Kozyrev tried to trade NATO arms sales for Iranian deals
By Vera Kessler ·
Russian nuclear scientists fled their borders while Moscow sold weapons to Libya to keep its defense industry afloat, a desperation captured in a 1992 cable
Russian nuclear physicists, trained in the deepest secrets of the Soviet state, walked away from their labs and into the arms of the highest bidder. In the corridors of power, the Russian state survived by selling missiles to Libya and Iran while its treasury ran dry.
These were the stakes on the table during the winter of 1992, as the wreckage of the Soviet Union was still cooling. The file's catalogue entry records a meeting on January 28, 1992, between the U.S. Secretary of State James Baker and the Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev. To the casual observer of the era, Kozyrev was the face of a new, liberal Russia—a man who sought integration with the West and viewed NATO not as an existential threat, but as a potential partner. But the record of this meeting suggests that Kozyrev’s liberal aspirations were perpetually at war with the grim reality of a bankrupt state.
January 28, 1992
The meeting served as a preparatory session for an upcoming summit between President Boris Yeltsin and President George H.W. Bush. While the two men discussed the coordination of assistance to the former Soviet republics, the conversation quickly shifted toward the darker necessities of Russian survival.
Baker brought the issue of arms sales to Iran and Libya to the fore. In the logic of the West, such sales were provocations, funding rogue regimes and destabilizing volatile regions. To Kozyrev, they were a matter of industrial survival. The catalogue entry records Kozyrev’s response: the Russian government was under "great pressure" from its own defense industry. In a moment of stark honesty that stripped away the diplomatic veneer, Kozyrev noted that "arms are one of the few commodities that Russia can sell."
This admission reveals the hollow core of the post-Soviet transition. While the political leadership in Moscow spoke the language of democratic reform and international cooperation, the actual levers of power—the generals and the factory directors of the military-industrial complex—were desperate. They did not care for the ideological leanings of the buyer; they cared for the hard currency required to keep the lights on in the plants.
Document imagery from nsarchive.gwu.edu From the files: nsarchive.gwu.edu
Scientists in Flight
Beyond the sale of hardware, Baker expressed a deeper, more systemic fear: the "brain drain" of Russian scientists. The concern was not that these men were seeking freedom or academic tenure in the West, but that they were migrating to "countries where their activities would not be in anyone’s interest."
When the state can no longer pay its physicists, those physicists become the most dangerous export in the world. A scientist who knows how to enrich uranium or design a warhead is a commodity far more precious than a T-72 tank. The implicit threat in Baker's concern was the prospect of nuclear proliferation by proxy—the fear that the world's most sophisticated weaponry was being auctioned off in a fire sale by men who had once been the vanguard of the Kremlin's scientific elite.
NATO as a Customer
Kozyrev’s solution to the Iranian and Libyan problem was as audacious as it was paradoxical. Rather than simply agreeing to halt sales to adversaries, he suggested that Russia sell its arms to the United States and its "NATO allies."
It was a proposition that highlighted the absurdity of the moment. The Russian Foreign Minister was essentially proposing that the West pay Russia to stop arming the West's enemies. It was an attempt to pivot the defense industry’s desperation into a diplomatic bridge, turning a security liability into a commercial venture.
At the same time, the record shows a strange relief on the part of the Americans. Baker noted "very interesting disarmament proposals" in a letter from Yeltsin to Bush. Crucially, Baker expressed relief that Russia did not intend to bring these proposals to the five-power talks within the United Nations Security Council. By keeping these discussions bilateral, the U.S. could manage the collapse of the Soviet empire without the interference of other global powers, maintaining a tighter grip on the process of disarmament.
Public records indicate that Kozyrev’s pro-Western trajectory eventually failed. By 1996, he would be replaced by Yevgeny Primakov, a man who represented the interests of the security state—the very industry that had been pressuring Kozyrev during his meeting with Baker. The tension between the desire for Western integration and the necessity of the arms trade was a gap that could not be bridged by diplomatic cables alone.
Whether NATO ever seriously considered becoming a customer for the very weapons it sought to neutralize remains a question the record does not answer.