is hard to imagine a more dubious idea than that of insisting that tens of thousands of highly portable nuclear weapons be swiftly put on the roads, rail networks and air routes of the former Soviet Union. Second, it would address the people part of the disintegrating Soviet nuclear arsenal.