Those Ukrainian Public Health Laboratories
By The way the US has been repeating warnings every few days about possible chemical or biological attacks by Russia suggests to me that they continue to intercept intelligence that this is a real possibility. It’s not clear what combination of things might happen – a straightforward attack by Russia on Ukrainian military or civilians, a false-flag attack, or a sabotage event, say of a railroad tank car full of ammonia, and attributed to Ukraine.
Or the purpose of the warnings could be to undermine the Russian claims that Ukrainian laboratories are developing chemical and biological warfare agents. Or a combination.
Deciphering the likely intelligence behind the warnings is more difficult than the Sovietology of who stood next to whom to review the May Day parades.
Russian propaganda calls the laboratories Pentagon-funded. That’s partly true. How that happened goes back to the breakup of the Soviet Union. It’s a great story that hasn’t been told well, and I can present only a small part here.
As the Soviet Union shuddered and cracked from 1989 on, Americans in government and the national laboratories recognized that one of the dangers lay in the laboratory and production facilities for nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. The dangers were in the materials themselves and in the knowledge that the people working with them possessed. Both needed to be kept away from potential proliferators and terrorists.
The Soviet Union formally ended on December 25, 1991. By early February 1992, the directors of the three American nuclear weapons laboratories were on their way to Sarov, the center of the now-Russian nuclear weapons complex. The previous November, theUS Congress passed the Soviet Threat Reduction Act, sponsored by Senators Sam Nunn (D-GA) and Richard Lugar (R-IN). That Act was, over time, accompanied by other sources of funding and called on resources across the government.
Some of the programs provided jobs for weapons scientists. Transitioning from a Soviet economy was difficult, and the new governments were unable to pay those scientists regularly. Repurposing laboratories to, say, public health was a way to keep them employed in peaceful activities. Hence the funding of those laboratories by the United States, with collaboration by American scientists to get things going in the right direction.
By and large, redirection was not a problem. I worked with physicists in Kazakhstan, monitoring radiation levels at the former nuclear test site at Semipalatinsk. They were happy to be doing what they were doing. The feeling of obligation to society can be fulfilled by building weapons to protect your country or offering public health support. Here’s more about those laboratories.
The Nunn-Lugar and related programs succeeded throughout the 1990s. Those of us who participated felt like we were mending the world. We acquired new colleagues and friends. There is nothing like working together toward a shared objective to make the world better.
By the 2010s, Vladimir Putin decided that the programs were not good for his Russia. They continued in other countries, building up their scientific capabilities, which Putin may not have liked. In any case, Russia’s lies about the Ukrainian laboratories are nothing new.
A Russian general who was instrumental in the nuclear programs recently died. His obituary in the New York Times gives some feeling for how these programs went. It was a good time, a contrast to the horrors now coming out of Russia.
Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner