Abstract
Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, there has been widespread concern that the result would be a hemorrhage of Soviet nuclear weapon materials and technologies onto the black market. Thanks in large part to the dedication and discipline found in Russia's nuclear weapons complex, the worst fears have not been realized. As long as the weapons complex remains under great financial stress, however, there will be some threat that nuclear materials could leak out.
By 1999 the Russian government's funding for nuclear weapons work had fallen to less than 15 percent of 1990 levels. Many of the nuclear facilities simply reduced salaries rather than destabilize the cities by creating thousands of jobless workers. As a result, the average salary for a nuclear weapons worker has sunk to barely $50 per month. Workers manage to survive only because they live in heavily subsidized apartments, use subsidized heat and electricity, and feed themselves in large part from their private potato patches.
The underemployment problem is at its worst in Russia's “closed cities”—ten communities with populations ranging from 33,000 to 120,000. Because of the huge quantities of nuclear materials and secret nuclear design information these cities contain, they are completely enclosed by double fences, with their perimeters patrolled by armed guards of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, with access restricted and controlled by the Federal Security Service. Although the populations of these cities are free to leave, only young, unmarried workers do so—families simply do not have the money for apartments in open cities.
U.S. assistance
In the early 1990s, the United States and other countries launched a number of efforts to help facilitate the conversion of Russia's nuclear complex. The largest and still most important of these programs was proposed in 1991 by independent physicist Tom Neff. The United States contracted to buy Russian weapon uranium, blended down to low-enrichment material for resale as nuclear-power-reactor fuel. The agreement called for the purchase of 500 tons over a period of 20 years.
Russia currently earns about $350 million a year as a result of this agreement. Thousands of its nuclear-weapons workers are employed tearing down warheads and blending down the recovered weapon-grade uranium. In 1999, most of the approximately $50 million invested in job creation by the Russian Ministry of Atomic Energy (Minatom) came from the uranium sale.
In 1999, the governments of the nuclear cities independently invested millions of dollars, creating thousands of new jobs outside the nuclear facilities. However, the rate of job creation is still far short of what is needed. Minatom estimates that 35,000 workers—approximately half its weapons workforce—must be laid off by 2005, and that the cost of creating jobs for excess workers and cleaning out old weapons facilities for new businesses will be about $1 billion. This averages out to a need for $200 million per year for five years—more than twice the rate of investment that has been achieved thus far.
The “Nuclear Cities Initiative”
Two years ago, the Energy Department created the “Nuclear Cities Initiative” (NCI) to help create jobs in three of Russia's nuclear cities. The $12.5 million budget for fiscal 1999 focused on the neediest cities among those open to U.S. assistance: Sarov, site of Russia's first nuclear-weapons laboratory and warhead-assembly plant; Snezinsk, built around Russia's second nuclear-weapons laboratory; and Zheleznogorsk, home to one of Russia's three plutonium-production complexes. (These cities were formerly known by their post-box numbers in nearby cities as Arzamas-16, Chelyabinsk-70, and Krasnoyarsk-26.)
Nci has launched some worthy programs—establishing resource centers to help would-be entrepreneurs develop and market their proposals, initiating a small-business loan program, and undertaking efforts to help city hospitals. As of the end of 1999, however, nci had created only about 100 jobs, evoking disappointment and anger in Minatom and in the nuclear cities. The program was further slowed when the Republican-led Congress—skeptical about foreign aid and concerned that U.S. support was going to Russia's nuclear-weapons establishment—cut this year's funding back to $7.5 million.
The average salary for a Russian nuclear worker has sunk to barely $50 a month.
This funding cut stands in stark contrast to the relatively steady congressional support for the Defense Department's $400-million-a-year Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) Program. One reason for the difference, of course, is that the highest-profile CTR programs fund the destruction of excess Soviet strategic missiles, submarines, and bombers. As former Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia, one of the fathers of the CTR program asked rhetorically in 1994, “How much would we give for a weapon that could do that?”
This past spring, Pete Domenici, chairman of the Senate's Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water, which deals with the Energy Department budget, decided to make NCI's downsizing mission explicit in the “Russian Nuclear Weapons Complex Conversion Act of 2000.”
That act increases the Clinton administration's proposed $17.5 million for NCI to $30 million in fiscal year 2001 if Russia agrees to close some of its warhead assembly/disassembly facilities within five years. At press time, the conferees from the House of Representatives had accepted this proposal but had reduced the funding increase from $12.5 to $10 million.
Russian downsizing
In March, Minatom First Deputy Lev Ryabev reported that warhead assembly had already ended in two of Minatom's four warhead plants and that warhead disassembly would end in the other two plants by 2003.
A month later, the “Avangard” warhead plant shrank visibly when NCI paid to have the security fence that had surrounded it moved inward to make several large buildings available for commercial joint ventures. At the end of August, Energy Secretary Bill Richardson visited the plant and promised $4.5 million next year to help create new jobs there.
To achieve the larger task, it will be necessary to work on several fronts, including: creating private-sector jobs, making retirement possible for thousands of older nuclear workers, bringing Russian expertise to bear on the shared problems of radioactive cleanup and nonproliferation, and increasing energy efficiency in the nuclear cities.
The NCI-backed venture that is currently the furthest along was inspired by a three-year-old joint venture in Sarov in which Intel, the U.S. chip manufacturer, hired 100 Institute of Experimental Physics programmers to work on the development of a library of computational subroutines.
Hoping to attract additional software development contracts, NCI established the Sarov Open Computing Center (SOCC), which employs 100 workers. A first contract has been announced with Credit Suisse First Boston. It is hoped that by 2005 the number of SOCC employees will increase to 500, supported almost entirely by commercial contracts. The projected capital cost is about $15,000 per job. City officials estimate that low-tech jobs that satisfy local and regional needs cost only a quarter to a third of that amount.
Both Russian and U.S. program managers have learned to do market assessments and carry out pre-negotiations with potential partners before investing in new ideas. The Senate's Russian Nuclear Weapons Complex Conversion Act of 2000 would reinforce this approach by requiring that the added $10 million be spent only on projects that are expected to become commercially viable within three years.
Russian government pensions amount to about $200 per year. Ilkaev estimated that supplemental payments would need to total only about $500 per worker per year if retirees were able to keep their apartments and health benefits.
The nuclear cities have now obtained permission from the Russian government to provide pension supplements. Foreign assistance for job creation is relevant because it could free up city funds for this purpose.
Some of Minatom's facilities and expertise could be helpful to the U.S. effort. The Energy Department's Initiative for Proliferation Prevention recently provided $1.5 million in startup funds for the “High-level Waste Tank Retrieval and Closure Demonstration Center” in Zheleznogorsk. This center is expected to develop lower-cost methods for cleaning out the high-level waste tanks at Energy's Hanford and Savannah River sites. But the effort will succeed only if the leaders of Energy's environmental remediation program can be convinced to follow up with investments of that program's own R&D funds.
There is also the opportunity for a strengthened nonpro-liferation partnership with Russia. In 1999, three private American foundations joined with the NCI to fund the establishment of nonproliferation analysis centers in Sarov and Snezinsk. These centers will help develop proposals for new cooperative nonproliferation initiatives.
Helping to downsize Russia's nuclear weapons complex in an orderly way is very much in the world's interest. Creating sustainable jobs is a difficult challenge that requires a real commitment of attention and resources. The small efforts that have been mounted thus far have pioneered approaches that could be the basis for a larger, more successful effort. But success can only be achieved by engaging other parts of government and through complementary private and foreign initiatives.