IN 1991, THE SOVIET UNION broke
up into its constituent parts. This left the world’s second largest nuclear
arsenal divided among fledgling nation’s states. Thousands of atomic warheads
and hundreds of tons of plutonium were abandoned in far-flung places in the
hands of nuclear scientists who did not get paid for months on end, and
soldiers who had a grow their own potatoes and forage for food. Organized crime
quickly permeated every facet of the former Soviet society.
Ex-Communist officials led the
stampede to embrace capitalism with a vengeance: everything was for sale. This
meant that after the end of the Cold War, the world was not the safer place it
may have been supposed, but an infinitely more dangerous one. Instead of two
relatively stable superpowers standing eyeball to eyeball, aware that a war
would mean their own destruction, every crackpot terrorist or tin-pot terror
state had access to nuclear weapons – if they could pay for them.
While Russia let other former
Soviet republics go their own way, it tried to hold on the Caucasian state of
Chechnya, but the Chechens themselves had other ideas. In 1944 the Chechen
warlord Dzokar Dudayev, a former Soviet nuclear-bomber general, seized control
of the state. He claimed he had stolen two nuclear warheads when the Soviet
army had withdrawn two years before and threatened to sell them to Libya’s
Colonel Qaddafi unless the Americans recognized Chechnya as an independent
country.
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