Report: U.S. Money Helps Recruit Weapons Scientists in Russia, Ukraine

If you're worried about nuclear terrorism, it makes sense, at face value, to support nonproliferation programs, particularly those that target the former Soviet Union. The problem, however, is that money can't always buy you security.

Nothing illustrates this dilemma better than anew report by the Government Accountability Office. The GAO says that no only does the Department of Energy overstate success in one of its key nonproliferation programs, but perhaps even more troubling, U.S. funding, intended to ensure that Soviet-era weapons scientists don't end up working for rogue states, is actually being used to recruit young scientists to work at weapons facilities:

[I]nstead of supporting Soviet-era WMD scientists as a way of minimizing proliferation risks, officials at 10 nuclear and biological institutes in Russia and Ukraine told us that IPP program funds help them attract, recruit, and retain younger scientists and contribute to the continued operation of their facilities. This is contrary to the original intent of the program, which was to reduce the proliferation risk posed by Soviet-era weapons scientists. For example, about 972 of the scientists paid for work on these 97 projects were born in 1970 or later, making them too young to have contributed to Soviet-era WMD efforts. Second, although DOE asserts that through April 2007, the IPP program had helped create 2,790 long-term, private sector jobs in Russia and other countries, we were unable to substantiate the existence of many of these jobs in our review of 48 of the 50 projects DOE considers to be commercial successes.

There's another issue here, of course. Russia, right now, is flush with money from oil and natural gas exports, raising the issue of why, over 15 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Moscow can't find the money to support and secure its own WMD infrastructure.

[Note: In our forthcoming book, A Nuclear Family Vacation, Nathan Hodge and I travel to Russia to see firsthand if U.S. funding is really helping to protect us from the threat of rogue weapons scientists.]