Osama Bin Laden, the exiled millionaire Saudi terrorist leader, has acquired tactical nuclear weapons from the former Soviet Central Asian states, according to a leading Arabic newspaper.

Bin Laden, accused by America of masterminding the attacks on the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, has established a network of influential friends in Central Asia and Ukraine, according to the London-based al-Hayat. Citing reliable diplomatic sources in Central Asia, the paper says that the Afghan-based terrorist has used this network to get hold of weapons from the former Soviet republics.

It was the middle of the night when Alexander Kuzminykh, a 19-year-old sailor, attacked a sentry aboard the nuclear submarine Vepr and killed him. Grabbing the guard's AK-47 assault rifle, the sailor then killed seven other crew members and locked himself in a torpedo bay.

For 20 hours, the disturbed teenager held control of the submarine at a naval base near Murmansk last month. He repeatedly threatened to set the warship on fire and blow it up, creating the potential for what one scientist called a "floating Chernobyl."

In the end, Kuzminykh killed himself. But his act of desperation sent a shiver of fear through scientists and antinuclear activists already worried about Russia's deteriorating ability, at a time of economic upheaval, to maintain a sufficient level of security at hundreds of nuclear facilities, both military and civilian.

With the breakup of the Soviet Union seven years ago, Russia inherited a vast nuclear empire. Today, its nuclear inventory includes an estimated 10,240 warheads, more than 500 vessels, 29 power plants and hundreds of storage sites for fissile material. Many are in remote and potentially vulnerable areas spread across Russia's 11 time zones.

Embarrassed Russian officials were quick to discount the nuclear danger of the incident: "The submarine and the people [in the vicinity] were absolutely safe," declared Sergei A. Anufriyev, chief spokesman for the Russian navy's Northern Fleet.

However, the Russian government is in such a state of paralysis that it cannot afford to pay the salaries of a vast number of people--including soldiers, officers, technicians and scientists--working with nuclear weapons.

"People who have nuclear warheads in their hands have not gotten their salaries for three or four months and are literally hungry," said Vladimir Orlov, director of the Center for Policy Studies in Moscow. Meanwhile, the quality of recruits has dropped precipitously for elite forces such as the submarine fleet, which during Soviet times was renowned for its high discipline and morale.

Alexander Nikitin, a former Russian navy captain, said the declining quality of military personnel creates a growing danger of nuclear disaster in Russia. "It is really scary that one day the use of nuclear arms may depend on the sentiments of someone who is feeling blue, who has gotten out of bed on the wrong side and does not feel like living," he said.

"When I realized that a maniac armed with an automatic rifle had seized an atomic submarine, this threw me into a cold sweat," said a Murmansk agent of the Federal Security Service--the main domestic successor to the KGB. "No doubt we were dealing with a crazy person, but the last thing I wanted was to witness a Chernobyl without actually even leaving my office."

Western experts quoted in US media have voiced concern that the Russian economic crisis could result in the illegal sale by unpaid, desperate military employees of nuclear weapons technology to terror groups or terror-supporting states.

Joseph Cirincione, director of the Non-Proliferation Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told the SAN FRANSISCO EXAMINER (Aug 30) that Russia "has 22,000 nuclear weapons. And 10,000 to 15,000 of them are in storage and, so, are guarded not by elite forces but by regular troops" whose trustworthiness is less certain. "You've got to be a little concerned ... about how vulnerable those weapons might be to sale or theft. And those concerns are certainly increased by the economic situation."

Arms-control activists have urged President Bill Clinton to make a dramatic gesture during his visit to Russia, like offering to begin talks leading to the lowering of both sides' nuclear arsenals to 1,000 strategic nuclear weapons. Cirincione urged the administration and Congress to increase substantially the annual US expenditure on an existing programme that tries to ensure that Russian scientists and military personnel don't sell bombs, fissionable materials or know-how to outsiders. The research director at the Nuclear Control Institute in Washington, Steven Dolley, said he was "less worried about [loose nukes] until the [Russian] situation became decidedly worse over the last few weeks, with concern about national collapse".

Russia is building deep underground bunkers, subways and command posts to help Moscow's leaders flee the capital and survive a nuclear attack, the Washington Times reported today. Among the ambitious projects are a secret subway being built directly to the residence of Russian President Boris Yeltsin outside Moscow.

"Three decrees last year on an emergency planning authority under Yeltsin with oversight of underground facility contruction suggest that the purpose of the Moscow-area projects is to maintain continuity of leadership during nuclear war," a CIA report was quoted by The Wahington Times as saying.

U.S. officials said the Russian spending on strategic defenses, couples with ongoing procurement of new strategic missiles and submarines, raises questions about Moscow's claims not to have funds needed to carry out START II reductions. The outlays also raise new worries among some U.S. officials about whether U.S. aid to Russia is allowing Moscow to spend its money on building new strategic forces and facilities.

According to the CIA report, construction work is continuing on a "nuclear-survivable, strategic command post at Kosvinsky Mountain," located deep in the Ural Mountains about 850 miles east of Moscow.

Satellite photographs of Yamantau Mountain, also located about 850 miles east of Moscow in the Urals near the town of Beloretsk, show continued digging at the "deep undergound complex" and new construction at each of the site's above-ground support areas, the CIA stated. Interestingly, Yamantau Mountain means "Evil Mountain" in the local Bashkir language.

According to the CIA report, the Russians are biuilding or renovating four complexes within Moscow that would be used to house senior Russian government leaders during a nuclear strike.

Peter Pry, a former CIA analyst and author of a new book on Russian nuclear operations say the undergound facility at Yamantau Mountain covers an area as large as the Capital Beltway. He said the Russian construction program shows that Russian leaders do not see a diminished threat of nuclear conflict. "This is a manifestation of the Russians' continued war-fighting attitudes... They believe in the idea that you can survive and prevail in a nuclear conflict. These kinds of facilities are designed to survive for weeks an months.

By contrast, U.S. nuclear protective facilities have been largely shut down. The complex underneath the Greenbriar resort in Virginia was abandoned, along with another facility in Virginia known as Mount Weather, U.S. officials have said.

The United States has developed a new nuclear bomb designed to destroy bunkders huried so deep that they are beyond the reach of conventional weapons, according to a published report in London yesterday.

The report in the Sunday Observer said the deployment of the new bomb by the U.S. Air Force follows warnings from the intelligence community that "rogue states,"" including Iraq, Syria, Libya, Iran and North Korea, have bought large amounts of earthboring equipment to build deep bunkers for chemical, nuclear and biological weapons and to shelter biological weapons and to shelter their military and political leaders.

He reportedly said the new weapon -- in effect a nuclear dumdum bullet -- was designed "to deliver most of the energy from a nuclear blast into the ground, which gives you very large accelerations that can destroy deeply buried targets." (LONDON --Deutsche Presse Agentur)

Doomsday is now just nine minutes away, according to the keepers of the symbolic Doomsday Clock. Worried by recent nuclear test explosions in India and Pakistan, the minute hand of the clock--a measure of how close humankind is to destroying itself--was advanced to 11:51 p.m., with midnight representing a worldwide nuclear holocaust.

In announcing that "doomsday" was five minutes closer, Leonard Rieser, chairman of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, said, "The consequences of a possible nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan are unforeseeable, but if barriers to the use of nuclear weapons ever fail, the physical, economic and psychological security of every person on the planet will be threatened," Rieser, a physicist, said.

The latest adjustment of the Doomsday Clock is the closest to Armageddon the clock has been since 1988, before the collapse of the Soviet Union.