The New York Times-20080124-Hiring of Soviet Scientists Has Strayed From Aim- Audit Says
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Hiring of Soviet Scientists Has Strayed From Aim, Audit Says
An American effort set up after the fall of the Soviet Union to hire its former weapons scientists to keep them from selling their skills to nations seeking nuclear, biological or chemical weapons is now paying people who were never weapons scientists and are too young to have worked in the old Soviet program, according to Congressional auditors.
In fact, some of the money is going to hire Russians to work on a civilian nuclear power initiative that Congress has been reluctant to finance.
Some members of Congress said Wednesday that the money might even be indirectly helping Russia supply Iran with nuclear technology, and that it might allow development in Russia of commercial products with which America would have to compete.
At a hearing of the investigations subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Representative John D. Dingell, Democrat of Michigan and chairman of the full committee, said that the Department of Energy program had begun with the best intentions but that there was often a thin line between the noble and the naive.
The program, which has a budget this year of $30 million, has spent about $309 million since its inception in 1994. It was considered a success in keeping newly impoverished scientists from emigrating to wealthy countries hostile to the United States that were seeking their weapons expertise. But members of Congress have begun to worry that the program may have outlived its usefulness as Russia's circumstances have changed.
Members of the subcommittee pointed out that Russia was awash in oil revenue. The senior Republican member, Representative John Shimkus of Illinois, said that the United States had bought $11 billion in oil and oil products from Russia from January 2005 through last October and that, unlike right after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia was now running budget surpluses.
Clearly, Russia can afford to participate, he said.
According to the Government Accountability Office, while the program's goal was to prevent technologies for weapons of mass destruction from leaving the Soviet Union, an analysis of 97 projects employing 6,450 scientists from former Soviet states found that more than half of them never claimed to have W.M.D. experience. And nearly 1,000 of the scientists were born in 1970 or later. The Soviet Union was dissolved in December 1991.
Department of Energy officials at the hearing quibbled with the specifics of the findings, saying that more than half were weapons scientists but that less than 60 percent fell in that category. They defended the program by saying that all the scientists working under it were being kept from helping other countries with dangerous technologies.
Robert A. Robinson, a Government Accountability Office official, said: It feels a little bit like mission creep. When problem X is solved, we move the program into problem Y, into infinity.
The subcommittee chairman, Representative Bart Stupak, Democrat of Michigan, said the program had become a slush fund for the Department of Energy's national laboratories, which are paid to oversee it.
Some of the money went to six research projects related to the Energy Department's Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, a proposal that Congress has not embraced and that would recover plutonium and other materials from spent reactor fuel, for reuse in a new class of reactors.
Energy Department officials could not say if they were financing any scientists in Russian groups directly involved in supplying fuel to Iran. But a State Department official, Richard J. K. Stratford, acting deputy assistant secretary for nuclear nonproliferation policy, who was testifying about a program run by his department to finance science centers in the former Soviet Union, said, You could argue if you give Russia a dollar for whatever purpose, it frees up a dollar that can then be spent elsewhere.
The State Department runs a program similar to the one at the Energy Department. It is based on institutes, not individual scientists, but has graduated some of the institutes as they have become self-sufficient. The State Department hopes to end the program by 2012. Several committee members called on the Energy Department to develop an exit strategy.
Adam M. Scheinman, the Energy Department's assistant deputy administrator in the office of nonproliferation and international security, said scientists in the program had worked on projects involving land mine detectors, systems for needle-free injections, prosthetic limbs and radioisotopes for cancer treatments.
