Reconsidering Cooperative Threat Reduction: Russian Nuclear Weapons Scientists and Non-Proliferation

Abstract

The collapse of the Soviet Union raised concerns about the fate of its nuclear weapons and led the United States to fund what came to be known as Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR). This includes programs that fight the proliferation of weapons expertise by providing short-term income and eventual re-employment of former Soviet WMD experts in civilian fields. Using case studies, based on archival research and extensive interviews, this article argues that CTR's three main ‘knowledge non-proliferation’ efforts have largely failed at their given task. Although programs have worked with many former Soviet WMD experts, few have been re-employed. Each program has also come to emphasize the number of people engaged rather than re-directed and to have less regard for their WMD skills. Moreover, this shift in goals, and the metrics each program uses to measure progress, led to serious political disputes between Moscow and Washington. Besides being unable to demonstrate success at their original non-proliferation goals, these programs use metrics that threaten to upset the fragile US domestic political consensus for future work in Russia.