For about a decade, tens of thousands of former Soviet Union (FSU) nuclear weapons scientists and engineers, working through centers in Moscow and Kiev, have received millions of dollars in grants from the US, the European Union, Japan, and other countries to do nonweapons civilian research. Although the research grants are for science projects, their underlying purpose is to keep at least subsistence amounts of money flowing to the weapons scientists so they won’t, in the words of a US scientist familiar with the program, “become desperate.” (See Physics Today, January 1997, page 55.)
US involvement in the science centers program was endorsed by a recent Bush administration review of all US nonproliferation and threat-reduction programs. The review recommended that the science centers program be expanded. The program is run out of two centers: the International Science & Technology Center (ISTC) in Moscow, founded in 1992, and the...
