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The United States and Russia have launched a new initiative to develop alternative industries in Russia''s closed nuclear cities. The project is a result of the work of the newly established Russian-American Nuclear Security Advisory Council (RANSAC), a nongovernmental group. BCSIA staffer Matthew Bunn is a key member of RANSAC.
"Russia has ten closed nuclear cities, built only to produce nuclear weapons and their essential ingredients," said Bunn, assistant director of the Center''s Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program and researcher in the Managing the Atom project. "An economic catastrophe in any of these cities could mean a huge nonproliferation risk to the United States because the people who live there are guarding and managing enough fissile material for tens of thousands of nuclear weapons. Additional efforts to shift these cities'' economies to civilian activities are essential," Bunn said. In late 1996, the director of one of Russia''s two principal nuclear weapons design laboratories committed suicide, in part in despair over his inability to pay his workers'' salaries. His successor, Evgeniy Avrorin, is a member of RANSAC.
The new government initiative, under the auspices of the soon-to-be-renamed Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission, was formally launched with an agreement signed by Secretary of Energy Federico Peña and Russian Minister of Atomic Energy Evgeniy Adamov on March 31, 1998. But it began nearly a year before, when RANSAC held a meeting in Moscow attended by most of the directors of the closed nuclear facilities to map out what had been done so far to promote conversion in these cities, and what more could be done. After months of behind-the-scenes lobbying by the council''s members, the Russian and American governments agreed to adopt the outline of the RANSAC proposal. Shortly afterward, RANSAC met in Moscow to work with senior leaders from the nuclear cities and the Ministry of Atomic Energy.
"It''s been a huge effort to get this going, but a very satisfying one," said Bunn, whose interest in the secret cities began when he was an adviser to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) from 1994 to 1996. "Now that it''s launched, we are working to put some flesh on the bones." At Sarov, formerly known as Arzamas-16, a city that houses a key nuclear weapons laboratory, an "investment zone" now offers greatly reduced tax rates for new businesses. In return, the businesses contribute to a fund that provides start-up capital for other new businesses in the zone. The fund is set up so that its books can be easily audited, strict rules ensure that the money goes to legitimate businesses, and money is not channeled into the coffers of the nuclear weapons institute. Next year, Bunn intends to bring groups from the nuclear cities for SDI''s U.S.-Russian Investment Symposium.
RANSAC''s U.S. members include Kenneth Luongo (former director of the Office of Nonproliferation and National Security at the Department of Energy), former Energy Secretary Hazel O''Leary, former OSTP Assistant Director Frank von Hippel, and Bunn. The Russian members include Avrorin, Evgeniy Velikhov (president of the Kurchatov Institute), Nikolai Ponomarev-Stepnoi (vice president of Kurchatov), and Anatoli Diakov, director of the arms control center at the Moscow Physical-Technical Institute. (For more information, see http://www.princeton. edu/~ransac.) *