The hunger strikers, Vladimir Strakhov, director of the RAS Institute of
Geophysics in Moscow, and Igor Naumenko-Bondarenko, chairman of its trade union
committee, warn that Russian science is heading towards extinction. This year,
claims Strakhov, the RAS has received only 50.8 per cent of the funds allocated
to it in the federal budget.

“Our salaries have not been paid for four months now,” complains Strakhov.
The same is true for most of the 122 000 people employed in 336 institutes run
by the RAS—many of whom survive only by spending much of their time
working outside of science.

Russian scientists have put up with pitifully low and late wages for years,
and have often had to beg the government for research funds. But now, it seems,
their patience has finally run out. “We’ve had enough,” says Strakhov. “Now we
have to beat on the table.”

The RAS trade union is demanding the government pay the money it owes
immediately. It also wants researchers’ salaries to be indexed to inflation. The
government has instructed the finance ministry to find a way to pay off the
debts. But scientists have heard similar statements before, and fear that little
will change. “Every day, Russian science seems to fall further behind,” says
Strakhov. “In another two years it will cease to exist.”

IN 1967, 1973 and 1991, Israel put its nuclear weapons on alert. India
and Pakistan were on the brink of nuclear war in 1984, 1987 and 1990. On
all these occasions, it was only intervention by the superpowers that prevented
disaster. Now there are eight Third World countries that have nuclear weapons,
four more with an active weapons programme and six others that could easily
embark on one. And this in a world that is no longer carved up into spheres
of superpower influence and control.

William Burrows and Robert Windrem, experienced American newswriters,
des-cribe how these countries were either helped or at least permitted by
their superpower sponsors to acquire nuclear expertise during the Cold War
years when it suited their purposes. They also show how these states continued
to bleed the West of vital knowledge long after the superpowers realised
that things had got out of hand.

‘The book is about Western technical arrogance,’ says Windrem, who was
in London a fortnight ago for its launch. ‘Every time we get a look inside
a Third World se-cret weapons programme, there is a major surprise. Even
if we hadn’t provided them with knowledge and assistance, it is arrogant
of us to think they couldn’t do it.’

Critical Mass is profoundly depressing to read for. Despite an attempt
by the authors at the end to offer advice on what should be done to stop
the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the enduring impression is one of
a world racing out of control. It is also long and in places a little tedious,
especially in the second half. But this is relieved by some amazing and
disquieting anecdotes.

The Iraqi government, for example, used the Pentagon’s Internet electronic
bulletin board to get answers to some difficult technical problems. They
would couch their questions in innocuous terms and wait for some unsuspecting
expert to answer them. And to evade export control restrictions, for instance,
a special team of Iraqi computer hackers transferred design data for a uranium
enrichment centrifuge to Baghdad from Germany, using modems.

But both Iraq and Pakistan made use of a great deal of basic information
available in nonclassified literature to build up their nuclear weapons
plants. And any equipment they needed that they could not buy openly, they
made themselves, assembling it from components bought in the West or from
another Third World state. A whole network of complex relationships formed.
Israel, for example, sold American missile technology to China to raise
money for its nuclear programme. China adapted the missile and sold it to
Iraq. If Israeli pilots had attacked Iraq during the Gulf War, they would
have been facing their own missiles.

The collapse of the Soviet Union has rendered the situation even more
chaotic. Economic crisis in the former Soviet Union has created a climate
in which almost anything is for sale. In 1991, Greenpeace arranged to buy
a nuclear warhead from an East German soldier. The organisation planned
to ship it to Berlin for a surprise news conference. This unusual sale was
stopped only by the early withdrawal of the soldier’s company back to Russia.
Critical Mass also gives details of Chetek, a Russian company backed by
the government’s ministries of defence and nuclear power that offers to
sell ‘peaceful nuclear explosions for ecology’.

Burrows and Windrem paint a portrait of a world gone mad, in which international
treaties are not only ineffective but irrelevant. While Pakistan, Israel
and India have steadfastly refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty, Iraq embraced it and welcomed International Atomic Energy Agency
inspectors to some of its facilities. This made it easier to obtain vital
equipment from Western suppliers for the serious work that it continued
elsewhere. In the face of the real determination of Pakistan and India to
develop nuclear facilities, the export restrictions imposed on these countries
because of their refusal to sign did not prove to be any obstacle.

‘We have to realise that there is a real technical capability here and
that technical fixes won’t work,’ says Windrem. ‘What we need are political
solutions. Much of the Third World is living on a hair trigger. We need
to invest a lot of political capital.’ He hopes this book will be ‘part
of an alarm bell that rings not just in the West but in Third World capitals’.
He is pleased that parts of it have been serialised in India and Pakistan.
‘Let the debate begin,’ he says.

Judith Perera writes on science in the former Soviet Union.

Mirzayanov was jailed at the end of January after refusing to attend
his trial at Moscow City Court on the grounds that it was unconstitutional
(This Week, 5 February). He argued that a new, independent investigation
of his case should be made. On 14 February, the court agreed, but sent Mirzayanov
back to prison. Since 1991, when he first published details of a secret
Russian nerve gas called Novichok, Mirzayanov’s case has attracted support
from all round the world. After the court returned him to prison, Russia’s
Prosecutor General, Alexei Kazannik, found himself flooded with letters
of protest and petitions from foreign scientific organisations. On 22 February,
he signed a release order.

Mirzayanov and his lawyer, Alexander Asnis, hope the new investigation
will agree that he has no case to answer. But Kazannik’s resignation on
27 February – over an unrelated matter – is giving them cause for concern.
Asnis has less faith in Kazannik’s successor, Alexei Ilyushenko. ‘Kazannik
was a progressive and thoughtful person,’ says Asnis. ‘Ilyushenko is nothing
more than a transmitter for ideas from the top-level leadership.’ The outcome
may depend on a political decision taken over Ilyushenko’s head, says Asnis.

Mirzayanov wants to organise an inspection by the International Red
Cross of the Matrosskaya Tishina prison, where he was held. He describes
conditions in one wing as like a ‘concentration camp’ with a cell meant
for twenty crammed with as many as a hundred people. There is so little
room, he says, prisoners have to sleep in shifts.

Between 1985 and 1989, more than $400 million was spent trying to control
locust plagues in Africa. The money was spent on more than 11 million litres
of the organophosphorous insecticide Fenitrothion, which was sprayed repeatedly
over large areas.

The anti-locust fungus, which like chemical pesticides comes in the
form of a spray, is being developed by Chris Prior and his colleagues at
the International Institute of Biological Control (IIBC) at Silwood Park
near Ascot in Berkshire. It uses Metarhizium flavoviride, a fungus which
grows only on insects and is pathogenic to locusts.

When a spore of the fungus lands on an insect, it germinates, sending
a tube up to 20 micrometres long and 1 to 2 micrometres thick into the cuticle.
The tip of this tube swells, and using a combination of enzymatic digestion
and brute force the fungus penetrates through the cuticle. It then grows
inside the insect, breaking up into small fragments which disperse through
the insect’s circulatory system.

‘The pathogen kills the locust by simply clogging up the circulatory
system until the insect is full of fungus,’ says Prior. ‘Some strains kill
by producing a toxin but this doesn’t seem to be the case with the ones
we are using.’

The fungus is present in the locusts’ normal environment, mainly in
the soil and other dead insects, but the insects have developed ways of
avoiding it. Periods of natural infection are limited to the very few periods
of wet weather in the region. ‘We have tried to increase the capacity of
the fungus to infect the insects by spraying it as a pesticide,’ says Prior.
‘If we can do this we may be able to kill enough with the sprays to control
them.’ He says the locusts are less likely to develop resistance to the
fungus than to a chemical pesticide. ‘The advantage of a living organism
is that it can evolve alongside the host,’ he says.

The fungus is formulated as a suspension of spores in an oil-based liquid,
which can be sprayed using existing equipment. Field trials in Benin, Niger
and Mauritania have been very successful. Once the technology is developed,
it may be extended to pests such as thrips, whitefly and caterpillars, leaf-feeding
beetles such as the Colorado beetle, and sap-sucking bugs, as long as a
parasite can be found for these species.

Starting in 1991, Mirzayanov published a series of articles alleging
that work was continuing on a binary nerve weapon known as Novichok (This
Week, 8 May 1993). The government insisted it had stopped research on chemical
weapons. If found guilty of revealing state secrets, he could face eight
years in prison. His defence rests on a clause in the new Russian constitution
that forbids retroactive prosecution under unpublished laws.

When the first of his articles appeared, in October 1991, the old laws
governing state secrets had been repealed, and he was not prosecuted. He
did, however, lose his job at the State Union Scientific Research Institute
of Organic Chemistry and Technology in Moscow, centre of Soviet chemical
weapons research.

Russian President Boris Yeltsin reinstated the secrecy laws in January
1992, along with an unpublished list of the kind of information that should
be considered secret. In September that year, when Mirzayanov’s second article
appeared, he was arrested and spent 11 days in jail. He was released after
agreeing not to leave Moscow. The panel of nine experts that investigated
his case recommended prosecution.

In the meantime, in July 1993, a new law on state secrets came into
force. It includes a list of the sort of information that must be kept secret.
The list must be published after the President has approved it. So far,
however, the list remains secret.

On the first day of his trial, Mirzayanov’s lawyer argued that a new
investigation by an independent panel should be started, taking into account
the latest law, with its stipulation that the list of what constitutes
a state secret must be published. These requests were denied.

Directing the operation was Marshal Georgi Zhukov, a hero of the Second
World War and briefly defence minister under President Nikita Khrushchev.
Zhukov describes the exercise for the first time in the third part of his
biography, which is about to be published in Moscow.

The aim of the test was to measure the destructive impact of the bomb,
says Vladimir Karpov, Zhukov’s biographer. ‘Fortifications and military
vehicles were put in place and houses were specially built,’ he says, ‘but
the most important aspect of the exercise is that troops were sent into
the target area.’

The test has been a secret for almost forty years. ‘Even now I don’t
know whether I am really allowed to write about it,’ says Karpov.

For those who took part, the secrecy has meant four decades of official
indifference to the health problems they have suffered as a result – and
no compensation. They had to sign documents promising to stay silent on
the subject for 25 years. But the habit of silence lingered on, and they
are only now beginning to demand recognition.

Among those who took part in the test is Shamed Shaimikhamedov, head
of the Committee for Special Risk Veterans which was set up in 1991 to campaign
on behalf of test veterans. Fewer than 1 per cent of those who were at Totsk
are still alive and the survivors are all plagued by ill-health, he says.
Many developed leukaemia and other cancers, but there have also been consistent
reports of problems with hearing and vision, eczema and damage to joints.
‘We were nothing more than guinea pigs. Most of us were in the open without
any kind of shelter,’ says Shaimikhamedov.

The soldiers, mostly teenagers and men in their early twenties doing
military service, were told at the last minute that ‘some exercises were
to be held’. According to Shaimikhamedov, the bomb was dropped about 3 kilometres
away on a bright clear day. ‘We watched through our gas masks and visors.
Everything shattered. There were two explosions and a shock wave – a very
hot wave – passed over us and then came back again in the other direction.’

The troops then spent several hours playing war games as two ‘opposing
armies’. The aim was to see how men and equipment would cope after a nuclear
attack. ‘Afterwards there were no tests for radiation. But we were given
new uniforms as a reward,’ says Shaimikhamedov. ‘We kept wearing them for
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Around 6000 people belong to the veterans’ group, including people who
worked in weapons plants or as monitors of nuclear tests at the test sites
of Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan, and Novaya Zemlya in the Arctic, as well
as at other less known sites, such as Totsk. Since 1992 these people have
received token compensation of 50 roubles a month – just enough to buy a
box of matches. They are now demanding their own scientific and medical
centre.

Shaimikhamedov says 90 per cent of the committee members are invalids
and thousands of veterans have already died. ‘Medicine cannot restore our
health – we need our own scientific centre.’

There are nuclear veterans throughout the Commonwealth of Independent
States. Those in Russia are lucky compared with others. In Kazakhstan, for
instance, there are just 300 left. These survivors set up their own committee
last May to press for a special law. The government argues that it cannot
pass a law for so few people. Melgis Alkenovich Metov, head of the committee,
says his members have many different diseases. Most of them worked at Semipalatinsk.

‘We worked in the very epicentre of the nuclear blast building houses
and underground tunnels right where the explosions had taken place,’ he
says. He says he took part in every test conducted in 1962 – the last year
before atmospheric testing stopped. ‘After every test I had to work in the
epicentre reading data from monitors three times a week and preparing the
ground for the next explosion.’

Most of those he worked with then have died. ‘I am a disabled person
but at my last medical examination they said it was all due to age. Can
this be so? Only a few of us have survived at all. Veterans not only have
their own problems but problems of sick children and grandchildren. I would
ask the medical profession to look to our needs and I would ask the government
to take care of us at the end of our lives.

Consultants are likely to be invited in September to submit proposals for a
feasibility study, for which the European Community’s technical assistance
programme has allocated 3 million Ecus ( £2.3 million). The
European Bank for Reconstruction and Development has approved financing of
the project in principle.

In the competition, a French consortium led by Campenon Bernard came closest
to providing a complete solution, and won second prize with its proposal,
called ‘Resolution’. Campenon’s idea is to build a box-shaped concrete
building weighing 250 000 tonnes over the crumbling concrete sarcophagus
that now encases the remains of the reactor. The new structure, made of
prefabricated blocks like huge Lego bricks, would be built by remote
control. ‘There will be no human intervention on site during construction,’
says Pierre Coppey of Campenon. The hollow blocks would be moved around the
site by a mobile crane. Once in place, the blocks would be pressurised,
while the interior of the building would be kept at low pressure to prevent
contamination escaping.

Coppey describes the new structure as a ‘giant demolition factory’. Inside,
wire-guided vehicles fitted with shielded video cameras and a huge mobile
crane capable of lifting up to 200 tonnes would dismantle the reactor. The
cranes would be controlled from a command centre outside the building, which
would be protected from radiation. Debris would be transferred to a sorting
centre inside the building and separated according to how radioactive it
was.

Low-level wastes would be blended with cement, placed in cement containers
and buried in special earth mounds. Intermediate and high-level wastes would
be temporarily stored in cells clad in stainless steel, pending final
disposal. Coppey estimates the containment would cost $250 million
to build, and puts the cost of the whole project at £2.5
billion.

Third prize was shared between a British group led by AEA Technology, a
French consortium led by Bouyges and a German group led by Hochtieff.
According to Gerry Bauer, who was responsible for AEA Technology’s entry,
‘The final solution is likely to combine what is technically best in all the
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Bouyges proposed building a massive concrete structure away from the site
and moving it into place on rails. Hochtieff offered several alternatives,
including one very similar to the Campenon solution. The British entry was a
huge steel dome built off site and moved into place on tracks. Concrete and
sand would first be pumped into the sarcophagus to cover the loose dust and
so shield against radiation .

Two Russian groups received joint fourth prize. A consortium led by the
Design and Research Institute of Complex Energy Technology of St Petersburg
proposed filling the sarcophagus from the bottom with concrete, providing a
waterproof cover, and leaving the radiation inside to decay. The proposal
from a consortium led by the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy in
Moscow involved dissolving the most radioactive material and sucking it out
for treatment at a plant built on site.

Brian Stanwix of Design Group Partnership, AEA Technology’s partner in the
project, questions whether the Campenon structure can be built by remote
control. ‘It is not a straightforward site – the ground is neither level nor
flat and near the reactor it is highly contaminated.’ He also points out
that the prefabricated units are not horizontally tensioned, and so would be
unable to handle horizontal seismic loads. In 1990 Chernobyl experienced an
earthquake rated 4 on the Richter scale.

In some lakes in the Kanin peninsula fish have been dying in vast numbers.
‘Archangel is in the flight path of rockets launched from Plesetsk and the
first stages fall to Earth in this area,’ explains Victor Kuznetsov of the
Archangel Ecology Committee. ‘These still contain some liquid fuel which
is very toxic.’

Yuri Zhuravlev, chief of staff of the Plesetsk site, says around 16
000 tonnes of separated rocket stages have accumulated in the region. In
1991, around 500 tonnes of metal were taken to depots in Archangel for recycling.
‘We are trying to tackle the problem in four ways,’ says Zhuravlev. ‘First,
we are keeping to a minimum the amount of fuel which remains in the separated
stages and we are also reducing the number of drop zones.’

The defence authorities ordered an environmental assessment of the drop
zones and organised a cleanup of the region. The cosmodrome is also making
efforts to give local people more information about its activities.

Plesetsk was built originally as a missile launching site, but over
the past few years it has become Russia’s principal cosmo-drome for routine
launches. It now undertakes around 60 per cent of all satellite launches.

The former Soviet Union’s main cosmodrome was at Baikonur in Kazakhstan.
Russia continues to pay for more than 90 per cent of Baikonur’s upkeep,
but there has been some acrimonious wrangling over its shared use. Plesetsk
is hoping to benefit from the wrangling for, with the signing of the START
2 agreement, its days as a missile launching site are numbered.

Last year President Boris Yeltsin said Russia would launch all its rockets
from Plesetsk. But it will never replace Baikonur, says the deputy director
of the Russian Space Agency, Alexandr Medvedchikov. Plesetsk is not suitable
for manned launches, and massive investment would be required to bring it
up to standard. Russia also needs access to Baikonur because it is relatively
close to the equator, making it easier and cheaper to launch satellites
into geostationary orbit.

It would cost billions of roubles to transfer the Baikonur facilities
to Plesetsk, says Nikolai Semenov of Glavkosmos, the commercial space agency.
‘We would also have to change the ground network of tracking stations.’

Top of the league for air pollution is the city of Norilsk, a metal
smelting centre in eastern Siberia. Figures for 1988 show that around 2.34
million tonnes of pollutants were pumped into the city’s air that year –
about 6.2 per cent of the total for the whole of Russia. Most of this was
sulphur dioxide. Moscow comes next with over 1.11 million tonnes, including
almost 80 000 tonnes of sulphur dioxide, 140 000 tonnes of nitrogen oxides
and nearly 190 000 tonnes of hydrocarbons.

Russia’s water has fared no better than its air. The Oka River near
Dzherzinsk in the Volga region, for example, contains almost 80 times the
official limit for ammonium nitrate. The Ivankovskoe reservoir, which supplies
Moscow, is heavily polluted with phenols and heavy metals. And the concentration
of bacteria and viruses in major rivers such as the Volga, Don and Ob are
hundreds of times over the official limit.

Russia is responsible for some 70 per cent – more than 1.6 billion tonnes
– of the toxic industrial wastes produced by the former Soviet Union. Most
of it is dumped in quarries and on waste ground in some of the country’s
major cities.

The fate of radioactive wastes is a still greater problem. Much of it
lies in unsuitable burial grounds and some is simply stored in warehouses.
‘There is serious pollution in all areas where nuclear wastes are kept,’
admits the ecology minister, Viktor Danilov-Danilyan. ‘In principle there
is no ecologically friendly way to deal with nuclear wastes. It is a question
of reducing the danger.’

In the 1950s and 1960s radioactive waste from industry was buried in
ordinary waste tips, where it remains today. In Moscow, for instance, which
has a particularly severe waste problem because of its high concentration
of nuclear facilities, there are about 80 old tips within the city limits,
some of which contain radioactive waste. Some disused tips have been built
on.

A second detailed report – drawn up by a commission of independent experts
on the instructions of the Supreme Soviet in 1990 – spells out the appalling
legacy of the accidents and contamination at the nuclear weapons production
facility at Kyshtym in the southern Urals over the past 45 years. According
to this unpublished report, known as the ‘Blue Book’, 437 000 people have
been affected.

The people worst hit are those living beside the Techa River, where
nuclear waste was dumped in the 1950s. More than 930 local people are registered
as suffering from radiation sickness. Between 1980 and 1990 the number of
cases of cancer in the Kyshtym area increased by 21 per cent, birth defects
by 23.3 per cent, asthma by 43.3 per cent, blood diseases by 31 per cent
and stomach diseases by 24.6 per cent.

Since 1951, 18 000 people have been evacuated from the area, but the
problems continue, according to Eugeny Belyaev, president of the state committee
on public health and epidemiology. ‘The huge amounts of accumulated wastes
may find their way into the ground water and into other rivers,’ says Belyaev.
‘This demands that some very decisive measures should be taken.’ A special
programme has begun to monitor the health of those exposed to radiation.

Across the country, 17 000 people are registered as poten-tial victims
of radioactive contamination. The incidence of leukaemia among these people
is 41 per cent higher than the national average.

Contamination from the accident at Chernobyl is now acknowledged to
have affected a much larger area than first admitted. Some 2.5 million people
inhabiting 7700 villages, towns and cities, live on contaminated land.