Avoiding Armageddon

ownsizing may be the norm at most federal agencies in the 1990s, but in an ironic twist of history, thousands of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons scientists and engineers from Russia and states of the former Soviet Union have jumped onto Uncle Sam's payroll.

These scientists are the beneficiaries of a set of federal programs aimed at keeping them involved in peaceful and productive civilian research and to discourage them from selling their knowledge of the arts of Armageddon to Iran, Iraq and other U.S. adversaries. Although these programs have a mixed performance record, the Clinton administration wants to accelerate them to help address the insecurity resulting from Russia's August 1998 economic meltdown.

In his 1999 State of the Union address, President Clinton emphasized the importance of proliferation prevention. "We must expand our work with Russia, Ukraine and the other former Soviet nations to safeguard nuclear materials and technology so they never fall into the wrong hands,"
Clinton said.

The Clinton administration's fiscal 2000 budget calls for spending $4.2 billion-an additional $1.7 billion above current budget projections-over the next five years on a range of threat-reduction programs. Of that spending, $535 million would be targeted for jobs-for-scientists programs, a significant increase over previous plans to spend $324 million on such efforts.

The budget proposal, says Ann Harrington, deputy director of the State Department's Office of Proliferation Threat Reduction, "is essentially a recognition that a lot of what we have gained over the last five years we are at risk of losing-due to [Russia's economic breakdown] last August-if we can't be more aggressive over the near term. The general assessment is we have an extremely high proliferation risk right now in Russia and the newly independent states."

Transforming 'Nuclear Cities'

The State and Energy departments are the primary managers of federal employment programs for scientists in the former Soviet bloc. Participating scientists work in technical institutes, weapons laboratories and formerly closed "nuclear cities"- isolated sites in the Urals, Siberia and Central Russia, surrounded by fences and barricades, where nuclear weapons were designed and produced.

The Energy Department, through its national laboratories, runs the Initiatives for Proliferation Prevention (IPP) program, a cooperative venture that pays labs and institutes in Russia and the former Soviet states to redirect the work of more than 6,100 scientists away from weapons development projects. IPP, which is slated to get $30 million in fiscal 2000 funding under the administration's budget, also has signed up U.S. firms to partner with labs in the former Soviet Union on commercial ventures and eventually take over project funding. About 75 companies participating in the U.S.-industry coalition have already provided $38 million in cost-shared resources to the program over the past four years.

DOE's 1998 Nuclear Cities Initiative, also slated for $30 million in fiscal 2000 funding, attempts to find peaceful research, marketing and business opportunities for scientists and other support personnel in 10 Russian nuclear cities. The program began with an initial focus on three sites: Sarov, Snezhinsk and Zheleznogorsk.

The State Department is the lead coordinator of the International Science and Technology Center (ISTC), a 5-year-old, Moscow-based institution that serves as a clearinghouse for small research grants. The grants are forwarded to individual researchers formerly employed in weapons programs. The ISTC, with proposed fiscal 2000 funding of $95 million, is a multilateral initiative, with assistance also supplied by the European Union, Canada, Japan, Norway, Sweden and South Korea.

The State Department also supports a Science and Technology Center in Kiev, Ukraine. The centers are credited with effectively coordinating interagency resources, and the administration has proposed to increase their budgets significantly over time.

Other agencies, such as the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Health and Human Services, and the Environmental Protection Agency, run programs to help Russian biological and chemical weapons scientists translate their skills into civilian research related to health and environmental problems.

And the National Science Foundation has created a private institution, the Civilian Research and Development Foundation, which funds projects, with some government seed money, private-sector support, and the early generosity of international financier George Soros, that link American and Russian scientists on promising joint research projects.

These jobs programs are an important complement to the Defense Department's Cooperative Threat Reduction program, created in 1991 to address the fear of nuclear chaos following the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Under that program, DoD has spent more than $2 billion assisting Russia, Belarus, Kazhakstan and Ukraine in controlling, safely storing, and dismantling nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction.

Jobs in Moscow and Kiev

Russia has a history of strong support of scientific research that dates back to Peter the Great's creation of the Imperial Academy of Science in 1725. During the Soviet period, some scientific disciplines, such as cybernetics, the predecessor of computer science, fell into disfavor, but others, including aeronautics, mathematics and physics, received strong support.

"After the first American atomic bomb, Stalin was very impressed," says Dr. Roald Z. Sagdeev, the former director of the Institute for Space Research at the Russian Academy of Sciences, who now runs the East-West Center at the University of Maryland. "So that year [1945] he signed legislation . . . to make scientists the highest-paid professionals in the state."

Now the situation is reversed. The Russian government can't afford to pay all its scientists and openly seeks U.S. help to shrink the size of its military-industrial complex. U.S. officials note that even while the annual pay of many Russian scientists is a modest $7,000, it is critically important to present American assistance in a way that doesn't injure Russian pride.

"We need to show that we have professional respect for their science, that they aren't some Third World country," says Harrington. "The psychological effect is enormous. But of course, we can't just go to Capitol Hill and say we're making them feel better."

Why not simply bring the scientists here, as the United States did with anti-Nazi nuclear physicists prior to World War II and Werner von Braun's German rocket scientists following that conflict? While the United States did modestly increase the number of entry visas for scientists after the Soviet Union imploded, officials say it made better sense from both a cost and policy standpoint to keep them employed in their homelands.

Bringing the scientists to the United States "was an unworkable idea for a simple reason," says Sagdeev. "They [the Russian government] would never allow people in such sensitive areas to work for the United States." Another factor, underscored by allegations earlier this year of Chinese espionage at Los Alamos National Laboratory, is the fear that bringing Russian scientists over here would lead to counterintelligence problems.

There are no such concerns on Eurasian soil. The Moscow- and Kiev-based science and technology centers currently pay for the work of more than 17,500 research scientists, who receive quarterly payments wired from London after they turn in required financial and technical progress reports.

Based on an agreement with the Russian and Ukrainian governments, none of the funding is subject to direct taxation or customs duties. "We can save 40 to 50 cents on the research dollar, and that can amount to real money," says Harrington. In contrast, payments made to Russian laboratories under DOE's IPP program are subject to Russian taxation.

While observers applaud the ability of the science and technology centers to directly reach their target populations, they point out that the program needs a mechanism to eventually move the scientists off their funding dependency.

Joseph Cirincione, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, believes the program can move to a new level. "The trick is to use the money that we now have available during the crisis for a quick fix, to give people jobs-however temporary-and then to use these funds to help make commercially viable activities," he says. "In the commercial areas of computer software, advanced ceramics, metallurgy and advanced electronics, there are things these people are able to do."

Harrington agrees her program needs a greater long-term commercialization focus. "What's missing is business management training and more English language training," she says. But Harrington says that "we aren't even close" to addressing the immediate threat. "A wide-net estimate of the number of scientists we need to reach is 60,000."

Red Flags

The commercialization challenge has also vexed DOE's Initiatives for Proliferation Prevention and Nuclear Cities Initiative programs. In a February report (RCED-99-54), General Accounting Office investigators highlighted IPP's lack of commercial progress and other operational problems. GAO criticized the American national labs for lax supervision of the IPP program. The report charged that some Russian laboratories receiving American funds continue to work on weapons of mass destruction or are exploiting the dual-use potential of certain technologies.

GAO also took DOE to task on the aid taxation issue and for wasting funds by allowing high IPP overhead charges at the national labs. According to GAO, only $23.7 million of the $63.5 million spent for IPP through June 1998 went to scientific institutes in Russia. GAO recommended that DOE increase program oversight, address the taxation issue, work harder to commercialize laboratory research and go slow on expanding the Nuclear Cities Initiative.

DOE officials responded to the report, which was ordered by Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms, R-N.C., a critic of U.S. aid programs for Russia, by pledging to enact significant reforms to the IPP program. "We will accept many of GAO's recommendations," says Leonard Spector, director of DOE's Office of Arms Control and Nonproliferation. "We will provide more money directly to the scientists and reduce the monies going to the [U.S.] labs."

Spector also says DOE headquarters will follow up on recent guidance to the national labs with a new directive requiring principal investigators who are the first line of contact with their counterparts in the former Soviet Union to keep better track of their work activities. "We have had a lot of oversight, but we don't have 100 percent," he said. "I think people at the laboratories know we need to do a better job." Helms said in a prepared statement that failure of DOE to make good on reform would "jeopardize continued support" of the program as well as congressional support for any budget increases for nonproliferation programs.

Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., also a critic of the administration's Russia policy, says Congress must provide more oversight of these and similar assistance programs.
"I think we need to have more involvement of the legislative branch in monitoring the dollars that are going into Russia," says Weldon. "The [Russian] Duma has concerns too. They agree that we should establish a bilateral commission . . . to monitor the money going into Russia to ensure it is going to the intended recipients and for the right purposes."

Congress is also certain to be paying more attention to the national labs' role in nonproliferation programs in light of the Los Alamos Chinese espionage matter. But DOE officials argue that even if some personnel from partner institutes and laboratories continue to work for the Russian defense complex, our success in engaging bureaucracies known for their Cold War hostility to U.S. interests makes it worthwhile to continue the effort.

"You can't occupy every scientist 24 hours a day, you just can't afford it," says Spector. "We can still tolerate the fact that some scientists [not on the U.S. payroll] will still be in their institutes doing their old work." As for allegations that some institutes use American funding to develop potential military applications of various technologies, DOE promises to involve the Pentagon in future advanced reviews before funding for projects is approved.

Federal officials say they are very concerned about the possibility that some Russian organizations may be allowing their scientists to travel to and work for rogue countries. Last year, the State Department declared several institutes ineligible to receive U.S. assistance. "We have to insist that any people who work with Iran are cut off at the knees [in terms of subsidies]," says Rose Gottemoeller, director of DOE's Office of Nonproliferation and National Security. Spector insists that with respect to the institutes the United States is working with, "we are not seeing any evidence that they are engaged in improper activities. If any technology transfer is happening, a red light will go on."

GAO investigators and other observers acknowledge the difficulty involved in altering the organizational cultures of Russian laboratories so they have a more commercial focus, especially when the country's economic chaos is factored in. "Everybody recognizes you will have difficulty doing certain kinds of commercialization in Russia today," says Spector. "But on the other hand, they have great technologies, such as software and pharmaceuticals, that can be marketed throughout the world without huge capital investment."

Spector notes that while in the IPP program's early years two-thirds of program funding was for basic research aimed at eventual commercialization, now two-thirds of funding is for moving promising research to the market. "We haven't gotten many [projects] up to the top, but we have sure rolled a lot up the ramp," he says. To date, GAO reports that of more than 400 DOE-funded projects with potential commercial applications, 79 are categorized as being in an intermediate phase on the road to commercialization-in which industry partners take over a greater share of program costs-and three are fully ready to commercialize.

Soldiering On

Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, a major architect of America's Russia policy, told an audience at Stanford University last fall that when thinking about Russia's future, "gloom and doom are no more justified now than was euphoria a few short years ago." That also seems to be the attitude of federal officials who direct the jobs-for-scientists programs. "The key to a healthy post-Soviet economy is a healthy high-tech sector," says Gottemoeller. "We are helping to stabilize their high-tech engine."

Another long-term justification for continuing to subsidize Russian scientists-one not usually mentioned by those who run the programs-is that people trained to question orthodox ideas through the scientific method traditionally have also helped promote democratic thinking. "Scientists like Yuri Orlov and Andrei Sakharov were great advocates of democratic values," says Gerson Sher, director of the Civilian Research and Development Foundation.

Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Calif., whose district includes the Sandia and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories, says that both the scientific and political factors make it imperative that the United States support programs to aid scientists in the former Soviet Union.

"This is a must-do as opposed to a nice-to-do," Tauscher says. "And I frankly haven't heard anyone tell me a better way to do it."

Edward Goldstein is a Washington freelance writer.