Russian scientists and rogue states: Does western assistance reduce the proliferation threat?

International Security

Volumn 29, Issue 4, 2005, Pages 50-77

  Ball, Deborah Yarsike ^a   Gerber, Theodore P ^b  

^a LAWRENCE LIVERMORE NATIONAL LABORATORY   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN MADISON   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 85047692968     PISSN: 01622889     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/isec.2005.29.4.50     Document Type: Review

References (61)

1. Restrictions on travel existed for weapons scientists, but the laws were not strictly enforced in the early days after the fall of the Soviet Union. Moreover, if a scientist is determined to move abroad, there are numerous ways to do so, including purchasing a fake passport. Today a passport is issued to a weapons scientist five years after the scientist has left weapons-related work.
2. One prior study that examined the potential for the migration of Russian scientists is Valentin Tikhonov, Russia's Nuclear and Missile Complex: The Human Factor in Proliferation (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2001). This study, however, did not look at the impact of Western grants on the likelihood of migration. Although the findings are interesting, the analysis is limited to univariate and bivariate distributions; however, multivariate analysis is necessary to understand the effects of key variables on the willingness of Russian WMD scientists to migrate.
3. At the time of the survey, the 2003 Operation Iraqi Freedom had not yet begun, and the U.S. government considered Iraq a rogue state.
4. When we asked Russian scientists about their inclinations to work abroad, we did not use the term "rogue states." In addition, when we refer to "going rogue," we do not necessarily mean that the scientists would work in an unauthorized or clandestine manner for these nations. Rather, we are merely testing their general willingness to work for these countries. The survey was conducted from November 2002 to January 2003.
5. On the numerous problems that confronted Russian science during the 1990s, see Peter Aldhous, "A Scientific Community on the Edge," Science, May 27, 1994, pp. 1262-1264;
6. Peter Aldhous and Alexander Dorozynski, "Saving Russia's Threatened Biological Heritage," ibid., p. 1266;
7. Daniel Clery, "A Once-Favored Discipline Has the Furthest to Fall," ibid., pp. 1268-1270;
8. Vladimir Pokrovsky, "Russian Science in the Balance," Nature, September 15, 1994, pp. 195-196;
9. Peter Kneen, "Science in Shock: Russian Science Policy in Transition," Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 47, No. 2 (1995), pp. 281-303;
10. Vladimir Zakharov and Vladimir Fortov, "Science in Russia Is Already in a Coma," Science, May 5, 1995, pp. 693-694;
11. S.A. Lebedev and S.A. Milenin, "The Crisis of Russian Science and Ways to Solve It," Russian Education and Society, Vol. 38, No. 10 (October 1996), pp. 6-23;
12. Michael Freemantle, "Russian Science on the Rack," Chemical and Engineering News, December 22, 1997, pp. 25-34;
13. Carol Matlack, "Up from the Wreckage of Russian Science," Business Week, October 27, 1997, pp. 153-154;
14. I.G. Ushkalov, '"Utechka Umov' I Sotsial'no-ekomonicheskie Problemy Rossiiskoi Nauki" [Brain drain and social-economic problems of Russian science], Vestnik Rossiiskoi Akademii Nauk, No. 67 (1997), pp. 150-153;
15. A.V. Iurevich and I.P. Tsapenko, "Funktsional'nyi Krizis Nauk," [Functional crisis in science], Voprosy Filosofii, No. 1 (1998), pp. 17-29;
16. Toni Feder, "New Minister Is Unlikely to Resuscitate Russian Science," Physics Today, Vol. 51, No. 8 (August 1998), pp. 54-55;
17. Carl Levitin, "Pay Crisis Drives Russian Scientists Abroad," Nature, October 15, 1998, p. 627;
18. A. Varshavskii, "The Socioeconomic Problems of Russian Science," Problems of Economic Transition, Vol. 42, No. 5 (1999), pp. 56-80;
19. and Vladislav Borobyev and Yekaterina Dobrynina, "Unit of Measure - The Mind," Rossiyskaya Nauchnaya Gazeta, February 10, 2004, translated in Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), CEP 20040210000290, February 10, 2004.
20. L. Gokhberg and L. Mindeli, eds., Nauka Rossii v Tsifrakh, 1999 [Russian science in numbers, 1999] (Moscow: Tsentr Issledovanii I Statistiki Nauk, 1999), p. 44.
21. Irina Dezhina and Loren Graham, "Russian Basic Science after Ten Years of Transition and Foreign Support," Working Paper No. 24 (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, February 2002), p. 7.
22. LG. Ushkalov and I.A. Malakha, Utechka Umov: Prichiny, Masshtaby, Posledstvii [Brain drain: Reasons, scale, consequences] (Moscow: Editorial URSS, 1999).
23. Carl Levitin, "Russian Scientists Threaten Campaign of Protests over Funding," Nature, September 14, 1995, p. 94.
24. Zakharov and Fortov, "Science in Russia Is Already in a Coma," p. 693.
25. President Vladimir Putin recently noted that Russia was losing much of its scientific talent to professions that provide better remuneration in Russia, such as business and politics. He also averred that although only 2 percent of scientists who leave the field choose to go abroad, their number includes some of Russia's most highly skilled and youngest scientists. See February 9, 2004, Itar-Tass, from Johnson's Russia List #8057, February 10, 2004.
26. Ushkalov and Malakha, Utechka Umov, p. 51;
27. and Gokhberg and Mindeli, Nauka Rossii v Tsifrakh, 1999, p. 28. Oleg Bukharin notes that the loss of personnel in the closed nuclear cities was less than at the other institutes within the weapons complex.
28. See Bukharin, Russia's Nuclear Complex: Surviving the End of the Cold War, report for the Program on Science and Global Security (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University, May 2004), p. 17.
29. The U.S. government, using satellite links, set up and operated a telecommunications system in the mid-1990s for Russian scientific institutes, including in closed cities such as Snezhinsk and Sarov until the Soros fiber-optic network became available a few years later.
30. Pavel Podvig, ed., Strategicheskoye yadernoye vooruzheniye Rossii [Russian strategic nuclear weapons] (Moscow: IzdAT, 1998), p. 30.
31. Pavel Koryashkin, "Russian Nuclear Ammunition Depots Well Protected - Official," Itar-Tass, October 25, 2001;
32. and "Russia: Terror Groups Scoped Nuke Site," Associated Press, October 26, 2001. We thank Matthew Bunn for bringing these incidents to our attention. See http://www.nti.org/e_research/cnwm/threat/anecdote.asp;
33. and Matthew Bunn and Anthony Wier, Securing the Bomb: An Agenda for Action, May 2004, http://www.nti.org/e_research/cnwm, p. 31.
34. For a detailed discussion of the institutional and cultural transformation that Russian science must undergo, see Theodore P. Gerber and Deborah Yarsike Ball, "Russian Scientists in a Changed Institutional Environment: Factors Affecting Subjective Adaptation," University of Wisconsin-Madison and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, August 2004.
35. For an overview and critique of the three major U.S. programs designed to encourage Russian WMD scientists residing in the ten closed nuclear cities to pursue nonmilitary-related work, see Sharon K. Weiner, "Preventing Nuclear Entrepreneurship in Russia's Nuclear Cities," International Security, Vol. 27, No. 2 (Fall 2002), pp. 126-158.
36. For a more general discussion on impediments to U.S.-Russian cooperation in the area of nonproliferation and on strategies to overcome those impediments, see Overcoming Impediments to U.S.-Russian Cooperation on Nuclear Nonproliferation: A Report (Washington, D.C.: National Research Council, 2004).
37. In addition to Russia, the ISTC funds scientists in Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. The U.S. side of the program is run out of the State Department. For more on the history of the ISTC, see Glenn E. Schweitzer, Moscow DMZ: The Story of the International Effort to Convert Russian Weapons Science to Peaceful Purposes (New York: ME. Sharpe, 1996).
38. See the ISTC web page http://www.istc.ru.
39. For more information on IPP, see the Russian Transition Initiatives website, http://www.dp.doe.gov/na-20/rti.shtml.
40. Billy Goodman, "Noted Researchers Laud Donation to Russian Science," Scientist, January 11, 1993, p. 1.
41. Valery N. Soyfer, "Russian Science's Comeback," Wall Street Journal, August 30, 2002.
42. See also Goodman, "Noted Researchers Laud Donation to Russian Science."
43. For more information, see http://www.crdf.org.
44. See the INTAS website, http://www.intas.be/mainfs.htm
45. Quoted in Soyfer, "Russian Science's Comeback."
46. Quoted in Dezhina and Graham, "Russian Basic Science after Ten Years of Transition and Foreign Support," p. 18.
47. A.I. Kurchatov, "Pushed Out into the Street," Sovetskaia Rossiia, June 24, 2003, in FBIS, CEP 20030714000304, June 24, 2003.
48. Theodore P. Gerber and Deborah Yarsike Ball, "The State of Russian Science: Focus Groups with Nuclear Physicists," Post-Soviet Affairs, Vol. 18, No. 3 (July-September 2002), pp. 183-212.
49. We have been impressed by the desire of State Department officials who oversee the United States' participation in the ISTC to obtain information in order to learn the extent to which their program is working. They were supportive, granted us independence in carrying out the study, and put no pressure on us to "shape" the results.
50. Gerber and Ball, "The State of Russian Science."
51. Although we focus on WMD brain drain in this article, the survey addressed a variety of topics, including respondents' views on developments in Russian science more generally as well as specific proposals to reform Russian science; the scientists' economic situations, productivity levels, grant-writing activities, and morale; broad economic and political issues; and certain aspects of the ISTC program.
52. During a recent government reorganization, the Ministry of Atomic Energy was downgraded to an agency and renamed the Federal Agency for Atomic Energy.
53. Only one of the twenty institutes we initially chose refused to participate. It was replaced by an institute from the backup list.
54. L. Gokhberg and L. Mindeli, eds., Russian Science and Technology at a Glance: 2000 (Moscow: Center for Science Research and Statistics, 2001).
55. One might argue that migration to Pakistan could be harmful from a WMD proliferation perspective, even though the U.S. government does not officially view Pakistan as a rogue nation. All respondents who expressed some willingness to take a job in Pakistan, however, were also willing to work in one of the rogue countries on our list. Note that the survey was conducted prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq; thus it is appropriate to code Iraq as a "rogue" nation.
56. Here we refer explicitly to grant money that goes toward the researcher's salary-not toward equipment, travel, or other research-related expenses.
57. We do not present error bars for the other response categories in Figure 3 because our substantive focus is on the estimate of the proportions who say the work should not be conducted under any circumstances.
58. The two measures are significantly and positively associated, as one would expect if both are imperfect but valid measures of individual willingness for harmful migration: 42 percent of those who think that WMD employment for an authoritarian government is acceptable under some circumstances say they would consider taking a job in at least one of the rogue countries listed, compared to 18 percent of those who see no acceptable circumstances and 21 percent overall.
59. We ruled out another alternative interpretation - that both grant status and proliferation potential are jointly influenced by other variables - by verifying our results using a multivariate statistical model (logistic regression). We assessed the effects of foreign grant status after controlling for Russian grant status, age, gender, ethnicity, place of residence, scientific specialty, administrative position, and income. Based on our final model, scientists with mean values on all these variables have a 25 percent probability of saying they would consider moving to a. rogue country if they have not received funding from foreign grants, versus an 11 percent probability if they have received funding. We verified all our findings with multivariate models and found no substantive deviations from the patterns present in the bivariate comparisons. We do not have the space to report these results and will provide them upon request.
60. Our logistic regression models confirmed that this pattern obtains even when our control variables are held constant.
61. Gerber and Ball, "Russian Scientists in a Changed Institutional Environment."