Uncommon Unemployment -- Russians Worried Nuclear Scientists Will Sell Their Souls

MOSCOW - For decades the Soviet Union struggled to build the world's most formidable nuclear-arms industry - an atomic empire that included about 40 "closed" cities, employed 900,000 people and produced 27,000 warheads.

With the Soviet collapse, the industry's one-time masters admit they're worried about losing control of their creation.

"There are reasons for worry, and I am worried," said Albert Shishkin, whose Tenex agency handled all uranium exports from the former Soviet Union.

Western analysts are even more anxious. They fear that Soviet nuclear materials - including weapons-grade uranium or plutonium - could be bought on the black market by dictators. At worst, some say, terrorists might obtain a live warhead.

Failing that, they warn, countries such as Iran, Iraq or Libya may offer huge salaries to the former Soviet Union's dirt-poor nuclear experts, speeding up their home-grown weapons programs.

So far, Shishkin said earlier this month, the former Soviet republics have not devised new systems to replace the defunct police state's control over the export of nuclear fuels.

New controls will have to be economic, not military, he said, and any attempt at a total export ban could produce black-market sales to outlaw states, he said.

Russia's Ministry of Nuclear Power also is struggling to find new jobs for the thousands of unemployed engineers who once designed bombs or produced uranium or plutonium for them, according to Alexander Medvedev, assistant to the minister.

$10 A MONTH SALARIES

The experts who remain at work earn only about 1,000 rubles a month. Due to the collapse of the ruble, that amounts to about $10. If the ex-Soviet governments fulfill their promises to lift the travel restrictions, those experts could offer their services virtually anywhere in the world.

Speaking to a small group of reporters last week, Medvedev and several top officials of the Ministry of Nuclear Power hastened to say that they had no evidence that any of their experts - of which about 2,000 are capable of designing bombs - have sold out to other countries.

A spokesman for the agency's chief bomb-components factory in the top-secret town of Chelyabinsk-65 recently confirmed that. "I know of only two scientists who have left, and they went to the U.S.," he said.

But Medvedev and Deputy Minister Yevgeny Mikerin confirmed that several Middle Eastern countries have been bidding for Soviet scientists.

Medvedev declined to name the bidders. "It would be immodest," he said, smiling.

Recent news reports in Russia and Western Europe have raised the specter of an effort by several Middle Eastern powers to profit from the Soviet collapse.

Libya - A senior Russian scientist at Moscow's prestigious Kurachov Institute of Atomic Energy said in early January that at least two of his colleagues had been offered $2,000 a month to work in Libya's nuclear program.

Iraq - Last month, plutonium-processing expert Victor Mironov said Iraq had offered him $100,000 to join its program in 1990. He told a TV interviewer that he had rejected the offer, but "a young scientist did go, and there are a lot of cases like that."

Syria - Western experts in recent weeks said it too has sent sent envoys to Moscow promising desperately needed hard currency in return for nuclear cooperation.

Iran - It has partially confirmed U.S. intelligence reports that it is engaged in a massive military buildup designed to make it the Middle East's most heavily armed nation. Russian officials have confirmed that their tanks, fighter planes and artillery comprise a huge share of this buildup.

The Egyptian newspaper Al Watan Al Arabi two weeks ago said Iran had hired 50 nuclear experts from the former Soviet republics and had purchased three nuclear weapons from one of them for $150 million. (The U.S. government says it cannot confirm the report.)

Muslim ties - Soviet and Western press reports have said the Muslim republic of Tajikistan, which contains perhaps five percent of the world's known uranium reserves, is considering a uranium-development joint venture with unnamed Arab nations.

Israel - The Ministry of Nuclear Power reportedly sold a reactor to Israel, which many governments already assume has nuclear weapons.

Unknowns - Italy is investigating a Swiss businessman who tried to sell a small sample of plutonium. Italian news reports say prosecutors believe the sample may have come from the what was the Soviet Union, and may be part of a larger shipment.

Reports in Western Europe earlier this month also indicated that Swiss police had confiscated about 66 pounds of non-weapons grade uranium that may be of Soviet origin.

If those reports are correct, they could indicate that industry insiders (perhaps aided by security forces) have made an illegal private enterprise of the Soviet government's longtime efforts to sell its nuclear technology abroad.

Mikerin, of the Nuclear Power Ministry, insisted that all Soviet weapons-grade uranium and plutonium are heavily secured. "Not a gram" is missing, he said.

But Italian journalists said their government's investigation remained open. And Shishkin said the independence of the former Soviet republics makes it harder to control the movement of radioactive materials.

Former Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze recently said he was "terrified" that the loss of central control could produce a nuclear catastrophe.

"In a situation of general instability, anything can happen," he told the Italian daily Corriere della Sera. "Nuclear arms are spread throughout the territory of the ex-Soviet Union, not just in the four `atomic' republics (Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan). And this just at the time when national armed forces are being set up, each opposed to the other."

Destroying the warheads not already on Russian soil is the simplest solution, and Congress recently appropriated $400 million to help accomplish that.

Historically, however, the spread of experts and ideas has been more critical to nuclear proliferation than the spread of completed weapons.

Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney said two weeks ago in London that he did not know how to stem that flow.

"I'm not certain we can successfully stop those kinds of transfers," he said. "We can try. We are doing that."

CONVERT TO TOOTHPASTE?

Some American nuclear experts advocate helping the former Soviet governments turn their weapons-designers into decontamination experts who could reclaim the huge regions contaminated by nuclear waste.

The Nuclear Power Ministry hierarchy, meeting last week with a small group, focused on the need for a thorough "conversion" program that would put its experts to work on new civilian projects: A huge new toothpaste factory, for instance, or a new plant for compact-disc recorders.

They argued that only continued international sales of uranium for nuclear power plants could provide the funds needed for building those new facilities.

"We don't want humanitarian aid," said the agency's chief press spokesman. "Just let us sell uranium on the (world) market."