Doug Henwood wrote:
> Boston Globe - April 20, 1999
>
> Disarming of Russia continues
> By David Filipov
>
> SERGIYEV POSAD, Russia - Relations between the United States and Russia may
> have reached their lowest point since the fall of the Berlin Wall, but
> remarkably, that has not stopped a US-funded program to dismantle the
> decaying, but still deadly, nuclear arsenal of the former Soviet Union.
>
> At a secret defense factory in this industrial town north of Moscow,
> Russian submarine-launched ballistic missiles, which were once aimed at US
> cities, are being disarmed and dismantled - with American equipment and
> funding.
>
> A nearby training center for Russia's strategic rocket forces uses
> techniques and equipment supplied by US specialists to weed out Russians
> unfit to work with Moscow's nuclear weapons.
>
> Even as Moscow wages a war of words with Washington over the conflict in
> the Balkans, more than $1 billion in US-funded projects to reduce the
> threat posed by Russia's weapons of mass destruction have continued almost
> unabated.
>
> The hardiness of these projects, commonly referred to as the ''Nunn-Lugar''
> program after its Congressional sponsors, former Senator Sam Nunn and
> Senator Richard Lugar, provides a measure of geopolitical comfort despite a
> chill in US-Russian relations not seen since the end of the Cold War.
>
> The staying power of these joint projects despite hard times in the
> relationship even suggests a model for how the West could have better used
> the billions of dollars it spent to support Russia's sporadic, and so far
> largely unsucessful, attempts at economic reform.
>
> ''The Russians see real results from Nunn-Lugar money,'' said Pavel
> Felgenhauer, defense analyst for the Moscow daily Segodnya. ''Unlike other
> aid, where all of the money was spent and nothing changed, with Nunn-Lugar
> money concrete things did happen. So the Russians want to keep these
> programs, despite their suspicions.''
>
> Russian politicians, and many ordinary citizens, are upset at the
> bombardment of a fellow Slavic, Orthodox Christian nation by NATO, an
> alliance that until a decade ago was the Cold War arch-enemy of the Soviet
> Union.
>
> The Kremlin has consistently portrayed the United States as the aggressor
> in the Balkan conflict, and Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, whom the
> West accuses of atrocities against ethnic Albanians, as the victim.
>
> ''Bill Clinton hopes to win, he hopes Milosevic will capitulate, give up
> the whole of Yugoslavia, make it America's protectorate. We will not allow
> this. This is a strategic place, the Balkans,'' President Boris N. Yeltsin
> said yesterday to a meeting of Russian editors and publishers. ''We simply
> cannot ditch Milosevic. We want to embrace him as tight as possible.''
>
> Such sentiments have led to cancellation or postponement of dozens of joint
> initiatives between Russia and NATO because, in the words of one senior
> Russian commander, General Leonid Ivashov, ''they are no longer appropriate
> at this time.''
>
> But across Russia, a number of Nunn-Lugar programs - which allow Americans
> access to highly sensitive and until recently, top-secret, technology - are
> still underway.
>
> They include:
>
> construction of a new storage site in the Ural Mountains to keep 6,000
> bombs' worth of nuclear material out of the wrong hands;
>
> a laboratory that will make it easier to keep track of Russia's 42,000
> metric tons of chemical weapons, a stockpile capable of destroying all life
> on Earth many times over;
>
> equipment and funding to help destroy ballistic missiles, missile
> launchers, strategic bombers and nuclear submarines under the 1991 Start I
> arms reduction treaty.
>
> In the first days after NATO began its airstrikes, Russia asked that a
> planned review session of the program in Moscow be postponed.
>
> ''But nothing else has been canceled,'' said an American official close to
> the project. ''This is an incredibly tense and difficult time for us, and
> there are things to work out on both sides. They had to ask themselves a
> few questions. But we're moving forward.''
>
> The Nunn-Lugar program was initially created when the Soviet Union
> collapsed and it became clear the successor states did not have the
> resources to eliminate the cold war arsenal. Since 1991, over $2 billion in
> US funds has gone toward eliminating 3,800 nuclear weapons in Kazakhstan,
> Ukraine, and Belarus - the entire nuclear arsenals of those countries -
> plus reducing Russia's arsenal by 96 submarine missile launchers, 50
> missile silos, 273 strategic ballistic missiles and 30 bombers.
>
> Under agreements already reached, an additional 711 missiles and many more
> submarine missile launch tubes will be eliminated. Other programs, such as
> improving security at 50 nuclear weapons sites, training personnel, and
> safeguarding transport and storage of fissile materials - are aimed at
> preventing the export of weapons of mass destruction from Russia.
>
> At first, the Russian military had a difficult time getting used to the
> idea that Americans would pay to dismantle Russian weapons.
>
> ''At first there was a big psychological problem,'' said Igor Safranchuk of
> the Center for Policy Studies, a Moscow think tank that monitors strategic
> arms control issues. ''Russian scientists didn't believe that Americans
> would help. But when equipment and money started coming, the mood changed.
> There was a sense of humbled national pride, that Americans were financing
> disarmanent by Russia, but it passed.''
>
> Commented the US official: ''It took time to build trust, to get on that
> base where you would have been shot dead a few years ago.''
>
> US and Russian observers acknowledge that the Nunn-Lugar programs have only
> made a dent in Russia's legacy of the nuclear arms race. But sources on
> both sides call the program a success.
>
> As recently as February, Gen. Igor Valynkin, who heads Russia's department
> for nuclear safety, praised the US aid, which he said included special
> containers for transporting Russian warheads, computers for keeping tabs on
> atomic weapons, emergency kits, and screening equipment such as polygraphs
> for the training center in Sergiyev Posad.
>
> ''All the computers [provided by the US] have been certififed by Russian
> specialists,'' Valynkin commented. ''They have no bugs or any other hidden
> devices to obtain secret information.''
>
> Valynkin's remarks point to another success of the Nunn-Lugar program.
> While the officials in charge of economic reform in Yeltsin's governments
> have almost all been young economists who professed pro-Western views, the
> same could not be said about the old-line military officials and defense
> factory directors the US has dealt with under Nunn-Lugar programs. But it
> is the way Nunn-Lugar has worked, not the Russian participants' political
> leanings, that has made it successful.
>
> ''When the International Monetary Fund gave Russia credits, they would say,
> `now, restructure the economy','' said Safronchuk. ''Nunn-Lugar didn't work
> like that. They would say, `build this facility' or `destroy these
> missiles.' And when the work was done, then the Russians would get their
> money.''
>
> The program has also established direct contact with Russian companies,
> said Russian and US sources, providing jobs and business at a time when
> most factories are at a standstill. This, too, is a reason why Nunn-Lugar
> has continued.
>
> ''Why should Russia refuse hundreds of millions of dollars? That would be
> foolish,'' said Alexander Pikayev, an arms control analyst at the Carnegie
> Moscow Center. ''Because Russia receives American money and technology, the
> US in return receives more transparency of the Russian nuclear
> infrastructure, and maintaining this is very important for the US.''
-- Marta Russell author, Los Angeles, CA Beyond Ramps: Disability at the End of the Social Contract http://www.commoncouragepress.com/ramps.html