Nuclear Legacy
KADEMGORODOK, Russia -- To uncover the impact of nuclear nonproliferation programs here, drive south past solitary ice-fishers, empty bus stops and leafless Siberian birch forests to a muddy field where rusting metal machines lie like old Datsuns in a mechanic's back yard.
Then wait for the shaking to begin.
Amid the thick mud and slush-filled puddles typical of April in southwest Siberia, Boris Glinsky said he and fellow researchers could build machines 10 times the size of the large one now rumbling like a small, nonstop earthquake.
All they need is a sponsor, said the project's patriarch, with his spiky shock of thick, white hair and ready smile, maybe someone from the West to fund their ideas.
Here at the Bystrovka Vibroseismic Test Site, of more than 30 machines that shake the earth to map its surface and test detectors for nuclear test ban treaties, only a dozen still work. The money to maintain them ran out first, followed closely by funds for scientists' wages, now less than $56 a month on average.
"Everything was much easier under the Soviet power," Glinsky said.
While crumbling infrastructure and below-poverty salaries are prevalent throughout Russian science, 21 of the 31 scientists working on these massive machines are former weapons scientists. That makes their future a global concern.
The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 left a political and financial maelstrom that surged over the country's colossal nuclear weapons industry. Never before had a world power, bolstered by a 35,000-strong nuclear weapon stockpile and unknown stores of chemical and biological weapons, been forced by withering federal coffers to abandon its weapons development work force.
At the time of the breakup, 100,000 Russian scientists, engineers and other officials had access to nuclear weapons information.
Panicked world observers feared the worst: desperate weapons scientists taking their knowledge to aspiring weapons nations such as Iran or Iraq, unpaid guards stealing from the untallied stores of uranium and plutonium, entire nuclear weapons cities collapsing as financial support disappeared.
What keeps these vibrating machines running is international funding, first envisioned during those frightening years after the crash, that turns weapons researchers such as these Siberian geologists to basic science and trains them in Western grant-writing and entrepreneurship. It is one of a half dozen U.S.-supported efforts that protect nuclear materials and prop up Russian weapons designers.
Although small compared to other defense initiatives, with $1 billion in U.S. spending a year, these cooperative programs have been the bedrock of efforts to prevent the spread of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and technologies.
Nearly a decade after the breakup of the Soviet Union left weapons programs in limbo, the Russian economy and U.S.-Russian relations continue to sputter. That has left the U.S. struggling to define its role in rescuing Russian weapons scientists and halting the spread of weapons of mass destruction.
"It is much easier when you have a hostile relationship," said Kenneth Luongo, director of the Russian American Nuclear Security Advisory Council, a joint nonprofit nuclear think tank. "When you are trying to help nurse a wounded country back to health, it is not so easy."
In most of Russia, the infamous bread lines or empty shelves in stores are no longer common, but most citizens have little or no money. In 1999, Russia's gross domestic product had shrunk 45 percent from 1991 levels, and is now smaller than that of Los Angeles County. Even at 12.4 percent, Russia's unemployment rate is largely believed to be unrealistically low because of underemployment.
Those economic problems -- as well as rampant health problems reflected in a death rate almost double the birth rate, in part because of widespread alcoholism -- have impacted weapons scientists, who once held an elite status in society.v
Cooperative program supporters -- including some U.S. and Russian nonproliferation experts, U.S. nuclear scientists, and former and current members of Congress -- say these programs are the only serious effort to fight what may be the most menacing national security threat: the spread of weapons to rogue nations and terrorists.
Opposition often comes down to a matter of trust. Most congressional opponents fear any aid will free Russia to spend its own meager resources on developing weapons of mass destruction, while others fight any U.S. money going overseas. Russian critics doubt U.S. motives, saying their goal is to gather intelligence and steal the country's best minds.
From both sides, the most outwardly successful programs are those dealing with tangibles: cutting up submarines, transforming weapons-ready fuel into less dangerous material, and securing Russian weapons storage and design areas. Pushes to prevent weapon makers from taking their knowledge to developing-weapons states are more controversial, and their success is harder to prove.
"We won, but we are not the only treasure trove of secrets," said Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Alamo, who has been an outspoken supporter of these programs.
Despite this support, President Bush's proposed budget cut nonproliferation programs by $100 million. Hardest hit is money for Russian weapons scientists. While Congress has restored much of that, annual fluctuations in budgets and plans have some Russian officials wondering if they should continue to open weapons facilities to U.S. scientists.
There is no disagreement, however, that the security threat remains unresolved.
"We need to get out and tell people that the work of dealing with the legacy of the Cold War is not done. It simply is not done," said Jesse James, a senior associate at the Stimson Center, a Washington, D.C.-based arms-control research group.
A nuclear history
At the entrance to Russia's founding nuclear laboratory stands a somewhat startling 10-foot-tall likeness of Igor Kurchatov's head, complete with his distinctive long, rectangular beard. The Soviet nuclear program began in earnest at this institute named for Kurchatov, the father of Russia's weapons program, whose presence looms as large as the statue in what was once the birch-forested outskirts of Moscow.
"Everything that turned out to be a massive nuclear industry started here," said Victor Tufyaev, a technician in a tight white lab coat.
The lab's control room has been preserved since the moment of that first chain reaction, down to the notebooks on the tables, the chair where Kurchatov sat, the black-and-white wall clock, which still marks 6 p.m. Even the reactor is still running 54 years later.
"You'll have to help us get this in the Guinness Book," joked V.S. Dikazev, the lab's head of nuclear safety.
In 1946, a year after two nuclear bombs devastated Japanese cities, Russia created its first plutonium here in the country's first nuclear reactor.
Fed by the best of Russia's scientists, generous funding and help from U.S.-based spies, the Russian program soon caught up with the United States'. It even surpassed the United States in the total number of people working on weapons projects, and the number of bombs created.
"During 10 years, we finished research from the nuclear bomb to the hydrogen bomb. It is one example of bad competition," said Dikazev, who wore a green and white pin with Lawrence Livermore Laboratory's logo, a gift from a previous lab visitor. "Now we are collaborators."
Once the Soviet Union collapsed, many Americans, hearing stories of bread lines and worthless rubles, assumed the nuclear threat had disappeared. But American experts knew the Soviet security system relied on guards and gates, keeping both scientists and weapons behind closed doors. That system faltered when guards weren't paid and gates weren't maintained. The country didn't have a system to track the amount or movement of nuclear materials or protect them adequately.
Amid this chaos, some U.S. leaders quickly established a connection with Russian weapons scientists. U.S. and Soviet scientists first met as technical advisers to arms control talks.
In February 1992, directors of U.S. weapons labs visited two secret Russian cities known only by their post box numbers in nearby towns: Arzamas-16 and Chelyabinsk-70. Few, if any, Americans had visited these remote Russian weapons lab cities.
"There was a lot of the feeling, at the end of the Cold War, that we could all work together," remembered John Nuckolls, then director of Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, who visited both historical and scientific sites during that frigid winter.
That same year, then-Sen. Sam Nunn, D-Ga., and Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., sponsored legislation creating the Cooperative Threat Reduction programs to address the basics: dismantling weapons and protecting and storing nuclear materials. It later expanded to include conversion of military and nuclear facilities and other efforts from the departments of Defense, State, Commerce and Energy.
Supporting weapons scientists was then, and remains now, a small part of this monumental task. But as U.S. scientists learned that their Russian colleagues were not being paid for months at a time, fear grew that these scientists could be wooed by high-paying jobs in rogue nations.
The first real effort to address this threat was the International Science and Technology Center (ISTC), a collaboration between the United States, the European Commission, Japan and other nations that fund science projects in Russia and other former Soviet countries. ISTC money from the United States supports the Siberian geologists in their shaking research on the rolling plains. A sister project operates in Ukraine.
Since then, other civilian science programs have been started. The Initiatives for Proliferation Prevention aim to make applied science projects attractive for Western business investment. It then hands projects over to the U.S. Industry Coalition, a U.S. government-funded nonprofit group that helps businesses work in Russia.
A Department of Energy program to help Russia's 10 closed nuclear weapons cities turn to civilian endeavors has come under the most criticism by both Russians and Americans. This 3-year-old effort, called the Nuclear Cities Initiative, has gone through multiple reviews and has seen its budget swing drastically -- from $6 million to $30 million -- during its short lifetime because critics say it is ineffective and its funds go to U.S. labs rather than Russian researchers.
After a rocky start, ISTC is now the most accepted of these programs, which says a lot in light of touchy U.S.-Russia relations.
"When the Russian government for several months failed to pay the salaries of its nuclear scientists, for several months they survived on ISTC grants," said Alexander Pikayev, who studies the nuclear threat at the Carnegie Moscow Center.
Weapons scientists
ISTC provides links with leading Western scientists and conferences on how to apply for grants, said Anatoli Iskra, a leader in a project to compile radioactive waste data from former Soviet sites. The salary system sends money directly to scientists rather than to federal bureaucracies. Unlike Russian research grants, ISTC salaries are not taxed at the typical 40 percent.
"Our projects are a very good model of living in the real market economy," Russian executive director Sergey Zykov said, explaining many weapons scientists never faced the kind of scrutiny typical of Western grant-making agencies and businesses. "There is a sort of teaching by real work." However, ISTC faces the same criticism as other scientist assistance programs. It must prove its salary supplements are not furthering weapons research, something ISTC officials say they prevent with hands-on, highly accountable management.
"We can honestly say we are not proposing to do enormous things," said Peter Falatyn, who for three years has been an ISTC senior adviser. "It is still on a person-by-person-by-person basis."
And that's a good thing. In the decade since the Soviet Union fell, relations between the U.S. and Russian governments have gone up and down like dot-com stock prices. And if news of National Missile Defense and FBI spies is any indication, that won't change anytime soon.
Meanwhile, the long-hoped-for comeback of the Russian economy has not materialized, leaving once-hopeful scientists -- especially weapons specialists, who were well off during the Cold War -- pushing for a return to the good old days of designing new weapons.
All of this has an impact on nuclear nonproliferation programs. U.S. lab scientists who once had access to Russian closed cities now have to cancel trips or put them off for months. However, officials at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow point out that the most tense time in recent relations, the war in Kosovo, had little impact on nonproliferation efforts.
Nonproliferation problems were much more complicated than anyone suspected 10 years ago. More nuclear materials are in more abysmal security and storage conditions than was predicted. The expected threat from rogue nations has intermingled with threats from terrorists.
But the doomsday predictions have not yet come true. Some Russian weapons scientists have tried to flee for better-paying jobs in rogue nations, as documented by nuclear think tanks, but they are few and far between.
Experts now understand, however, that Russians don't have to leave their labs to work for those nations. U.S. and European visitors have seen business cards of scientists from Iran and Iraq inside Russia's closed nuclear cities. And conditions have not improved much for weapons scientists, especially in those neglected weapons cities that are home to 760,000 residents.
"There is a dangerous gap between this threat and our response," said Rose Gottemoeller, a former Energy official and analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "Most of today's threats can only be met by cooperation with Russia."
In some ways, that makes nonproliferation programs more important.
"Above all, it is in the U.S. interests, the shrinking of the Russian complex," said Pikayev of the Carnegie Moscow Center. "If Russia changes its policy to anti-American, it would have less chances to reconstitute its nuclear capabilities."
The question of whether these programs, designed as short-term fixes, are good for long-term problems also must be addressed. The Bush administration is re-evaluating nonproliferation efforts, and preliminary reports say that review suggests at least two programs, including the Nuclear Cities Initiative, be eliminated.
"You have to ask yourself, what signal are we sending to the Russians?" said James, the Stimson Center analyst. "If you think that spending money to address these dangers is a good thing, why are we cutting back money on it?"
At least some Russian experts realize the threat and say they are working to do something about it. Officials at the Russian Ministry of Atomic Energy say they are putting money earned by converting weapons-grade uranium to nuclear power-plant fuel back into transforming their weapons complex. They also are looking to two highly controversial plans to raise money: Selling a nuclear power plant to Iran and importing the world's nuclear waste for storage in Russia.
"From the Russian side, we have to solve this," said Alexander Antonov, head of conversion for the Ministry of Atomic Energy, the Russian equivalent of the Department of Energy. He said the question for the United States is, "Will it take a long time to develop this (conversion), or can we speed it up?"
To Hope
Back at the Siberian test site, a mere 52-hour train ride southeast of the power players in Moscow, the geologists are celebrating the present with an elaborate meal of butter-soaked Russian dumplings, known as "pilminy," red caviar on dark brown bread and, of course, vodka toasts all around.
"Perestroika was not good for science," said Victor Soloviov, another researcher at the test site, as he stood, glass raised, to make his ritual toast.
He spoke of days when money flowed, when machines ran and twice as many scientists were seated at the long food-filled table in the bunkhouse here. But he is hopeful for the future of Russian science and the test site, he said, because the research is strong and has support from the West.
Everyone raised their glasses as his voice crescendoed to the final words:
"To the ISTC."
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