The United States plans to propose to Russia the formation of a Western-financed clearinghouse to find jobs for thousands of Soviet nuclear scientists who might otherwise go to work for hostile countries, White House officials said Friday.
In addition, leaders of the U.S. anti-missile research program, or Star Wars, want to buy critical technologies from the counterpart program in the former Soviet Union.
The officials believe that this will significantly speed up deployment of the limited anti-missile defense system now planned by the United States, they have said in interviews and in congressional testimony.
The officials have asked the Bush administration to clear the way for plans to take advantage of the collapsed Soviet Union by acquiring some of its most advanced technologies and about a thousand of its scientists and engineers.
Officials of the Star Wars program on Friday said that they were especially interested in purchasing prototypes of a nuclear power system that would orbit in space and components for electric propulsion units for rockets that would be capable of lower-cost space flights.
The proposal for the Western-financed clearinghouse would pair the talents of the estimated 2,000 to 3,000 scientists who have the most advanced nuclear knowledge with the needs of foreign investors, universities, private research organizations or governments willing to pay for commercial nuclear research.
This is one of several ideas that Secretary of State James A. Baker III is to take up with President Boris Yeltsin of Russia on a trip that will be devoted in part to visiting outlying former Soviet republics-Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan-and in part to working out new arms control understandings with the Commonwealth of Independent States. Baker is to leave Washington on Sunday.
The centerpiece of the U.S. proposal to address the possible ”brain drain” of nuclear scientists is the suggestion to establish clearinghouses in one or more centers outside of Moscow, in the key cities that made up the former Soviet nuclear military-industrial complex.
Cities being considered for such centers, officials say, are Nizhny Novgorod, formerly known as Gorky, a major military-industrial city on the Volga River, and Novosibirsk and its sister city, Akademgorod, in Siberia, which under the Soviet system had long been a center for scientists and academics. Both areas housed thousands of nuclear scientists and technicians. The scientists would be put to work on specific civilian commercial contracts initiated from abroad, or on government-sponsored projects that would focus on taking military-related technologies, like magnetic fusion, and applying them to civilian uses, like new energy approaches.
”The idea is to find those things that the Russians can do well and see whether there is a commercial application that can attract foreign capital and private investors so the centers will eventually be self-sustaining,” a U.S. official said.
”In this way you hope not just to divert them from their overly militarized economy, but also to promote privatization.”
Washington`s ”short-term goal is to stem proliferation of nuclear technology,” he added, but its long-term agenda is to promote conversion of military industries to civilian use.
Financing of and participation in the proposed new centers, would be provided by the United States, Germany and other Western allies, U.S. officials said.
In an interview this week with Pravda, Viktor N. Mikhailov, the director of the nuclear military program of the former Soviet Union, said that roughly 100,000 people were employed altogether in the former Soviet nuclear military- industrial complex.
”Really secret” information and nuclear bomb technology is possessed by roughly 10,000 to 15,000 nuclear scientists in his country, he said, with between 2,000 and 3,000 of them possessing ”information of paramount importance in sophisticated technologies.”
