not paid for months. and a young man who was working for the united nations department of energy was on a mission to go to all the facilities that had highly enriched uranium and plutonium, fissile material to make sure the video cameras and the portal monitors and all the fancy equipment that the united states had installed in the 1990s was working. and at the institute of theoretical and experimental physics, located on a very pleasant 89-acre estate in moscow, he went. all the protection was there. at this institute there were dozens and dozens of 6-inch long canisters clad in aluminum of highly enriched uranium for which they had used for their experiments. but as he looked around he realized there was one very unanticipated problem.

all the guards who have manned the video cameras and watched over the uranium had not been paid and walked off the job. the canisters were sitting there nobody but video cameras looking at them. this man gathered all the employees at the institute that he could find, 32 people into the deputy director's office on a freezing cold day, so cold he said he never quite experienced anything like that even in moscow. he took out of his wallet all the cash the department of energy had given him for this one trip. his per diem. and put it on the table. and said will you get the guards to stay here for two months until i can get back? $50 a month? this was 1998. not just after the collapse of the soviet union. and the fissile material, the

uranium was sitting in those canisters without a single guard on a moscow afternoon. a few weeks later i visited south of moscow. another famous russian nuclear research institute. there are 10 tons of fissile material there. a lot of it are in very small disks, about 2 1/4 of them. they're not numbered. they're not inventoried. you could put a dozen in your pocket and walk out with them. and they were struggling when i was there that day to begin the process of keeping track of those disks. in the year 2000, the doors swung open for me at the institute of applied microbiology, also south of

moscow. this laboratory was the scene of some of the most diabolical and bizarre research and genetic engineering carried out in the secret soviet biological weapons program, which i'll talk about briefly today. what really amazed me is i had the ability as a journalist to walk around the big tall central building where these experiments had been done. it's the first time western journalists were allowed. the director told us at the institute, which had huge amounts of cultures of these dangerous pathogens was at that time receiving 1% of the budget it had received in soviet times and was desperate looking for other work. that was the year 2000. so these experiences led to ask, what else was going on in russia

in those years? i was the moscow bureau chief for the "washington post." i was able to explore, to roam, to ask questions. and i also asked myself, how did it gets this way? this began a long research effort to roll back the clock. and to understand how the fissile material, the pathogens, the chemicals got so widely spread. and in the process of that research, i got very lucky one day. i discovered the papers from the kremlin. he was a professional staff member in the central committee. he passed away in 2001. but i was doing my research i found out he left behind a large amount of documents from the

time that he served on the central committee as a staff member. he was in the defense department, which was responsible for the entire military industrial complex. and he was one of those fellows who lived by the power of his pencil. and his pen. he filled dozens of large notebooks with notes every day of technical details, things that had happened in the kremlin. arms control. weapon decisions. and what's so fascinating about this archive which will be available publicly to everybody at the hoover institution that you get an inside view of some of the most important turning points and decisions of soviet arms control, weapons development in the last years of the cold war. and i think this is really important. because a lot of us in struggling to understand this period -- certainly we have read

and listened to the american history, the declassified history. looked at the documents, asked ourselves questions about what our leaders were thinking. but it was always very difficult to understand what soviet leaders were thinking and saying to themselves. certainly they produced a large amount of material that we could absorb that was intended for us in their speeches and in their articles. but here's a chance to understand what they were saying to each other privately. so today i'd like to share with you two short case studies of things i discovered in this research that we didn't know before. and they both focus gorbachev as we're coming to the 20th anniversary of the fall of the berlin wall, i thought it would be timely to focus on gorbachev and how we learn some very important things about his role in this period. his role is central to my story and in my book.

but i also felt that i discovered things that in all the previous years we didn't know. and definitely got a new understanding of what that role was. i think it's important to remember that gorbachev's achievements in ending the cold war. breaking what he said the speeding of the locomotive race. allowing the revolution in europe to unfold peacefully. ending the confrontation in the third world. these were not his first objectives. they grew out of his own desire for radical change at home. rooted in his own experience as a peasant son, a witness to world war ii. a university student. a party official in the years of stagnation and they grew out of his own deep impressions about what had gone wrong. gorbachev did not set out to change the world. but rather to save his country.

and in the end he didn't save the country. but he may have saved the world. and one part of this was gorbachev's deep and profound understanding of the burden of the military and the hypermilitarization on soviet life. he saw this and accumulated this over many years. he didn't talk a lot about it publicly, of course, he couldn't. but when he became general secretary, he was quickly presented with a test. so my first point is, what happened in that year of 1985? what was presented to gorbachev in that very early period when he came to office when reagan had proposed his strategic defense initiative? a lot of people have ascribed to reagan's strategic defense initiative some kind of legendary power to have caused change in the soviet union. and i'm here today to address that with new evidence. and i hope to cause us to

rethink a little bit gorbachev in his role in this context. now you know most of the american literature about this i dare say triumphantless. you know books titled victory, crusader, reagan's secret war. there's a whole set of titles star wars bankrupted the strategic convention. and, of course, reagan said sd.i. was, quote, the single most important reason for the historical breakthroughs of his later years in his presidency. i think the school lacks an essential ingredient. and that is what was happening on the other side in moscow? if you recall reagan announced sdi in march 1983, the same month he called the soviet union an evil empire. and while the soviets geared up a lot of propaganda about it, the documents, the records of the central committee suggest that actually they weren't that

worried about it. there were 20 meetings of the military industrial commission in the third quarter of 1983. not a single one of them was devoted to reagan's strategic defense initiative. but several of them were devoted to the threat of the pershing 2 missiles that nato was about to deploy in europe. the person whose frightened about the russian leadership and they went to the point of discussing him about thinking about how they could turn the moscow abm system to become an intercepter to stop them from coming from germany. in reagan's i second inaugural said the strategic defense initiative would be to render nuclear weapons obsolete. a global shield. this got their attention in moscow. and with 10 days after reagan

gave that speech, the kgb sent out an alert to all agents everywhere to report as much as they could find out about the american policy on the militarization of space. of course, this triggered an avalanche of intelligence all of which came across his desk. and he was surprised that the large amount of it that was cut from newspaper clippings. he also also was surprised of the lack of the critical analysis. very much of it reflected the fact that the agents in the field were unable to really estimate the seriousness of the threat. and they certainly were afraid to underestimate it. so they overestimated it. ten cables came across his desk and 30 to 40% of them he said dealt with the strategic defense initiatives, star wars and missile defense. now, just two months after

reagan's speech and with the kgb now on full alert, gorbachev came to power. at this time when gorbachev was chosen, we had a very, very poor understanding of his real intentions and of who he really was. and we know robert gates who was then deputy director of the central intelligence agency has written that he believed gorbachev was a protege of andropov and protege of slusof and we shouldn't consider him a gary hart and lee iococa. and, of course, it captured some of the early mood and the excitement on the streets. it also said gorbachev was stylistic different. definitely a new suit. not a brezhnev but would there be real reform. radical reform?

the cia expressed some doubt but the director of the cia bill casey sent this report to president reagan with a cover note and on the cover note he said gorbachev and the people around him are, quote, not reformers and liberalizers either in soviet domestic or foreign policy. casey was wrong. at that time the united states was also claiming repeatedly that the soviet union was developing its own missile defense program. its own strategic defense initiative. there was a speech given in july saying of the soviets clearly they see the potential applications for advanced defensive technologies; otherwise, they would not be advancing so much effort and knowledge of this area. we had some good propaganda of our own in a number of glossy reports which were issued by the pentagon and the state department. we showed that the soviets had a

laser reaching up to kill satellites. this pencil drawing appeared at least four times in pentagon and state department brochures. but this laser shooting into the sky did not exist. and, in fact, the soviets at one time wanted to build a laser but after years of trying they had failed. so this is the state of our knowledge of gorbachev. what really was going on? what really was happening was quite different. within three months of taking office all the top designers and constructors in the military space program brought to gorbachev of a colossal program. the new man and they put it on his desk. the entire plan is listed in careful handwriting and notebooks. this plan would build a soviet star wars. it was huge with two major

programs, 137 projects and design in testing and 34 projects in design and research and 115 in fundamental science. and, of course, you could imagine the billions and billions of dollars that they were hoping to get from this. and what did gorbachev do? well, if he was the old school, as our experts thought, and as our cia told president reagan, he probably would have built it. certainly brezhnev would have built it. but he didn't. ...

succeed at the physics of this initiative for 20 years and he and gorbachev talked about other kind of responses. instead of going toto with the u.s. they tried to think of an asymmetrical response and something, yes grandiose and one option that came off was maybe they could just overwhelmed american defenses with more warheads and more missiles. this was a serious discussion in the summer of 1985 and the documents and careful handwriting charts we find that there was talk about putting 38 warheads on every ss-18 missile which at the time had 10.

of course, this idea would have been also a way to accelerate the arms race and gorbachev at least in 1985 mentioned it to reagan at their first meeting at the geneva summit and eluded it after hearing his description to make nuclear weapons obsolete, we will build up to smash your sheep. but gorbachev didn't want that answer and didn't want another arms race and did not want more warheads and build his own stia and ultimately decided not to build it but to use one other aspect of this is magic response, his voice, and try and talk reagan out of it which gave rise to many things that happened after that. i think that this short case shows us that pressures that gorbachev was under where actually much greater than we

understood. we thought old school guy and they're building their own star wars and the truth was they weren't and they didn't. in this sense his role in this time i think deserves more scrutiny for the really courageous decisions he made in this was only one of them we know also the sacking of the top people and the defense ministry after his plane in mid square and the new military doctrine and concessions on intermediate range missiles and the new approach to europe, yes there were a lot of things going on but we have to understand that to the trample list here who just look at the u.s. and reagan as the sole agent of change are wrong because gorbachev really was the one to jean -- choosing a new direction. it's also quite clear that sdi did not pick up the soviet union. the soviet union bancorp itself and anything reagan's mission

might have puzzled them and might be something to talk about. my second case, also applies to gorbachev and also opens a window on the difficulties of this time and raises questions on the other side of the ledger and that is the soviet biological weapons program. as a report in the book the soviet union had an illicit and huge program for the warfare, brezhnev's started at right after and maybe slightly before the soviet union signed a biological weapons convention and it was in full swing in gorbachev's years and involve using genetic engineering to develop pathogen's the world had never known before and was unstoppable by any enemy. it involved pathogens that kill people, animals and plants, not just laboratory research but also factories to create tons of anthrax.

so the question is where does this fit into our understanding of the gorbachev and class knows? i found a lot of evidence that through the time he was general secretary their high level initiatives taken in the beer or a list central committee about biological weapons and i'm going to find a lot of details in the book as early as february 1986 there are two or three people that say gorbachev and signed a five-year plan for biological weapons. february 1986, the month after gorbachev proposes to eliminate all nuclear weapons. i've not seen this document but i have heard of it and certainly in november of 1986 and october 1987 there are more central committee resolutions about biological weapons facilities and fortunately for us they kept track of the states and the titles of the resolution so we can begin to see the

pattern that this was an issue grabbing high-level attention. one of the reasons was that foreign minister who shared a gorbachev's openness for perestroika and new thinking, he had gone to the conference in geneva and in a speech he announced the soviet union would hands force in a display of openness agree to mandatory challenge inspections without right of refusal for any chemical weapons facility and he did this at the time that chemical weapons convention was being negotiated. it was hailed as definitely in advance and verification and something the soviet union certainly hadn't put permitted before but after the speech people in moscow began to get word and especially the people in the biological weapons program because they realized that the announcement had just opened the door for possible inspections of their own

facilities. they certainly could not bar the door to the inspectors and say no, don't come in here, that's biological weapons, whoops, we are supposed to have biological weapons. by 1989 in july 27th, all the top leaders of the biological weapons convention gathered in office of zaid cough, a bureau member in charge of the military complex. at this meeting was the head of the military, the kgb, the general staff, the biological weapons records and research and they were all there to come up with a new resolution to think about how they could come up with some kind of showcase, dare i say, a laboratory that they could show specter's in case for an inspector showed up asking about germ warfare. they did this in by october resolution was passed by the central committee proposing against some sites ready for foreign inspectors but it also

said it to preserve the image you to parity in the field of military biology. of course, there was no parity because the united states had actually abandon biological weapons in 1969 although many soviet scientists think that we didn't and said they worked on germ warfare out of a feeling that maybe we had hit in our program. these worries that more intense in 1989 when a defector, vladimir, took to the whole story in britain and laid it out block's stock and barrel, but by 1989 gorbachev's power was beginning to wane. president george h. w. bush met with gorbachev in december a few months after the director at moltke on ships, at the summit there was no mention of a biological weapon at all and one of the reasons was that bush was afraid to bring it up, it would blow up everything else he was working on with the unification of germany within nato,

strategic arms control, and gorbachev didn't want to bring it up because all he knew about the defector and realized talk of biological weapons program on his watch would cause the world to ask questions about new thinking and glasnost. and there was a little bit of a conspiracy of silence but the soviet leadership for a terribly how to respond if they got ask questions and his continued to enveloped gorbachev and bring in his top advisers including a foreign minister. they had numerous meetings how to respond and then decided if we get questions we will come up with a confidence-building measure and proposed to exchange experts. on may 14th, 1990, the american ambassador's end of britain made a marched to the kremlin to gorbachev's national security adviser in the foreign ministry laying out the whole story what we thank you are

doing, is a quite specific indictment. in secret the also told the soviet leadership that we wouldn't make it public, we have all these other things going on and i got their attention. it's the very next day a letter was written to gorbachev about biological weapons, the first people -- the first piece of paper that shows gorbachev's knowledge and understanding. i brought just a photocopy of this so you can see it, that in the latter it was handwritten the word in -- i think he did it want the typist to know what kind of weapons he was talking about -- it was that sensitive. this letter is in his files. helps us see that, of course, in the soviet system not only had they lied to the world about biological weapons for a long time and not only had they lied to their own people and each other but they also like to their president and this is not

an honest accounting of the whole soviet biological weapons program and is a kind of a coverup within a cover-up, but there is. gorbachev gets the letter. a few days later secretary of state baker is in moscow and raise it again. he said he didn't think it could be so but he would check it out and in the summer of there is a summit, gorbachev comes to camp david with president bush and they begin to discuss biological weapons secretly and again in gorbachev talks about an exchange of visits and in july the whole staff is called together and said we have to respond, they're going to ask us about this again. baker presents more paperwork. again i was covering secretary baker at this time and none of us knew about this, it was all done in secret. fortunately there were taking notes during all these discussions and preserved a lot of the papers and finally if you recall secretary baker and

foreign minister met and it was august 1990 and i have a the talking points which was awfully preserved and i've interviewed secretary baker and he took that as talking points and said, we have no biological weapons and he proposed a confidence-building measure in exchange for visits. this kind of coverup continued through 1990 in exchange of visits and exchange happened. the american experts came home, more suspicious than ever that there was a biological weapons program. so this kind of back-and-forth went on all through 1991 and the end of gorbachev's time and raises an important question. in all of the his struggles for disarmament in his determination

to push back the military and powerful designs and willingness to abandon the outcome of two blocks inexorably at odds and rhetoric of a world free of destruction in danger, there was this one unexplained gap. in the biological weapons drive was going at full speed at the same moment that gorbachev reached the apex of his cooperation with reagan. gorbachev and gordon nuclear-weapons and declared his intention to eliminate chemical weapons. did he also fear the pathogens? you know, i think there are several speculative answers. my own efforts to ask gorbachev meeting with opposition and a little dissembling and he change the subject. i find it persuasive and that he would have known about resolutions to the central committee from 1986 until 1991, but he insisted that he wanted to end the biological weapons

program and the military misled him about that and promised to shut down and didn't review to see proof of that to and another is that gorbachev was told by the kgb during newspaper clippings that they were told america still have biological weapons program and it was hidden. of course, we had a bend in are supportive gorbachev knew of the program what did he and could have done about it? one explanation is the program was so deeply entrenched, so firmly stock in that system that gorbachev decided it would be impossible to change it. he had such an insight into the nuclear priesthood as you call in at the time of chernobyl, he was angry at how they handled the chernobyl reactor. perhaps he saw the biological

weapons program as the same. is also possible that in the latter part of his term having accumulated so much global approbation for glass through thinking in perestroika that he decided he couldn't possibly go public with it and he was too invested in the things you started and would have such a negative impact. lastly, one argument has been suggested by some soviet officials is that gorbachev saw biological weapons as some kind of secret reserve of strength, some military program that would give the soviet union and ed after the nuclear weapons were negotiated. i don't buy that last argument, i don't think gorbachev saw biological weapons as some kind of secret military assets, but i hear this year so as i close i like to tell you that for all his accomplishments the new information in this book that we've learned about gorbachev deepens our understanding of the pressures on him and deepens the

puzzle of why given his dedication to glasnost and his enormous efforts of disarmament in the nuclear field he didn't do more to stop the dangerous biological -- biological weapons program so i'd like to close and hope you enjoy reading this book. i hope that you find new insights and new data for what is to judge how the whole cold war came to an end and i apologize because and this old talks have yet to tell you what "the dead hand" is in on that i hope you ask me some questions. [applause] >> we have time for questions. i ask people to try to be direct and concise and their comments and questions. we will go first down here and then go up there and come back down here. >> my name is jerry. i was an intelligence analyst during this time and like to say everything you say is supported

by evidence and intelligence committee at that time. there was a great deal of evidence that shows the soviet union was an economic crisis going back to the late '70s and they realized they couldn't win the arms race. it's a very -- it was a minority voice so that was just an intelligence judgment that went to the majority. my question to you is on the biological aspect which there was evidence for as well, is that maybe the scientists convinced gorbachev of that they're doing basic research and not building and accumulating biological weapons on a grand scale like they were chemical weapons. we know there was a great deal of chemical weapons and the inventory but biological weapons program was very robust, but hadn't yet reached that stage so i agree with the concept that he was looking at as an ace in the whole an asymmetrical answer that he could put on the table to bargain away with that in his

mind he felt he was sufficiently clean as far as presenting not an operational weapons program. would you comment on that? >> and have to disagree. one is if he's right that he knew they were in violation of the p.w. c. then even a research program was illicit so why would he allow an illicit program or not act on it? secondly the issue of how much they created and stockpile that is an open question. i don't find the question -- answer but i do find a lot of evidence that once the secret research program produced a new pathogen and sometimes you recall as a diabolical because sometimes these are efforts to essentially use genetic engineering to unite to different pathogens in one, something that would be really awful if you let loose on a population there was a second stage which we documented to

prepare the pathogen for delivery in a weapon. aerosol is asian, microencapsulation, that was the duty of the director to get the running and what we have seen is the third phase, the actual weapons delivery mechanisms and that goes to your questions if we ever did learn that but step or the factory was built for anthrax at immobilization capacity to produce tons of anthrax. some people say of to 300 tons a. i remind you that a teaspoon of anthrax spores contains millions. this was an incredible production capacity that would suggest to me that it was not simply in laboratory and that gorbachev all he had to do is ask somebody why do we have this giant factory and it was not research. >> i'm going to that gentleman them will come up here and make our way back so this gentleman right here.

>> thank you. i'm carl from jonas speaks. i assume "the dead hand" it refers to the underground chambers that would allow the military to have a retaliatory strike against united states against the u.s. had a first-rate decapitating the civilian leadership in the soviet union. and you're nodding so i'm assuming it's yes but they kept it all secret so that we didn't know they had this extra deterrent against the first reich. similar to the cuban missile crisis were they installed nuclear missiles in cuba presumably to deter american invasion of cuba yet they did tell us about it. maybe you can continue. >> well, you're right. "the dead hand" was retaliatory system that soviet leaders devised and i actually at one point thought about a completely automated retaliatory system and i think they got worried that

would be too frightening for them so they developed a semi-automatic system which involved in this deep underground bunker in the shape of the globe and several men with a checklist and under certain circumstances lost communication with authority, seismic evidence of a first-rate they would launch small command rockets which would be used to launch all the weapons. i describe this in a chapter in the book but the key point dimension which we puzzled over including the man who worked on the system and describes in the book is why did they keep it secret because of it was intended as a deterrent it would only work as a deterrent and if it was public. by keeping it secret they essentially suggest that they didn't see it as a deterrent. i don't think that i or anyone completely answered this question. one possibility is they were afraid that if they announced it could also be decapitated. i don't know, it seems to me to be speculative.

another possibility is that they weren't thinking of it as a deterrent but simply thinking as some kind of reserve system in case of decapitation and didn't have any doctoral importance. this was discussed my chapter and i was told i think it was a huge mistake to keep a secret and today would like to have a more transparency about it but has been unable to convince anybody. >> we have dmitri, this gentleman and then over here. >> my name is dmitri. and i was at this time there and i have a question for you. it was many times gorbachev

here. why don't you ask him the situation which you have not answered? what is the reason? >> dmitry, i did ask gorbachev and interviewed him twice for this book but he didn't want to answer. his answer to me was i specifically asked ticino the secret organization that carried out the biological weapons research any said there is a fine line between offensive and defensive research in biology and he just assembled and then change the subject. he didn't want to answer it. >> [inaudible] >> wayne, this being washington we have to relate to your topic to iran so would you address to specific questions -- what indications he may have had any of those cylinders or desks, in fact, did end up in iran and seconds more broader structural

question which is during the 1990's all this program was under talks in a my own state department pentagon days dealing with the russian leadership is pretty clear that this was a state within a state and that even yeltsin had no idea and less control of what was going on in the '90s not the '80s. so to what extent does your research indicates that part of the problem was the structural one of a state within a state of nuclear energy matters that in some respects conducted its own foreign policy? >> on the first question, we know the iranians were on the hunt for fissile material and project sapphire carried out in 1995, costs on to bring the iranian-backed they found a large supply of beryllium ingredient needed a nuclear weapons in a great address to pteron. we also know and i report that

there were repeated efforts to scrap the entire military industrial complex for biological technology and missile technology. now, i don't believe that any -- i don't have evidence of fissile material going to iran and because they're trying to develop its own tool cycle using maybe they didn't get that far, but there's solid evidence which i report in the book that russian million note -- missile designers made repeated trips with the connivance of the state to help the iranians work on missile design. i would point out however, that iran seemed incapable of assimilating the expertise and there are still years behind where we thought they would be in the 1990's in missile design. they still have trouble and they also set up a special office in moscow to find this technology and look elsewhere so it's a mixed story but it was a real serious issue and i think this sort of open bazaar nature of russia and the 1990's made it to

an easy target and so did iraq by the way. >> this gentleman right here. >> my name is howard. during the 1980's i spent full-time organizing anti-nuclear grass-roots efforts to stop the mx missile, the trident biological weapons missile, the pershing, attended mass demonstrations, even gave a speaking tour of england and scotland on the subject. i think they are saying that the july 1982 or the june 12th, 1982 demonstration in central park still is the largest outdoor assembly of human beings in north america ever. did we have any impact on the events? >> i think that you did in a way that was surprising. one of the things i urge you to do is get a copy of reagan's diaries and read them carefully because one of the things that

reagan didn't tell us at the time and didn't tell me, i was a white house correspondent for the washington post and didn't appreciate he became in his own mind a bit of a nuclear abolitionists and was out there in central park with he. my favorite anecdotes or it came through occurred in 1986, gorbachev gave a big speech in moscow in january of 1986 calling for elimination of all nuclear weapons with a wonderful charge and time schedule. i reproduced to this in the book fighting in the files. the speech was immediately transmitted, sent back to washington, translated for reagan and secretary shultz got over to the white house to give the president some guidance about what to think about and when he got there reagan was already reading it and he looks up and says, george, why should we wait until the year 2000? >> right. front.

>> i bought the book, i read three-fourths of it and it's very informative and persuasive. let me ask about the trained gorbachev as -- portraying gorbachev proposing a 50% reduction in soviet and u.s. nuclear weapons within a tenure time. reagan while he was interested he seems at times really to be lost in those discussions. he's not a tentative and nonresponsive. do think reagan was really sick at this point? >> no, i was a white house correspondent and covered it from the press room in which didn't tell me very much, but re-examining the record i think that is quite interesting, reagan -- gorbachev prepared carefully and other people in the civic establishment gave gorbachev rather serious

guidelines for the summit. gorbachev didn't follow them and went beyond. he was a steamroller locomotive and knew he wanted and created a trap and the deal was he was going to use -- propose to reagan the irresistible idea of deep production in offensive weapons to bottle up as -- sdi. if reagan refused to is going to shout to the whole world that was his plan going in, it was quite dramatic. reagan didn't prepare that well. he didn't have a plan and, in fact, had a tug of war inside his own circle and one of the reasons for his confusion was that some of the paragraphs his advisers put on the table didn't agree with each other. one paragraph talk about ballistic missiles and another about strategic weapons in the same document and that was one of the reasons for this great confusion. reagan had a war inside his own group, but he did catch the romance what gorbachev was offering and that's why it was such a