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  • Our Own Worst Enemy? Institutional Interests and the Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Expertise by Sharon K. Weiner
  • Jason Krupar (bio)
Our Own Worst Enemy? Institutional Interests and the Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Expertise. By Sharon K. Weiner. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011. Pp. xii+358. $27.

Sharon Weiner set out to explain what happened over seventeen years (1991-2008) to the $1.2 billion spent by the U.S. government to discourage the proliferation of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons expertise from Russia, Ukraine, and other successor states of the Soviet empire. She argues that a combination of employment creation and mission conversion drove the United States, and other allied regimes, to subsidize programs that aimed to prevent weapons experts from migrating to rogue governments like North Korea. These programs offered pools of skilled though relatively impoverished labor a stake in their nation's future while shifting their focus from weapons production to private commercial ventures. The record of these programs, according to her, was mixed at best.

Weiner begins by detailing the collapse and partial recovery of the Soviet weapons complex. She does so in order to underscore the potential proliferation threats presented by the deteriorating economic situation in Russia and the successor states in the 1990s. Weiner then focuses attention on the domestic political contexts that surrounded the Cooperative Threat Reduction program in the United States. The politics and policy choices that were made to reduce proliferation were negotiated by former enemies whose intentions were not necessarily in sync with one another's national agendas. Presidential indifference, congressional demands, intra-agency conflicts, and cross-wired organizational goals complicated the U.S. efforts to prevent the proliferation of weapons expertise.

The core of Weiner's work revolves around four chapters that examine the key conversion programs and the administrative agencies responsible for them: the Departments of Defense, State, and Energy. Weiner emphasizes the importance of institutional cultures and decision-making structures, as well as the political agendas of both Congress and the president. She provides little information on the actual scientific and technological programs undertaken by these agencies. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Weiner concludes that despite the large amounts of money spent and the temporary stabilization of salaries for thousands of former Soviet weapons experts, [End Page 694] few jobs were created and few programs succeeded. She separates herself from past examinations of these programs, which tended to focus on funding issues, insufficient coordination within the U.S. government, or Russian intransigence, and instead argues that domestic politics in the United States doomed these efforts.

Presidential commitment, regardless of administration, remained lukewarm at best. Congressional members routinely debated whether nonproliferation initiatives in Russia constituted a national security issue or foreign aid to a former enemy. While any one of these factors would have complicated the nonproliferation aid packages, Weiner persuasively points out that the three federal departments involved in the initiatives collectively undercut the likelihood of success. These departments, according to her, placed their institutional interests ahead of the overarching goal of finding or creating employment opportunities for former Soviet weapons experts. Thus the largest obstacle to achieving success lay in the three federal departments themselves, which at times worked at cross-purposes and with little coordination.

Weiner's examination of the late-twentieth-century Soviet nuclear arsenal will attract the attention of historians of Russian science and its weapons complex. She describes an institutional system that was geographically dispersed and comprised at least a million individuals, from weapons designers to janitors. The size and scale of the Soviet weapons arsenal added another complication to the nonproliferation programs. Remarkably, very few of the men and women identified as top-level weapons experts left their homeland, despite the financial crises that engulfed Russia during the 1990s. Weiner notes that those who left went either to the West or to Israel, and not to countries like Iran or North Korea, which the United States feared and cited as its rationale for nonproliferation aid. Terrorism and technology permitted experts to sell their expertise without leaving home, further undercutting what remains of the nonproliferation aid programs.

Our Own Worst Enemy? offers insight into the mixed achievements of the United States in attempting to...

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