How Kazakhstan's Uranium Was Won, and Why Gorbachev Did Not Match SDI

David Hoffman -- the Washington Post writer on Russia's oligarchs -- has a new book out today. The Dead Hand is serialized in a couple of pieces in the Post. One of the excerpts is on the famous Project Sapphire, in which, as O&G readers know, the U.S. spirited out more than have a ton of highly enriched uranium from Kazakhstan to Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The second excerpt is Hoffman's take-down of the stubborn fiction that Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative was responsible for Mikhail Gorbachev's decision to call a halt to the arms race.

The Sapphire story is the first inside account of the 1993 event, and is riveting, as evidenced by the 372 Diggs (at last count) it's accumulated. It's also accurate "with a few errors," according to then-U.S. Ambassador Bill Courtney, with whom I exchanged emails this morning. That's a high mark in Courtney's lexicon.

The missile defense piece is interesting, too. As those of us who write on Russia today know, this isn't the 1990s -- it's extremely difficult any longer to access archived records of official Soviet meetings, and participants are also nowhere near as easy to speak with. Hoffman managed both to piece together his account of Gorbachev's decision not to match SDI, but instead to let the U.S. spend its billions while seeking a deep cut in nuclear arms.

Religiosity and the Meaning of the Shift on Missile Defense

One is pressed to name a technology attached to as much religious-like fervor as missile defense. We of course are not talking the type of fanaticism seen in the lines around the block to buy the latest iPod, but truly mob-like anger resembling the debate over evolution. It's been that way ever since Ronald Reagan gave missile defense national prominence in 1983. A quarter century later, while the defense industry continues to work toward a breakthrough that would make the technology reliable, the news in Eastern Europe and Russia brings missile defense back front and center in all its passion and vitriol -- Obama has canceled George W. Bush's planned missile defense components in Poland and the Czech Republic, and to the technology's advocates, that means heresy.

As we have discussed previously at O&G, Obama has been bound to make just this move simply because of the irrationality of attempting to persuade Iran or anyone else that Europe is held safe by a non-working technology. In a column today in The New York times, here's how Defense Secretary Robert Gates himself describes the attacks against him since the decision: "I have found since taking this post that when it comes to missile defense, some hold a view bordering on theology that regards any change of plans or any cancellation of a program as abandonment or even breaking faith."

So what is this lathered-up debate genuinely about? It is whether or not there will be any resulting dividends from Moscow as a result. Naturally, the Obama Administration denies any link to Russia, and technically that assertion is correct -- the cancellation I think would have taken place regardless of the friction with Russia.

But payback is nevertheless an issue -- Russia remains an outlier on extremely important matters, including the troubling arc of developments in Iran. Looked through that lens, Obama can be expected to act to eliminate other irritants, too, that have no legitimate U.S. strategic value.

Hence, look next for a trade opening with Moscow -- there's no valid reason to block Russia from the World Trade Organization if it meets the criteria. But don't expect the U.S. to back down in Georgia -- among other factors, the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline continues to link Georgia strategically to the West. The U.S. will probably also continue to pursue the strategic Nabucco natural gas pipeline despite the lack of enough fuel to make it work.

While both of Russia's leaders -- President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin -- suggest that they will be more attentive now to U.S. concerns, my friend Masha Lipman at Carnegie in Moscow remarks that "anything that looks like a concession can be viewed by the Russian side as a sign of weakness."

Generally speaking, Lipman is right. But the reduction in the points of friction between Washington and Moscow is still arguably a valid approach to getting Russia on side.