U.S. Nonprofit Helps Former Weapons Scientists

By Chris Schneidmiller, Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — As a college physics student in the Soviet Union, Nana Voitenko knew she was on a direct line to a job supporting the superpower’s vast weapons complex (see GSN, Sept. 20).

Following the dissolution of the communist bloc, she could not even be sure she would have a job.

Today, with support from the United States, Voitenko conducts diabetes research in Ukraine.

“I’m completely happy that my research may help to improve human life rather than to destroy it,” she said.

That is a sentiment the United States would like to hear from all weapons scientists, engineers and technicians left idle by the fall of the Soviet Union.  To that end, it has operated major initiatives for more than a decade aimed at keeping them engaged in peaceful research at home, rather than potentially employed by unfriendly nations with a need for weapons expertise.

Voitenko’s benefactor, though, was not the U.S. government.  It was a nonprofit agency that operates from across the Potomac River in Arlington, Va. 

The U.S. Civilian Research and Development Foundation since its inception in  1995 has been offering grants, training and other resources to former Soviet weapons scientists and their civilian counterparts.  At a time when the Washington is cutting back some of its scientific redirection programs, the organization aims to be a consistent source of support for the Eurasian research community.

“People, particularly when they’re in stressed circumstances, can still do bad things and they can do it in bad places,” Eric Novotny, the foundation’s vice president for programs, said in an interview.

There were plenty of candidates from the Soviet Union.

The communist state operated a superpower-sized weapons complex that included 35,000 nuclear weapons and 10 “closed” cities dedicated to the production of the atomic arsenal.  It had 40,000 metric tons of chemical weapons, the world’s largest arsenal of materials such as sarin, VX and mustard agent. 

Developing and maintaining those programs required tens of thousands of workers.  Moscow’s nuclear weapons program is believed to have employed 70,000 people.  Another 60,000 supported research and development of biological weapons, even after the Soviet Union signed the Biological Weapons Convention in 1975, one expert said.

“It was the only way to use our background and knowledge at that time,” Voitenko said of weapons work.  “The salary at … defense-related installations was much higher than academic institutions.  Of course, a lot of students preferred to work at that program.”

Voitenko in 1990 received a bachelor’s degree in physics, with a focus on low temperatures.  Had she continued in that field, she might have gone to work producing devices for missile control.

Instead, she quit an internship at an institute conducting defense research and switched to biophysics for her graduate and postgraduate studies.  Meanwhile, the Soviet Union came apart in 1991.

That cause a weapons program once controlled by a powerful central government to be spread across up to 15 suddenly autonomous nations.  Tens of thousands of skilled research workers found themselves without jobs or holding jobs in which they could not be sure when or if they would be paid.

“It was really a bad time.  The salary of a doctoral fellow was about $5 a month.  Even this miserable salary was not paid in time.  We waited several months for our salaries and it was absolutely nothing due to the rate of high inflation,” Voitenko said.

Voitenko in 1992 began working at the Bogomoletz Institute of Physiology in Kiev while continuing her studies.  The institute lacked funding for heating, much less chemicals and equipment, she said.  Colleagues who had already moved to foreign laboratories passed on supplies, while Voitenko’s parents in Azerbaijan sent her food.

The paucity of resources and nearly nonexistent salary finally persuaded Voitenko to follow departed co-workers abroad.  An acquaintance invited her to join the research team at Iowa State University, and she left Kiev for Ames in 1997. 

The fear internationally was that some of her fellow researchers would seek employment in more dangerous nations.  Several thousand nuclear personnel probably had expertise that could have proven useful to a nation looking to produce an atomic weapon, said Elena Sokova, director of the Newly Independent States Nonproliferation Program at the Monterey Institute’s Center for Nonproliferation Studies.

Leaders in Moscow and the capitals of the newly independent nations did not have the money to pay their weapons personnel or the resources to completely monitor their whereabouts, Sokova said.

There is no known instance of a Soviet weapons scientist actually turning up in a rogue nation, Sokova said.  That is not for lack of trying by some.  Russian authorities stopped a plane-full of scientists from leaving the country for North Korea in 1992, the Christian Science Monitor reported in September.  A Russian arms expert was arrested in 1998 on suspicion of spying for Iraq.  Iran is also suspected of seeking the expertise of former Soviet biological weapons scientists, according to the Nuclear Threat Initiative.

“I would say that the threat was very prominent in the early ‘90s and mid-90s when Russia had these great difficulties, economic difficulties, restructuring,” Sokova said. 

The United States and other nations quickly took notice of this threat.  The U.S. Energy Department established the Initiatives for Proliferation Prevention (IPP) and the Nuclear Cities Initiative (NCI) in the 1990s, their intent to produce civilian employment for Soviet biological, chemical, missile and nuclear weapons personnel.

The first program has engaged 16,000 scientists, engineers and technicians at 180 institutes across the former Soviet Union in research and commercial efforts.  More than 7,000 are presently at work on projects.  In total, they have produced 30 technologies — from improved prosthetic designs to new radar technology — that are on the market or have received venture capital.

The recently expired Nuclear Cities Initiative focused on three “closed” cities that house major nuclear research and production facilities.  U.S. and Russian agencies, working in tandem since 1998, sought to reduce the size of the weapons complex at those sites while ensuring that personnel there did not find themselves without work.  The project employed 1,600 workers and developed or expanded 26 businesses in those cities.

The United States has also been a party to the International Science and Technology Center, which since 1994 has provided more than $590 million in research funding to 58,000 research personnel in Russia and other former Soviet states.

The Civilian Research and Development Foundation has a somewhat different take on this effort.  The congressionally authorized organization’s first mission has been to promote scientific collaboration between former Soviet republics and the United States.  The hope is that this effort will allow scientists to work in their home country, thereby strengthening its scientific and technological infrastructure.  Grants to fund research projects are offered on a competitive basis, with weapons scientists receiving some preference in funding.

The foundation uses a number of methods to strengthen collaboration, the foundation’s Novotny said.  Research projects must involve personnel from both the United States and a former Soviet state.  Funding is also available for cooperative commercial projects and for Eurasian science and technology entrepreneurs to visit the United States and make connections with companies and investors here.

Weapons research lends itself to work in other sectors, according to Novotny.  For example, scientists who once produced lethal biological pathogens are also likely to have expertise in areas such as infectious diseases, agriculture and water desalinization that can be put to good use. 

“Traditionally, we’ve found that former weapons researchers translate well … to nuclear medicine, geosciences, pharmaceutics and material sciences,” Novotny stated by e-mail.

With an extensive list of public and nongovernmental funders, the foundation to date has dedicated nearly $100 million in roughly 3,000 research grants.  Of that, $45 million has gone to projects involving more than 2,500 former weapons researchers.  The organization also promotes separate avenues of funding by making connections between U.S. and Eurasian entities.

With CRDF support, scientists at a Georgian institute are working with the Battelle Memorial Institute in Ohio to develop a method for rapid anthrax identification.  Nine former Russian weapons scientists at the Kurchatov Institute are helping develop a treatment for bone metastases.

“Who better to develop those needs than the people who were trying to get you in the first place?” said Chris Robinson, nonproliferation programs director at the foundation.

Voitenko applied for a CRDF grant before she left for the United States.  It came through in 1998 and she returned to the Bogomoletz Institute.  Her team of researchers has now received four grants totaling $660,000 — two directly from the foundation and two it helped arrange from the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.

California-based SciClone Pharmaceuticals joined with former biological weapons scientists at St. Petersburg-based Verta to receive CRDF and IPP funding. The firms are jointly developing an oral drug that could be given to boost the immune systems of people suffering from suppressed systems through infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and hepatitis C.

“I think over the years we’ve had up to 60 different bioweapons scientists involved on various projects,” said Cynthia Tuthill, SciClone senior vice president and chief scientific officer.

“They have not sat down with me and said, ‘Yeah, we took the plague organism and we added this gene in order to make it work in the air better’ or something like that,” she added.  “We’ve never actually gone there.  It would be sort of awkward, I think.”

SciClone is more interested in the Russian scientists’ present work than their past.  The Russians supplied a proof of concept that their drug has efficacy against infectious disease and conducted a human clinical trial, years before the U.S. company could have done the work on its own, Tuthill said.  SciClone, in turn, contributed its own money and research and helped secure the additional funding.

The ultimate goal of the two companies is to develop an immune system stimulator that could be marketed around the world.  The Russian government has already approved the drug for use, and the company is now waiting to be allowed to begin manufacturing, Tuthill said.

“This has been sort of a pinnacle of my career to know that I’ve been helping to employ these people with really responsible, exciting work that they can feel proud of, with decent salaries and all that, to keep their expertise in the medical field,” Tuthill said.

Scientific redirection programs for more than a decade have helped keep thousands of scientists on the straight and narrow.  The threat has been further reduced as the Russian government has tightened oversight of its scientists and increased their salaries, Sokova said.

The United States recently has begun cutting money from some of its major scientific engagement programs.  Funding for the Global Initiatives for Proliferation Prevention — which encompassed both the IPP and NCI programs — is set at $28 million in this fiscal year, a 30 percent drop from fiscal 2006, according to the Russian American Nuclear Security Advisory Council.  The final Nuclear Cities Initiative projects expired in September, and differences between Moscow and Washington leave little hope it will return, the organization said (see GSN, Sept. 20).

Washington also now supplies one-third or less of the annual funding for the International Science and Technology Center, down from more than 50 percent in previous years, Sokova said.  Other nations, particularly Canada and the United Kingdom, have stepped up their participation in the sector, she said.

Some Nuclear Cities Initiative projects are likely to find funding in other programs, Sokova said.  The United States has also begun to focus increasingly on redirection of biological scientists through newer programs such as the BioIndustry Initiative.

Scientific engagement is clearly becoming less of a priority for the Bush administration, said RANSAC Executive Director Ken Luongo.  It is seen as a “zero-sum game,” in which increased funding for one project means money must be cut from another, he said.  He acknowledged also that officials in Moscow, in particular, have become increasingly hard to work with as Russian influence has grown as the Soviet collapse fades further into history.

The problem is that “the job is not nearly done,” Luongo said in a telephone interview.

A 2005 survey of 602 Russian biological, chemical and nuclear weapons scientists found their average income to be roughly $110 a month, the Christian Science Monitor reported.  Twenty-eight percent of scientists surveyed who did not have grant funding said they would work for a rogue nation, while 12 percent of those who have funding through a program such as the Nuclear Cities Initiative said they would do so.

Weapons scientists, working within secretive and isolated programs, are not likely to have kept up with the rapid changes in their fields, Luongo said.  It remains crucial to bring them back into the mainstream scientific community.

“You cannot unlearn what you have learned in these weapons programs and therefore steps should be taken to redirect these people so that they are not tempted by economic circumstances to work for another country,” Luongo said by e-mail.

Foundation officials said they have no intention of cutting back.  As U.S. federal funding begins to decline, other partner nations are increasing their commitment to the program to maintain the “knowledge benefits” their scientists receive through collaboration with the West, Novotny said. 

There are new challenges to address.  Where nuclear workers were the focus of the early years, the organization now looks more to chemical and biological weapons personnel.

Deadly pathogens are found in nature, meaning a microbiologist separated from his country’s military complex stands a better chance of producing such a weapon than his nuclear weapons counterpart.  “It’s much easier to develop pathogens.  You could do it in this room,” Novotny said.

Salaries for Russian life scientists have lagged behind their nuclear counterparts, leaving them potentially more vulnerable to enticement.  While an incoming nuclear engineer can now expect to make $1,000 a month in Russia, the government’s support for biological science “is kind of limping behind,” Sokova said.  The nuclear sector remains a going concern and source of pride in Russia, and funding is applied correspondingly.

Additional countries might need scientific support, including post-Hussein Iraq and Libya, which renounced its WMD programs in 2003.

“As long as there is a threat and there is a need for the type of engagement that CRDF specializes in, we like to think we’ll be here to meet that need,” said foundation communications manager Eric Dyson.

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