It has been a wild and woolly time trying to keep up with the changes going on in the old Soviet Union, and I couldn't have done it without help. As ever, I wish to thank my wife, Jean, for helping me cook up these stories; my editor and friend, George Coleman, at Putnam; and especially my executive assistant and friend, Dennis T. Hall, for chasing down information sources, handling the phones, checking my sources and contacts, and helping me straighten out the kinks in a rapidly changing real-world political scene. I can't wait to see what happens next. . .

Dale Brown

Folsom, CA

March 1992

Actual News Excerpts.

WASHINGTON POST, 8 December 1991-The leaders of Russia, the Ukraine and Byelorussia formally announced the dissolution of the Soviet Union today and said they had agreed to establish a "Commonwealth of Independent States" in its place.

The decision to liquidate the 69-year-old Communist-forged union and halt activity of all Soviet government organs came during a closed-door meeting at a Byelorussian hunting lodge near the Polish border in the absence of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev.

There was no immediate comment from Gorbachev, whose constitutional position as president and commander in chief of the 4-million-member Soviet armed forces has now been challenged throughout the Slavic heartland of the former Soviet superpower.

In Washington, Secretary of States James A. Baker III said in a television interview that "the Soviet Union as we've known it no longer exists," but he warned that there is still a risk of civil war amid the ruins of the Soviet empire.

NEW YORK TIMES, 24 December 1991-. . . The nuclear weapons issue [in the new Commonwealth of Independent Statesi, while the subject of reassuringly worded promises in the Kremlin, remains to be worked out in its critical details by the new commonwealth.

The republic leaders are to gather . . . in Minsk, the commonwealth headquarters, to try to resolve their differences over how to craft a common defense council that does not smack of the old union. They also will be facing resistance by [many Soviet republicsl to a plan under which Russia ultimately becomes the guarantor of disarmament and repository of the entire Soviet nuclear armory.

WASHINGTON POST, 20 February 1992-A classified study prepared as the basis for the Pentagon's budgetary plaaning through the end of the

century casts Russia as the gravest potential threat to U.S. vital interests and presumes the United States would spearhead a NATO counterattack if Russia launched an invasion of Lithuania.

U.S. intervention in Lithuania, which would reverse decades of American restraint in the former Soviet Union's Baltic sphere of influence, is one of seven hypothetical roads to war that the Pentagon studied to help the military services size and justify their forces through 1999. In the study, the Pentagon neither advocates nor predicts any specific conflict.

The Lithuanian scenario contemplates a major war by land, sea and air in which 24 NATO

divisions, 70 fighter squadrons and six aircraft carrier battle groups would keep the Russian navy "bottled up in the eastern Baltic," bomb supply lines in Russia and use armored formations to expel Russian forces from Lithuania. The authors state that Russia is unlikely to respond with nuclear weapons, but they provide no basis for that assessment.