Program aims to reduce terrorist threat by funding former weapons scientists
Not everyone who worked at what was once world largest nunclear missile factory would become as influential as President Leonid Kuchma, the plant’s most famous worker. Most of the Yuzhmash Nuclear Missile Factory’s approximately 10,000 former employees have had to settle for far more mundane occupations.
At the end of the Cold War, funding for missile production at Yuzhmash dried up, as did the salaries of its employees. Highly trained scientists suddenly found themselves in the same position as the missiles they had created – redundant.
It created a situation that many countries like the United States have come to fear following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11: Scientists with the ability to make weapons of mass destruction became underemployed and thus vulnerable to being lured into service by rogue states.
From bombs to scalpels
Enter the Science and Technology Center of Ukraine. Jointly funded by the United States, Canada and the European Union, the center has been helping Soviet‑era weapons developers apply their knowledge to civilian projects since 1995.
Over the past five years, the Kyiv‑based center has worked with 11,000 scientists from Ukraine, Uzbekistan and Georgia, many of whom are former defense industry employees. The center’s director, Leo Owsiacki, said that by offering travel grants, patent support, partnership programs and competitions, the center is reducing the global threat of biological, chemical, nuclear and missile technology proliferation.
Owsiacki said that funding and technical support from the center helped Yuzhmash transform itself into a producer of booster rockets and undersea probes, and that a department of the Kharkiv Physical and Technical Institute that once produced protective coatings used on bombs now uses similar material to make surgical scalpels.
Owsiacki said the center provides Ukrainian scientists with two primary incentives to stay in Ukraine and out of terrorists’ employ ‑ the chance to support their families while conducting research that interests them.
Owsiacki said that he has heard of no Ukrainian scientist who has emigrated to work on weapons‑related program during the center’s five‑year history.
“Our donors ask how we know that we are successful,” Owsiacki said. “We aren’t spies, but we do know that the 11,000 scientists who have worked on our projects are here in Ukraine.”
Vladislav Pasichny is one of them. The 64‑year‑old, once researched heat‑resistant coatings for rockets, but now does solar energy research from an isolated building at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine’s Institute for Materials Science.
Pasichny is one of only 1,600 of 4,500 former employees who has remained with the institute after 1991. As head of the department, he earns the highest salary, $85 a month. There is no money to pay for business trips or to replace obsolete equipment. But the center allows Pasichny the chance to compete for research grants.
Few ethical issues
The Soviet Union devoted almost half its scientific research budget to the military‑industrial complex. The high salaries Soviet scientists earned doing weapons research attracted top minds like 46‑year‑old Nicolay Kirjukhin, who used to make protective coating for nuclear bombs.
“In Soviet times all who worked in the nuclear industry received higher wages than others,” Kirjukhin said. “We were also allowed to shop in special stores that carried a larger variety of goods and were given a greater choice of apartments and automobiles.”
Flush with funding and material goods, Kirjukhin thought little about the moral implications of his work. He took a job with the Kharkiv Physical and Technical Institute in the early 1970s because he was interested in physics and began to work on creating protective coatings for nuclear bombs. At the time, Kharkiv was renowned throughout the Soviet Union for research in the areas of physics and nuclear technology.
Like Kirjukhin, Viktor Zhirnov had no ethical qualms with his work. He began his career as a pediatrician and later earned a graduate degree in biochemistry.
Seduced by a loftier title, a well‑equipped lab and prestigious research opportunities, Zhirnov began to pursue defense‑industry research into mustard gas, where he studied the human body’s reaction to the deadly gas hoping to discover ways to protect and treat people exposed to it.
Kirjukhin and Zhirnov were among the 15,000 scientists who worked with weapons of mass destruction in Ukraine in 1991. Owsiacki said he believes that about a third of the Soviet Union’s military‑industrial complex was based in Ukraine. Most of it focused on delivery systems like missiles. But nuclear and, to a lesser extent, biological and chemical weapons were also produced in Ukraine.
In addition to the world’s largest nuclear missile factory, Ukraine was home to one of the Soviet Union’s largest nuclear weapons factories and numerous research institutes and factories were devoted to developing weapons of mass destruction. Vast sums of money were pumped into research and production of weapons during the Cold War.
Then, the Soviet Union collapsed.
“Suddenly, everything we had accomplished was unneeded,” said Oleksandr Klochko, a laser technology expert who worked with rocket‑guidance systems at the Kyiv Arsenal factory before 1991.
Laying down arms
After Ukraine became independent, the rocket systems that Klochko and his colleagues created were destroyed. Arsenal, once one of the top physics institutes in the Soviet Union, withered. The scientists who worked at Arsenal and thousands of other factories across the country were forced to find jobs elsewhere.
A handful of scientists like Klochko stayed on at Arsenal. Klochko, now deputy chief of Arsenal’s laser department, struggled to save what he calls the company’s “scientific potential” and convert it to civilian use.
It wasn’t easy. The Ukrainian government had little money to devote to the project. The salaries of those who stayed decreased almost 10‑fold and today average less than $100 a month. The scientists were unable to advance their research until 1998, when the Science and Technology Center awarded a research grant into the use of lasers with measuring devices. Researchers received pay raises, and, perhaps most importantly, were finally productively working in their areas of expertise.
Researcher Pasichny is grateful to the Science and Technology Center.
“If not for the project I did on solar energy in 1997, I think our entire department would be gone,” Pasichny said. “Our salaries at that time were only about $30 a month.”
The center’s financial and professional support gave Pasichny and hundreds of other Ukrainian scientists a way to survive in their own country while conducting meaningful research.
But the center is able to reach only a third of Ukraine’s former weapons scientists. Owsiacki estimates that another third have either immigrated to Western countries, found work in different fields or have died.
And the final third?
“They survive somehow, but not off the salaries they earn,” Owsiacki said.
