Nuclear-qualified U.S. airmen “provided” to the Soviet Union

A Soviet fighter pilot who defected to the West in 1989 said he was told by a Soviet nuclear weapons officer that the Soviet arming procedure for tactical nuclear bombs had been copied from American methods — and that those methods came from American airmen handed over by North Vietnam. The pilot pressed the officer on the point that matters most, and reported the answer: the Americans had been taken to the Soviet Union, not merely questioned in Vietnam.

We are looking for the men. This page names none of them. It sets out the account, what the arming procedure was, what was at the base where the conversation is said to have happened, and which groups of still-missing American aircrew the account would have to be describing.

What is known

The account

Aleksandr Mikhailovich Zuyev, born July 17, 1961, flew with the first Soviet regiment to become operational on the MiG-29 Fulcrum. On May 20, 1989, he took a MiG-29 from the airfield at Mikha Tskhakaya in the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic and landed it at Trabzon, Turkey. He was extensively debriefed by United States agencies, settled in San Diego and later consulted for the U.S. government, including on MiG-29 radar identification during Desert Storm. He died June 10, 2001, in the crash of a Yak-52 near Bellingham, Washington.

While his regiment was undergoing combat-readiness testing at the Soviet air base at Mary, in the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic, Zuyev asked a nuclear weapons officer where the Soviet dual-channel-code arming procedure for tactical nuclear bombs had come from. The officer answered that the Soviets had adopted the system in the 1970s from American techniques, and said:

The American methods, we obtained from several U.S. Air Force “guests,” nuclear-qualified pilots our fraternal Socialist comrades in Vietnam provided us during that Imperialist war.

Zuyev then questioned the officer specifically to establish whether those Americans had actually been taken to the Soviet Union rather than merely interrogated in Vietnam. The officer confirmed they had been transported to the USSR.

Where the account comes from

The passage originates in Zuyev’s own memoir, Fulcrum: A Top Gun Pilot’s Escape from the Soviet Empire, written with Malcolm McConnell and published by Warner Books in 1992, at page 199. It is carried again in Inside Hanoi’s Secret Archives, McConnell’s 1995 account of Operation Swamp Ranger.

The second book’s endnote is the part worth reading twice. McConnell wrote that before the paperback edition of Fulcrum went to press he went back to Zuyev and questioned him on this specific point, and that Zuyev “was adamant that the Soviet nuclear weapons officer had told him the dual-channel bomb-arming system had been obtained from American Vietnam War POWs taken to the Soviet Union.” The re-interview is dated June 10, 1993. The account was put to the source a second time, years later, and he did not soften it.

The Soviet officer is unnamed. The account reaches us at second hand, through a defector and a commercial co-author, and Zuyev is dead.

What was at Mary

Mary sits in the Karakum desert of southern Turkmenistan, about 60 miles from the Afghan border. It had three airfields: Mary-1, the civil airport, with a military training establishment alongside it; Mary-2, the military fighter and fighter-bomber field; and Mary-3, for agricultural aviation.

The establishment that matters is the 1521st Air Base, created in the early 1970s on the basis of the 187th Fighter Aviation Regiment at Mary. The Soviet aviation historian Viktor Markovsky records why the site was chosen: it was the one place in the USSR where, for most of the year, conditions differed little from Egypt’s. It was built first to prepare Soviet fighter pilots for combat in the Middle East, and then to do something broader — to test the combat readiness of each Soviet fighter regiment that arrived there. It ran its own command post and an air group of two squadrons, under the air force of the Turkestan Military District. Its training programs were built directly on the lessons of Vietnam and the Middle East: “Kavkaz,” developed from 1969, and “Korrida,” developed in 1971 and 1972. From 1984 the research and instructor regiment from Lipetsk brought MiG-29 and Su-27 trials there. The base closed with the Soviet Union.

That corroborates the setting of the account. A MiG-29 regiment at Mary for combat-readiness testing in the late 1980s is exactly what the 1521st Air Base existed to do.

Mary-2 held combat units as well. A fighter-bomber regiment flew the Su-15TM there from 1975 and re-equipped on the Su-17M3 in 1981; a fighter-bomber division was formed at Mary in July 1983. The Su-17M3 was a nuclear-capable type, and tactical nuclear weapons were still present in the Central Asian republics, Turkmenistan among them, when the Soviet Union collapsed. The KGB Border Troops also based a separate aviation regiment at Mary from November 1981, flying Mi-8 and Mi-24 on the Afghan border throughout the Soviet-Afghan war.

What a dual-channel arming procedure is

“Dual-channel code arming” is not a term of art in the American or the Russian technical literature. It appears to be the defector’s rendering, or his co-author’s. But there is a real American two-channel arming architecture it fits, and it was in service in the period in question.

President Kennedy signed National Security Action Memorandum 160 on June 6, 1962, directing that coded locks — permissive action links, or PALs — be fitted to nuclear weapons deployed to NATO commands. The first-generation lock used a four-digit electromechanical coded switch and needed 14 control lines, too many to work from a cockpit. The next generation cut that to five lines, which made it practical for aircrew to unlock a weapon from the cockpit, and it was fitted to exactly the tactical bomb family in question: the Mk 28, the Mk 43, the Mk 57 and the Mk 61. The cockpit equipment was the Aircraft Monitor and Control panel, which the Defense Department defines as the equipment installed in an aircraft to perform in-flight monitoring and control of a nuclear weapon’s safing, arming, enabling, disabling and fuzing.

The two-channel part is the design principle underneath. American nuclear detonation safety puts two “strong links” in series along the firing energy path, deliberately of different types so that no single failure or single intrusion can close both. Sandia National Laboratories, in its own unclassified history of nuclear weapon safety devices, describes the pair as an “intent” strong link and a “trajectory” strong link. Both must be closed electrically — one by a specific operator-coded input and one by an environmental input corresponding to an appropriate flight trajectory — before the weapon can be armed.

There is a second, simpler sense of “two channels,” and for a lead about aircrew it may be the better one. When PAL control was extended to Strategic Air Command bombers in 1967, the design required that more than one switch be operated simultaneously by two physically separated crewmen. That is not a weapon-design secret. That is a procedure, and it is the sort of thing the man who performs it knows cold.

The distinction runs through the whole question. Aircrew were not briefed on the internals. A Navy pilot who stood nuclear alert with the Mark 7 and the B43 put it plainly in Naval History: there was “a complex set of switches and lights we had to learn cold,” and “we were not told about the B43’s inner workings.” What a captured airman could give an adversary is the employment procedure: that the code is entered from the cockpit at all, how many digits it runs to, the panel and its indications, the sequence and its timing, where the code comes from and under what authentication, the alert and loading routine, and the two-man rule as actually practiced. A procedure is precisely what the Soviet officer is quoted as describing.

There could be other explanations for a Soviet system adopted in the 1970s from American techniques. The idea of a coded lock was not itself a secret.

Who would have known

The account gives a screen rather than a name: American aircrew, nuclear-qualified, several of them, lost in the Vietnam War. It says Air Force. We have not treated that as decisive, because a Soviet officer recalling a conversation years later may have meant American airmen generally.

Many of the aircraft flown in Southeast Asia were built to deliver a nuclear weapon. The F-105 Thunderchief was designed as a single-seat nuclear attack aircraft carrying one weapon internally. The F-111A carried one nuclear bomb in an internal bay. The B-57 had a rotary bay. The B-52 was a nuclear bomber flying conventional missions. On the Navy and Marine side the A-4 Skyhawk was built around the nuclear delivery mission, the A-6 Intruder was the fleet’s dedicated all-weather strike aircraft — its mission described in the reference literature as long-range “special weapon” strikes, the standing service euphemism — and the A-7 and the F-4 carried nuclear stores as well.

Pilots rotated into Southeast Asia from units that stood nuclear alert. The 36th Tactical Fighter Wing at Bitburg and the 49th at Spangdahlem flew the F-105D on a NATO nuclear strike role. Victor Alert ran across U.S. Air Forces in Europe and extended to Osan in South Korea and to Okinawa. The 3rd Bombardment Wing held a Single Integrated Operational Plan mission against China, North Korea and the eastern Soviet Union, forward-deployed its B-57s to Kunsan Air Base to stand nuclear alert because weapons could not be stored in Japan, and moved to Bien Hoa Air Base in South Vietnam in November 1965. Strategic Air Command crews flew Arc Light and Linebacker II on temporary duty rotations from their nuclear wings. The carriers were dual-hatted: Sixth and Seventh Fleet carriers carried hundreds of assigned strategic targets, and nuclear weapons were physically aboard ships conducting Vietnam operations.

Nuclear delivery aircrew occupy what the Defense Department calls critical positions under the Nuclear Weapon Personnel Reliability Program — pilots, navigators, bombardiers, weapon system officers — and the program applies across all the military departments. Certification is tied to the position, so a pilot leaving a nuclear-tasked unit for Southeast Asia was decertified on reassignment and kept every bit of the knowledge. The question about any individual man is therefore not whether he was certified when he was shot down. It is where he had been before.

Navy and Marine aviation, and what separates them

Widening the screen beyond the Air Force is justified on the aircraft. It is not justified on the technology, and the difference is the most useful thing on this page.

The United States Navy did not use coded arming on its aviation nuclear weapons. At the time of National Security Action Memorandum 160 in 1962, Navy warheads were exempted from permissive action link control — as, at that date, were Strategic Air Command’s. The Air Force exemption did not last: PAL control was extended to SAC bombers in 1967, in the two-crewmen form described above, and in February 1972 the Secretary of Defense extended PAL control to weapons deployed on foreign soil in the Western Pacific. The Navy exemption did last. Vice Adm. G. E. Miller wrote in the Naval Institute’s Proceedings in July 1988 — arguing against adopting them — that the Navy “does not use these permissive action links (PALs) in its submarine-launched ballistic missiles, nuclear-armed naval aviation weapons, or cruise missiles.” Navy weapons ashore and in shipment were reported fitted with PALs only in February 1990.

What the Navy used instead was physical. Sandia’s own institutional history records that the Navy insisted on a removable component that a local commander held until a decision to fire was made. Custody aboard ship, keys, the two-man rule and a procedure involving much of the crew did the work that a lock did ashore.

So a Navy or Marine attack crewman of that period is a strong source for weapon handling, alert posture, loft and laydown delivery technique, the cockpit control box and its switches and lights, and in-flight insertion of the fissile capsule on the older weapons. He is a weaker source for a coded arming procedure, because his service had decided not to have one.

The sharper screen that produces is not “Air Force rather than Navy.” It is narrower than either. The man who personally entered an arming code was a pilot on Victor Alert or quick-reaction alert in Europe flying a coded-switch weapon on an aircraft with a PAL-capable controller; a Strategic Air Command bomber crewman after the 1967 extension; or a Pacific-theater crewman after February 1972. If the Soviet officer meant two numeric codes entered by aircrew, that is the population. If he meant two men and two simultaneous actions on one weapon, a carrier procedure fits it as well as an Air Force one.

What the screen selects

This project does not publish the names of individual missing men in connection with an unproven account, and it does not do so here. What follows are the groups and the numbers. Every one of these men is carried by the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency as unaccounted for, and nothing on this page asserts anything about any of them.

  • B-52 Stratofortress — four men. Four Air Force crewmen remain unaccounted for from the B-52 losses of December 1972: two from an aircraft lost northeast of Hanoi on Dec. 20, a co-pilot from an aircraft lost over Bach Mai on Dec. 22, and a radar navigator from an aircraft hit near Hanoi on Dec. 21 whose crew came down in Laos. This is the group where nuclear qualification is closest to structural — a Strategic Air Command crew existed to do that job — and, after 1967, the one flying under a two-crewman coded arming procedure.
  • F-111A — seven men. Seven remain unaccounted for from four F-111A losses: two from each of two aircraft lost in March and April 1968 on the Combat Lancer deployment, one from an aircraft lost Nov. 7, 1972, and two from an aircraft lost Nov. 21, 1972. Six are Air Force. The seventh is a Navy officer who was flying on exchange duty with the Air Force squadron. The F-111A was the newest American nuclear strike system of the war.
  • A-6 Intruder — about 28 men. Roughly 30 Navy and Marine A-6 aircrew appear across the loss records for Southeast Asia, four have been accounted for since 2018, and about 28 remain missing. The A-6 was the fleet’s nuclear strike aircraft, and its bombardier-navigator, not its pilot, ran the weapons system.
  • A-4, A-7, F-4, F-105 and B-57 aircrew also flew nuclear delivery types, and their unaccounted-for numbers are larger than the three above.

Other reports in the region

The one place in Central Asia where Americans are known to have been held is Uzbekistan, in the Second World War. Bound by its neutrality pact with Japan, the Soviet Union interned American airmen who came down on Soviet territory in the Pacific war, and ran a permanent camp near Vrevsky and Yangi-Yul, outside Tashkent — the site chosen in part for the road and rail lines running toward Iran. American inspectors were shown it. There were 61 internees in December 1943 and 130 a year later; something over 240 crewmen from 32 aircraft passed through between August 1943 and July 1945. They were exfiltrated into Iran through staged “escapes” arranged on Stalin’s personal instruction, one convoy leaving Tashkent by rail in January 1945 for Ashkhabad (now Ashgabat) and Kizil-Arvat before crossing into Iran by truck. The route out ran through Turkmenistan.

That is precedent, method and geography together: a concealed standing system for holding American servicemen in Central Asia, and moving them out so that they believed they had arranged it themselves.

The Central Asian reporting on American prisoners after that war is clustered in the Kazakh camps, and it belongs to the Korean War. Task Force Russia recorded a Lithuanian former prisoner describing a man in a mining camp in the Balkhash area who said he was an American naval or intelligence officer captured by the Red Army in northern Korea at the end of the Second World War. A 1997 Joint Commission interview in Latvia produced an account of three men described as Americans — a major and two pilots, one of them born in the United States — in a labor camp in Karaganda Oblast in the mid-1950s, moved on to another camp 80 kilometers south. A 1993 interview in Lithuania produced an account of a Lithuanian-American claiming the rank of Air Force major, shot down in Korea, held at a corrective labor camp in the Dzhezkazgan mines about 30 kilometers from Kengir, and put in solitary confinement during the 1954 uprising there to keep him out of it. All three are second-hand.

Why this matters

The weakest joint in the case for withheld American prisoners has always been motive. A number by itself explains nothing. What this account supplies is a use — a specific, technical, dated reason to want a particular kind of prisoner, and to move him somewhere he could be worked on at length by people who were not in Hanoi.

It also names a category rather than a number, and categories can be tested against records the United States already holds. Nobody needs Moscow’s permission to find out which unaccounted-for American airmen had stood nuclear alert, and where.

Evidence and sources

Request for information

Please contact us if you can help with any of the following.

  1. Accounts of American prisoners from the Vietnam War taken to the Soviet Union, including to the air base at Mary in Turkmenistan or to Soviet weapons test and training sites.
  2. Information from defectors, veterans or intelligence reports on the arming procedure for Soviet tactical nuclear bombs adopted in the 1970s, where it came from and any foreigners present when it was developed or taught.
  3. The names of nuclear-trained American airmen reported alive after capture in Southeast Asia.

Zuyev pressed the Soviet officer on one point and reported the answer: the Americans were taken to the Soviet Union, not just questioned in Vietnam. Did Moscow take American airmen for what they knew about nuclear procedures? Were they held at Mary, or somewhere else? Or did the officer repeat a boast with no prisoners behind it?

Related lead: a former Soviet GRU officer’s report that a Top Secret study of U.S. military operations in Korea, written from KGB material, held detail he believed could only have come from American POWs retained by the Soviets (see The GRU book on the Korean War).

Write to contact@powinvestigativeproject.org. We treat every approach in confidence.

Русский

Американские летчики, допущенные к ядерному оружию, — обращение

Александр Зуев, лётчик-истребитель, который 20 мая 1989 года перелетел на МиГ-29 в Турцию, рассказал следующее. Во время проверки боевой готовности его полка на аэродроме Мары в Туркменской ССР он спросил офицера, отвечавшего за ядерные боеприпасы, откуда взялась советская процедура двухканального кодового взведения тактических ядерных бомб. Тот ответил, что в 1970-е годы систему переняли у американцев, и добавил, что американские методики получили от нескольких «гостей» из ВВС США — лётчиков, допущенных к ядерному оружию, которых во время той войны передали советской стороне вьетнамские товарищи. Зуев переспросил, чтобы уточнить главное: этих американцев действительно вывезли в СССР или только допрашивали во Вьетнаме? Офицер подтвердил, что их доставили в Советский Союз.

Мы ищем этих людей. Нам помогут личные воспоминания: слышали ли вы в те годы, что какая-либо процедура была заимствована у американцев, и видели ли вы иностранцев на аэродромах или в учебных центрах в Мары и в других местах в 1960–1970-е годы. Вы можете написать анонимно. Пожалуйста, не присылайте секретных документов и не сообщайте сведений, которые до сих пор составляют государственную тайну, — нам нужны только воспоминания и опубликованные материалы. Мы работаем конфиденциально и принимаем письма на русском языке.

contact@powinvestigativeproject.org

Related on this site

Outside sources