Supply of Proliferation-Critical Knowledge

This section examines sources of the supply of personnel with proliferation-critical knowledge who may divert their expertise to proliferant states and terrorist groups. A key question that this section addresses is the size of the pool of NBC weapons expertise in the former Soviet Union. Unfortunately, there is little confirmable data on the number of personnel in the NBC weapons complexes, and estimates of these numbers vary widely, particularly for the chemical and biological complexes. 

See Federation of American Scientists, WMD Around the World Ministiy for Atomic Energy, Minatom, http //www.fas.org/nuke/guide/mssia/agency/minatom.htm (as of April 6,2004). 

Some public sources, such as a 1992 statement by the head of Minatom, V. Mikhailov (1992), suggest that the number of Minatom personnel with real weapons-critical knowledge is a relatively small subset (10,000 to 15,000) of the larger nuclear workforce. 

See Oleg Bukharin, Russia s Gaseous Centrifuge and Uranimn Emichment Complex, Program on Science and Global Security, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, January 2004. 

Smithson, 1999, p. 10 and Jonathan B. Tucker, Biological Weapons in the Former Soviet Union An Interview with Dr. Keimeth Ahbek, The Nonproliferation Review, CNS, Vol. 6, Spring/Simuner 1999, pp. 1-6. 

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Another way to think about the supply of proliferation-critical knowledge in the former Soviet Union is to examine the types of individuals that are in the complexes and the knowledge they possess that would be useful to states or terrorist groups seeking to acquire nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons or the know-how to develop their own weapons. 

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