US Research Grants Are Critical to Former Soviet Weapons Scientists, but Not a Long-Term Solution

For about a decade, tens of thousands of former Soviet Union (FSU) nuclear weapons scientists and engineers, working through centers in Moscow and Kiev, have received millions of dollars in grants from the US, the European Union, Japan, and other countries to do nonweapons civilian research. Although the research grants are for science projects, their underlying purpose is to keep at least subsistence amounts of money flowing to the weapons scientists so they won’t, in the words of a US scientist familiar with the program, “become desperate.” (See Physics Today, January 1997, page 55 .)

US involvement in the science centers program was endorsed by a recent Bush administration review of all US nonproliferation and threat-reduction programs. The review recommended that the science centers program be expanded. The program is run out of two centers: the International Science & Technology Center (ISTC) in Moscow, founded in 1992, and the Science & Technology Center in Ukraine (STCU) in Kiev, begun as a sister project in 1993.

The administration’s endorsement of the centers a little more than a year ago prompted Andrew Hood, the program’s senior coordinator in the State Department’s Office of Proliferation Threat Reduction, to put renewed emphasis on a project that would pair US industries and FSU scientists on research projects with potential commercial value. The partnership efforts, begun in 1997, have met with only limited success and have revealed some fundamental differences between the US free market economy and a Russian system that is struggling with the very notion of capitalism.

Many of the best Soviet scientists worked in the nuclear weapons program, and Hood said the partnership program was designed to give US industries access to that talent by doing joint research in Russia and Ukraine for much less money than the companies could do it in the US. Although businesses such as the Dow Chemical Co, DuPont, and General Atomics have joined the science centers and have done research projects with Russian scientists, efforts to get US companies to make longer-term investments have proven more difficult.

“You have to keep in mind that the science centers program is first and foremost a nonproliferation program,” Hood said. “We’re trying to keep these former Soviet scientists sitting where they are working on projects that are peaceful and civilian in nature.”

The State Department puts the number of FSU weapons scientists at between 30 000 and 75 000, which makes for a very large “between.” Program officials said it has been difficult to come up with a precise, reliable number on how many scientists the Soviet Union had working on its nuclear weapons program.

Since the centers began operating, they have engaged more than 50 000 scientists and engineers in research projects all across the FSU. The scientists work on everything from plasma physics for fusion reactors to materials synthesis and processing. All of the work is unclassified and nonmilitary.

“A surprising number of [the scientists], when we started, had never even set foot out of their nuclear closed cities where they were doing their weapons work,” a program official said. “A lot of them had never set foot in the West, never left the Soviet Union.”

The partners program has tried to build upon US funding for the centers ($37 million in fiscal year 2002; $32 million in FY 2003). When the partnerships work, an official said, “the scientists benefit because they have work and an income, the companies benefit because they have top talent and bargain rates, and the US benefits because Russian scientists do work on commercial civilian projects. They are not being enticed by Osama bin Laden or Iran.”

That is an admirable goal, but it hasn’t worked well. “US industries can’t protect their investments and they are terribly afraid of expropriation,” said Thomas Neff, a senior researcher at the MIT Center for International Studies in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Neff originated the 1993 Highly Enriched Uranium Purchase Agreement that committed the US, through the privately-owned US Enrichment Corp, to buy 500 tons of highly enriched uranium derived from Russian nuclear weapons for reuse, in a blended down state, as fuel in US nuclear power reactors. The Russians receive about $700 million a year for the enriched uranium, which now accounts for about 10% of US electricity generation.

“There are a host of things that stop US companies from investing in Russia,” Neff said. “If you put money into developing intellectual capital, somebody may decide to start a business in Russia and run off with your capital. If you build things there, somebody may expropriate it. That’s a fundamental problem, and it’s a Russian problem.”

Princeton University physicist Frank von Hippel, a professor of public and international affairs, agreed that US private industry involvement in the science centers and other US-FSU nonproliferation programs has been difficult. A significant hurdle for companies, he said, is the issue of access. Most of the FSU weapons scientists live in the nuclear, or secret, cities that were scattered around the Soviet Union. They were “closed” cities during the cold war and remain high-security cities today.

“For an ordinary person, there is 45 days’ notice that must be given to get access to these cities,” von Hippel said. “And then they can turn you down, so you don’t know if you can visit your investment. To make a major investment when you don’t even know if you can visit that investment is a real downer,” he said.

Despite the difficulties, both von Hippel and Neff said that the science centers program is performing an important mission in keeping some money flowing to FSU scientists. “It’s a temporary solution,” Neff said of the program. The long-term solution to underemployment of thousands of former weapons scientists won’t come from outsiders, he said. “The Russians are going to have to invent a solution themselves. All we can do is give them some help. And it may just be temporary projects, or it may be a modest annuity for their scientists to put bread on the table. The nuclear cities don’t have enough money to pay all of these people, so what we are doing for now is supplementing the budget. They throw some of the people they can’t pay onto these grants, and it reduces the load on the Russian budget.”

Von Hippel agreed, saying, “It’s legitimate to call [the science centers program] a welfare program. But it is of critical importance. The typical salary of a Russian scientist, at least until recently, was $200 a month. The State Department program is a significant amount of the money going into those institutions, and it actually goes into the individual bank accounts of the scientists, with some going back to the institutes they work for.”

And the economic problem facing the individual weapons scientist is a “collective phenomenon” faced by the nuclear cities as a whole, von Hippel said. The Russian Ministry of Atomic Energy (MINATOM) “is keeping many more scientists on the payroll than they need. They are concerned about destabilizing the cities by having too many without jobs.”

“What we’re doing is a holding pattern for what is eventually going to have to be a fundamental transformation in the Russian system,” Neff said. Given the dependence of the weapons scientists on funding from the US and other countries, “God only knows what will happen if it stops. So it’s time to start thinking of how do we get from a holding pattern to longer-term change. I keep looking for Occam’s razor, the simple thing that doesn’t cost too much.”