This
threat was all too credible and it put Washington in a bind. It did not want to
annoy the Russian President, Boris Yeltsin, by recognizing Chechnya, but it
could not risk allowing nuclear weapons to fall into the hands of the mercurial
Qaddafi. Stalling for time, Washington asked Dudayev for more details. Dudayve
said that the Americans were welcome to send a team to inspect the weapons,
provided they did not tell the Russians.
The
Americans knew that Yeltsin would be outraged if he discovered that they were
sending agents to Chechnya behind his back. On the other hand, there was the
terrible possibility that Dudayev was telling the truth. Weeks of stormy
meetings followed in Washington. Eventually, it was decided that they had to
send an inspection team. But the Russians were secretly informed. To
Washington’s surprise, they were happy the Americans were sending in
inspectors: they also believed that the threat was credible as the Kremlin had
no idea where most of its nuclear weapons were.
Many
of them had been lost in transit in the confusion that came during the Soviet
pull-out of former Warsaw Pact satellite countries after the fall of the Berlin
Wall in 1989. Then when the nuclear stockpile was being withdrawn from newly
independent states such as Kazakhstan, the railway system broke down and
thousands of freight cars went missing every day, some of which were carrying
nuclear weapons.
It
turned out that Dudayev was bluffing. When the Americans confirmed that he did
not have any nuclear weapons, Yeltsin sent the Russian Army into Chechnya,
beginning the Chechen war which over the next two years would cost 100, 000
Chechen lives and which continues to this day.
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