What happened yesterday in Russia that revived an old disturbance in Washington?

Wagner's chief, Yevgeny Pigozin, interrupted the rebellion against the regime following an agreement mediating the Belarusian leader.

This reduced immediate concerns about a major conflict within Russia, but signalled that Russian President Vladimir Putin's power is weakening.

The images of tanks on the streets of Russian cities brought to mind the 1991 failed coup by hard communist lines, which increased concerns about the safety of the Soviet nuclear arsenal, say former US intelligence officials.

“The intelligence community will be super focused on the [ruse]” nuclear reserves, says Marc Polymeropoulos, former senior CIA officer who has monitored the agency's illegal operations in Europe and Eurasia.

You want to know who's in control of nuclear weapons because you're worried that terrorists or bad people like

Cadyrov may come later”, says Daniel Hoffman, former senior CIA officer who served as chief of the agency's station in Moscow.

Cadyrov sent thousands of his forces to Rostov-on-Don City south of Russia, occupied and then abandoned by Prigozhin fighters, vowing to help end the uprising.

US officials say they see no immediate threat to the safety of Russia's strategic and tactical weapons.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the agreement that brought Wagner's fighters back to their camps was aimed at avoiding confrontation and bloodshed.

“We have not seen any changes in the setup of Russian nuclear forces”, a spokesman for the US National Security Council said.

“Russia has special responsibility to maintain command and control of its nuclear forces and ensure that actions do not endanger strategic stability”, he said.

But the safety of these weapons is a constant concern for Washington.

US intelligence agencies said in their annual assessment of the threat, for 2023, that Russia's “nuclear security remains a concern, despite improvements in the protection of materials and control of them”.

Nuclear Command Chain

One disturbing scenario is the possibility that a military faction gains decision-making skills over some of the weapons if the divisions in the war in Ukraine that exposed Pigozin's rebellion again explode.

The United States and their allies asked how any new authority would use weapons, Hoffman says.

“And it may not play with the same rules Putin has on”, he says, noting how the Russian leader has failed to act against the nuclear threats he has made in response to Western support for Ukraine's fight against Russian invading forces.

Russia's nuclear arsenal is the largest in the world. According to estimates by the Federation of American Scientists in 2022, Russia has 5,977 nuclear heads, compared to 5,428 estimated to be US.

Collecting information for the command structure of Russia's strategic forces and for their security and other aspects has long been one of the highest priorities of US intelligence agencies, former CIA officers say.

This job became more difficult with Putin's decision, in August 2022, to stop US inspections in Russian nuclear countries, as the new START agreement envisioned.

The decision caused Washington to depend heavily on spy satellites to assess the safety of nuclear weapons sites and nuclear head movements, says Polymeropoulos.

This has always been a top US priority information on nuclear command and control of weapons in Russia”, Hoffman says.

And we all know that they're dangerous, so we've had all those treaties, where we've had a lot of transparency, and now it's gone”, it ends. / REL/