Nuclear Cities Face Uncertainty
Still encircled by tall fences 10 years after the Cold War ended, Russia's 10 nuclear weapons cities have brand new names but an uncertain future.
These closed cities in Russia's most remote regions were once the heart of the nuclear weapons industry, with an elite status that made them sealed enclaves of science and culture.
Now the cities' 760,000 residents are underpaid -- at times, unpaid -- and must rely on backyard gardens for food because store shelves are often bare.
Along with their counterparts in missile, biological and chemical weapons cities, these homes of nuclear know-how present the most daunting challenge facing governments and nuclear watchdog groups.
Fears that scientists and other weapons workers, desperate to support their families, will take their knowledge and bomb-making materials to countries such as Iran, Iraq and North Korea, have fueled efforts to employ scientists and economically strengthen these cities, with spotty success. The one U.S. program specifically designed to help the secret cities' transition from weapons work to mainstream industry has faced years of precarious funding and support.
"In Russia, there is a complicated situation," said Alexander Pikayev, who studies nonproliferation issues at the Carnegie Moscow Center. "There is no money to support (weapons scientists) to continue their activities. There is no money to convert them to civilian proposals."
Life behind the fence
Until recent years, Russia's nuclear cities didn't appear on maps.
They were known only by post box numbers in nearby towns, such as Tomsk-7 or Arzamas-16.
Residents were not allowed to leave to visit their families or travel. No foreigners were permitted inside.
The cities and their research institutions were swept up in the stirrings of democracy and capitalism that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union. They changed their names, held their first city elections and encouraged entrepreneurship. They allowed Westerners inside the fences for the first time. Several established close ties with U.S. laboratory towns, which have much in common with their Russian counterparts. Snezhinsk is home to a laboratory like its sister city of Livermore, site of Lawrence Livermore Lab.
The end of the Cold War was also a time of pain. Gone were the perks and comfortable salaries of old. Russia's budget for its nuclear weapons facilities is one-seventh of what it was 10 years ago. Its average weapons assembly worker earns $56 per month.
"There is a lot of resentment of the difficult economic times," said Eileen Vergino, deputy director of the Livermore lab's Center for Global Security Research and a sister cities leader who has visited Snezhinsk a dozen times.
Dire conditions at these cities and throughout Russia's nuclear complex panicked many international observers.
"We were literally worried about these people picking up stakes and going to bad places," explained Laura Holgate, who heads Russian nuclear programs for the Nuclear Threat Initiative, formed by Ted Turner to fight the spread of weapons of mass destruction.
In the early 1990s, the United States and Europe set up stopgap programs to keep scientists from taking their knowledge to rogue states, and there have only been a few isolated cases of that happening. But the larger issue remains: Russia has too many nuclear sector employees -- at 75,000 more than twice as many as the United States -- and no money to convert them to peacetime work.
Using resources
As the United States did a decade ago, Russia's Ministry of Atomic Energy (MinAtom) plans to convert its nuclear program from active weapons production to maintenance. It expects to shut three of six assembly plants by 2005. In all, half the nuclear work force -- 35,000 people -- will be out of work.
For closed cities, especially those where plants are shuttered, this means massive unemployment. MinAtom has plans to help these cities by, for example, encouraging industry to develop software products or medical devices, said Alexander Antonov, head of the agency's department of conversion.
"The main idea is to use the incredible intellectual resources that are in the closed cities," said Antonov from MinAtom's Moscow offices. "We have to organize a favorable environment for them to work."
But MinAtom has little money. Because of this, Russians say they welcomed working with the United States on the Nuclear Cities Initiative, the only program specifically designed to help conversion of nuclear cities.
This Department of Energy initiative aims to strengthen city governments, help weapons institutes turn to industrial work, and encourage entrepreneurship among Russia's well-trained, but market-illiterate, citizens.
In three cities -- Sarov, Snezhinsk and Zheleznogorsk -- the initiative has opened business development and computing centers, funded training on proposal writing and career changes, and sponsored city leadership training.
In its most touted success, the initiative moved a mile-long concrete fence inside the closed city of Sarov, opening up former weapons disassembly buildings to industrial development. Already, a kidney dialysis equipment maker has moved into this area.
But the program has fallen short of its goals during its three years, directly creating 370 jobs instead of thousands and drawing criticism in the United States and Russia. The General Accounting Office has called the program ineffective, and a recent National Security Council review recommended dropping some elements and merging the rest with other initiatives.
The two major sticking points are money and access.
Funding for the Nuclear Cities Initiative has gone up and down constantly since it began in 1998, peaking at $30 million a year. President Bush's budget for 2002 bottomed out at $6 million, although Congress will likely give the program more. That is much less than the $550 million program managers had expected over a five- to seven-year period.
Russians say sporadic funding tests their commitment to continue working with the United States. Worse, very little money -- they say only $1 million total, although initiative officials dispute that -- has gone to cities and instead goes to U.S. labs and the Department of Energy, which runs the initiative.
Initiative officials say start-up years are hard and require more money for management. Now that the program is established, more money will go to create jobs in cities.
"In my opinion, we have not given it time to work." said Ken Baker, head of Russia nonproliferation programs at Energy. "The main thing is that we're in there. We're in Russian closed cities. It cannot be oversold right now."
The stickiest problem may be access.
After a decade of relative openness, a new federal security service -- the successor to the KGB -- and the cities are again clamping down. Foreign visitors must have approval to enter a closed city 45 days before their trip, a point critics say scares potential business investors. Even that notice doesn't get them in every time -- GAO investigators didn't get into any closed cities, and neither did this reporter. U.S. lab researchers who have been visiting for nearly a decade are now having problems.
"We have to figure out how to do this differently," said Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Alamo, a strong supporter of nonproliferation programs who has visited Snezhinsk.
Many, including Tauscher, argue that opening the cities to business is essential to their turnaround. But the cities don't necessarily want to open. Staying closed has protected them from some of the widespread corruption and instability that has gripped the rest of Russia.
"They are safer and more stable in some ways," said Oleg Bukharin, a researcher at Princeton University's Center for Energy and Environmental Studies.
MinAtom officials don't think access is a problem. Researchers enter these cities every day, Antonov said, and they are far more open than during the Cold War. They say having too many visitors turns into a form of "nuclear tourism" rather than meaningful visits.
Despite access fights, Baker said an overarching agreement should be completed soon, although that settlement has been weeks away for five months. The agreement would allow businesses and lab researchers into the cities to work on the serious threat that remains.
Until these programs begin to work, officials in Russia and the United States alike agree the threat of closed cities' researchers continuing to work on weapons, either for Russia or rogue countries, hasn't waned.
"We are there trying to do not just a job for Russia and the United States but for the world," said Energy's Baker. "It is like a low-cost insurance policy for national security."
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