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Untitled Document Russia's Nuclear Cities: Swords-To-Plowshares Program Suffers Meltdown Paul Webster Science October 10, 2003
The United States has pulled the plug on a controversial program to help steer Russian weapons scientists into civilian work. Last month the U.S. government quietly opted not to renew a 5-year agreement with Russia on the Nuclear Cities Initiative (NCI), a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) effort that has channeled $87 million into business development at three once-secret cities devoted to nuclear weapons R&D.
Negotiations broke down last month after Russia failed to grant U.S. contractors blanket immunity from legal claims if something were to go awry during an NCI project. Although comprehensive liability provisions are a standard feature of other U.S. nonproliferation programs aimed at helping Russia secure its nuclear stockpile, a recent agreement on similar projects between Russia and several European countries features a shared liability approach. The Russian and U.S. governments "have a disagreement," says NCI director Paul Longsworth. "The U.S. had to draw a line in the sand."
Some analysts, however, contend that by letting the agreement lapse, the Bush Administration has signaled its intention to kill NCI. "The Administration's inflexibility on the liability issue demonstrates an unwillingness to try to preserve the NCI program," says J. Raphael Della Ratta of the Russian American Nuclear Security Advisory Council, a think tank based in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. Alexander Pikayev of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Moscow agrees. A senior DOE delegation in Moscow late last month, he says, "seemed to be almost celebrating [NCI's] demise."
Figure 1NCI has been dogged by criticism for much of its 5-year life. In May 2001, the U.S. General Accounting Office rebuked NCI management after determining that 70% of the initiative's funds were being spent in the United States. It also accused NCI of creating too few jobs or sustainable commercial ventures in the nuclear R&D cities of Sarov, Snezhinsk, and Zheleznogorsk. Russia's Ministry of Atomic Energy echoed those concerns, and members of the U.S. Congress called for the program's termination.
In response, NCI officials pushed harder at business and job creation--efforts that seemed to be paying off. A computing center and other new facilities in Sarov "have opened up new job possibilities," says Vitaly Dubinin, deputy director of the All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Experimental Physics in Sarov. And U.S. Representative Curt Weldon (R-PA), an erstwhile NCI critic, is now a convert. "We need to keep our focus on the nuclear cities," he told Science. "The NCI should be renewed."
Longsworth says that all 69 NCI programs now under way will continue, including a $9 million cancer diagnostic center in Snezhinsk that Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham approved on 19 September--3 days before the agreement lapsed. But no new projects will be funded. Longsworth says it's still possible that a compromise over liability provisions could be reached. Other possibilities, he says, include fusing some NCI components with other DOE efforts, such as the Initiatives for Proliferation Prevention, or integrating it into the G8's $20 billion Global Partnership Against the Spread of Weapons and Materials of Mass Destruction, which would allow other nations to share the burden of finding more peaceful pastimes for Russia's nuclear elite.
Paul Webster is a freelance writer based in Toronto.
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