THE CODES TO THE USSR'S TACTICAL NUCLEAR WEAPONS WERE SEIZED BY THE AUGUST COUP PLOTTERS IN 1991

Herald Sun

August 27, 1991 Tuesday

YELTSIN N-VETO

LENGTH: 542 words

THE Russian republic wants a veto over the Soviet Union's nuclear weapons. Russian Vice-President Alexander Rutskoi said the republic was seeking the veto after the disclosure that the Soviet coup plotters seized the codes for launching the country's tactical nuclear weapons. And Russian leader Boris Yeltsin said today his federation also reserved the right to question its borders with any republic that withdrew from the union. There are already suggestions that Russia take the USSR's seat at the United Nations Security Council.

The Russian President's statement seems certain to send shivers across the other 14 republics of the Soviet Union. With virtually every inter-republican frontier a potential source of dispute, Mr Gorbachev's Union Treaty had declared all borders inviolable. The treaty as it stands is all but finished. Mr Yeltsin's spokesman, Pavel Voshchanov, said the warning mainly referred to northern Kazakhstan and to the Donbass region and the Crimea in the Ukraine.

"If these republics enter the (renewed) Union with Russia it is not a problem," he said.
Mr Rutskoi said the revelation about the nuclear codes falling into the hands of the coup plotters at the weekend raised questions about the security of the vast nuclear arsenal in times of turmoil.
The plotters who approached President Gorbachev at his Crimean villa on Sunday seized a briefcase containing the launch codes, but apparently could not have used them without his help.
Co-operation was also required from a top Defence Ministry official and the military's General Staff, according to the editor of Jane's Soviet High Command, Richard Woff. He said he believed the Soviet system for deploying the weapons rendered the coup plotters incapable of using them.

"He would then have had to co-ordinate the other two points of the triad," Woff said of those who held the codes. "And I don't think he'd have been able to do this. "There would have been someone on the General Staff who would have sensed the madness of this and would have pulled the plug." The new Soviet Defence Minister, Yevgeny Shaposhnikov, also denied that the coup plotters - some of whom may still be at large - ever had the ability to launch a nuclear strike.

But Woff, in an interview, said the seizure of the codes constituted a serious breach of security nonetheless. "There was a very serious possibility of the codes falling into the wrong hands," he said. "If they did get hold of this case, why were they allowed to get hold of it?" US Defence Secretary Dick Cheney told NBC television on Sunday that the codes were retrieved after the coup collapsed last Wednesday and were returned safely to the central government. "Most of the strategic systems that we are most concerned about are in the Russian Republic," Mr Cheney said. "They appear to be, at this point, clearly under the control of the central government."

Hundreds of nuclear weapons remain, however, in Soviet republics trying to break away from the central government.But Woff said those republics would be incapable of launching the weapons.
Apart from Russia, other strategic weapons are thought to be deployed in the Ukraine and in Kazakhstan.
- AGENCIES