In a world fearing a new era of Russian nuclear threat, it seems timely to remember Evgeny Maslin. A few decades ago this Russian general made a huge contribution to reducing the danger of nuclear weapons.
General Maslin was from 1992 to 1997 the head of the Russian defence ministry’s department responsible for nuclear weapons safety. It fell to him to secure the estimated 25,000 nuclear weapons left on the territories of the Soviet Union after its collapse.
It was a daunting and sensitive task. There were political tensions between the Russian Federation and the newly independent states around it where weapons were located including Ukraine and Kazakhstan. The weapons themselves were often in a hazardous state, stored and transported in poor conditions and managed and guarded by 30,000 largely demoralised staff. There was also the constant threat of the criminal appropriation of nuclear weapons by one of the rogue groups that sprang up in the chaotic aftermath of the end of Soviet rule.
As the US defence secretary Dick Cheney pointed out, even if 99 per cent of the Soviet nuclear weapons were successfully rounded up, that would still have left 250 weapons bigger than the Hiroshima bomb on the loose.
Part of Maslin’s challenge was to persuade Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan to hand over or destroy the nuclear weapons they had inherited from the Soviet state. He urged Russian disarmament too, helping secure agreements with the US whereby at one stage 2,000 warheads a year were being destroyed.
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Maslin worked out what he needed and appealed for international help, especially to the US. He persuaded doubters in the Russian government that “we need it for our own security, not to please Americans”. The countries of the former USSR, he pointed out, lacked specialist transport and storage containers for fissile materials, and damage control equipment for any nuclear accidents. Poor pay and living conditions for military specialists and civilian personnel supposedly looking after the weapons were also a continuing problem, he argued.
His assessments and appeals were persuasive. Maslin developed especially close collaboration with US politicians and officials through the so-called Nunn-Lugar programme, initiated by two US senators. Finance and specialist technical assistance and equipment were provided to help implement Maslin’s plans, including bullet-proof blankets for transporting weapons, and high-security fencing for safer storage.
It was all, Maslin believed, a vital part of post-Cold War confidence-building. Such co-operation, as well as help from other countries including the UK, “strengthens security and transparency in the disarmament effort,” he said. “The whole world also benefits from greater confidence in the future and expanded co-operation in other fields.”
His success in negotiating such sensitive deals was helped by his ability to bond with his international colleagues. “Distrust, strained relations, and suspicions have vanished,” he stated in the mid-1990s. “The negotiations have been conducted in an atmosphere of goodwill.”
Known for his bonhomie, he enhanced that mood of goodwill by conversing with his international colleagues about his love of chess, art and literature (Kipling was a favourite) or indulging his love of wine and cognac. He also regularly broke into song, including ballads about the “Great Patriotic War” against Nazi Germany.
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He liked to see the Russian-US co-operation on the safety of nuclear weapons in the 1990s as comparable to the military and economic co-operation between Moscow and Washington during the Second World War. In the end Maslin’s ambitions were triumphantly fulfilled. Despite the chaotic political and economic conditions in much of the former Soviet Union not a single nuclear warhead was lost, involved in an accident or stolen. For a while at least, the success of his international project seemed proof of a new era in constructive co-operation after the decades of Cold War rivalry.
Maslin had been born into a very different era in Stalin’s Soviet Union in 1937 in a village in the Tambov region about 250 miles from Moscow. He was raised in the nearby town of Algasovo where his parents were teachers. After surviving the Second World War years at school he joined a military academy in Leningrad in the 1950s. His father, who had fought with the Red Army in the war, discouraged him from joining the infantry so he trained as an engineer and was then sent to the Soviet defence ministry’s specialist nuclear weapons security unit. He rose steadily to become its boss in the extraordinary circumstances of 1992, just after the USSR had ceased to exist.
He was married to Nina, who worked in a military hospital. They had two daughters, Ekaterina, who works for a pharmaceutical company, and Elena, a teacher.
After retiring from his military post in 1997 Maslin’s expertise was still much in demand as an adviser on questions of disarmament and non-proliferation as well as nuclear weapons security. He was also a member of the Global Zero Commission, devoted to pressing for an end to nuclear arms.
“If we think of the world in terms of the whole planet, then it is high time for humankind to stop threatening each other with nuclear weapons as well and start dealing with universal problems,” he commented in 2017. “However, in the current situation the world would not be any safer, this is my deepest conviction.” The need was to manage the weapons the world still had as well as promote mutual understanding and good crisis management to try to prevent their use.
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Those warnings now seem especially prescient as President Putin wages war on Ukraine and hints at a nuclear threat against those who stand in his way. Maslin represented a very different strand in Russian military and governmental thinking as the Cold War ended. With the death of General Maslin, said one tribute, “it seems the era of co-operative security has come to an end 30 years after it started. But the memory of the singing nuclear general who guarded our peace will remain as a guiding light for future generations.”
Evgeny Maslin, nuclear weapons expert, was born on May 20, 1937. He died of cancer on February 26, 2022, aged 84