Learning to build the bomb

Abstract

At the end of the cold war in 1991,the USand its allies realized that the former Soviet Union had thousands of unsecured nuclear weapons, tons of unguarded fissile material, and unemployed nuclear weapons scientists. The materials and expertise necessary for a so-called rogue state or terrorist group to build a nuclear weapon were readily accessible. So the US set about helping the former Soviet states secure their weapons, materials, and scientists through various facets of the Cooperative Threat Reduction program. Several CTRprojects were aimed specifically at preventing a mass exodus of former Soviet scientists to rogue states by reemploying them on peaceful projects and thus taking away the temptation to sell their weapons expertise to any state that came recruiting. But 15 years on, the reemployment programs have made slow progress in the former Soviet Union; official US government reports and various academic studies attest to that fact.l And yet the feared mass exodus of scientists to rogue states never happened (but plenty of former Soviet scientists emigrated to Western states), even though Libya, North Korea, and Pakistan were building nuclear weapons programs and were presumably in need of nuclear expertise. Now Iran is also building an enrichment program, and perhaps more. If those states were not recruiting unemployed former Soviet scientists with experience designing and building nuclear weapons, then where did they-and where would potential nuclear-weapons states-get their nuclear workforce?