Defying the United States, a Russian nuclear weapons laboratory secretly acquired 16 advanced IBM computers late last year, using Moscow-based middlemen to evade U.S. export rules, Russian and U.S. officials say.
A federal grand jury in Washington is examining IBM’s role, U.S. officials and executives say, to determine whether the company or its representatives violated laws governing the sale of computers to nuclear weapons installations.
U.S. officials and the executives say technicians working for IBM installed computers at the laboratory in Arzamas-16, a closed city where Russia designed its hydrogen bomb. The clandestine transaction came after IBM failed to gain federal approval for a sale of similar computers to the lab.
A reconstruction of the case by The New York Times, based on interviews with participants in Russia and the U.S., as well as secret correspondence between the two nations, shows that the Russian purchase grew out of a diplomatic misunderstanding that arose during negotiations over a total ban on nuclear tests.
Russia signed the test-ban accord in September 1996, handing President Clinton an election-year triumph.
But Russian officials insist they were the victims of a diplomatic bait-and-switch maneuver and that they were enticed to sign the deal with hints that they could later buy high-performance computers from the United States. U.S. officials say they made no such offer.
In the absence of testing, computer simulations are one of the main ways of telling whether nuclear weapons will work as designed.
“We never promised to provide these kinds of computers,” said James Rubin, the State Department spokesman.
The computers would help Russia do research on nuclear and conventional arms, but U.S. experts say they would not enable Russia to develop new types of nuclear weapons without additional testing. IBM, for its part, saw the legal sale of computers to the weapons labs as a steppingstone into the potentially lucrative Russian market.
Civilian customers in Russia are permitted to buy some high-performance computers without a license, but U.S. laws bar the sale of any computer to a nuclear weapons installation in Russia without federal approval. The government can bring a criminal case if it believes it can prove that a person or company knowingly shipped equipment without a required license.
The issue has disturbed relations, with the U.S. insisting Russia return any computers acquired illicitly for Arzamas-16 and a second nuclear design center. Russian officials, for their part, are warning that the test-ban treaty might not be ratified by parliament.
Russia has offered to move the computers from the nuclear laboratories to civilian locations, and the United States has told the Russians this might be acceptable, provided there is a way to monitor how they are used. Moscow has refused to let U.S. investigators interview any Russian witnesses in the case, citing national security.
Russia’s Ministry of Atomic Energy, known as Minatom, disclosed that it had acquired advanced U.S. computers earlier this year but did not reveal all the purchases.
Interviews with U.S. officials and businessmen indicate that Russia purchased three shipments of computers. Russia, as previously disclosed, arranged the purchase of a high-performance computer system from Silicon Graphics. It is now at the nuclear design center at Chelyabinsk. Russia also purchased a high-performance computer from IBM whose whereabouts are not clear.
The third shipment is only now coming to light: the sale of 16 IBM computers to the Arzamas-16 nuclear complex, the Russian equivalent of the U.S. nuclear laboratory in Los Alamos, N.M. Although the machines individually are not among the most powerful made by IBM, U.S. officials are concerned because the units can form a potent computer if linked.
