Russian science

...Desperate scientists and engineers are now spontaneously declassifying their work and leaving the secret towns in search of employment...

...By 1992, however, it had become a war zone between independent Georgia and the newly formed Muslim Federation of the Mountainous Peoples of the North Caucasus...

...However, the funding has not yet been provided...

...With a population of 200,000, it has 120 research institutes and a university...

...National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois...

...Designated Iskra-5 (which means that this is the fifth model), the machine is housed in a huge five-story cross-shaped building filled with more than two thousand registration apparatuses...

...A nine-year plan for the development of a one-hundred-kJ, one-thousand-TW pulsed laser facility was recently adopted as a joint project by five European nations, with a projected cost of about $300 million (Physics World, August 1990...

...The laser beams are focused on a small drop of plasma, where the heat energy reaches thirty kilojoules (kJ), high enough to start the fusion of deuterium and tritium nuclei but not yet powerful enough to compress the mixture to the level that can produce a sustainable chain reaction...

...The pride of the institute, demonstrated to visitors only in 1992, was the world's largest laser pulse reactor, capable of heating plasma to temperatures of up to 100,000,000°C, high enough to register the emission of nuclear fusion neutrons...

...Other science towns appeared throughout the country in those years...

...The world's largest helium liquefying plant, designed to generate thirty thousand liters of liquid helium per hour, was also under construction...

...government, together with the governments of some European countries, pledged nearly $100 million last spring to set up a special International Research and Technology Center in Moscow to help redundant nuclear scientists from the atomgrads to transfer their skills to the civilian sector...

...It is now known as Cheliabinsk-70 or Snezinsk...

...UNK was not the only victim of the collapse of the USSR...

...The new cardiological and oncological centers, both architectural landmarks of the suburbs of Moscow, reflected the attitude of the aging Brezhnev leadership...

...q 426 • DISSENT...

...The first Soviet atomic and thermonuclear bombs were designed and assembled here, but they were tested in the Semipalatinsk region of North Kazakhstan, where the fourth secret atomgrad, Semipalatinsk-21, was built...

...A similar fate befell the world's largest neutrino detector laboratory belonging to the Institute of Nuclear Research...

...The U.S...

...Forgotten Secret Atomic Towns Igor Kurchatov, the father of the Soviet atomic bomb, was an influential supporter of theoretical nuclear physics...

...This machine was famous not only for the information it gave about heavy ions physics, but also because its gigantic 36,000 ton magnet was listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the world's heaviest magnet...

...His strategy attracted such famous physicists as Igor Tallinn, Yakov Zeldovich, Lev Landau, and Lev Arzimovich...

...It is made of twelve powerful lasers, each two hundred and fifty meters long...

...Soon several other atomgrads were built to satisfy military demands for nuclear weapons...

...Unless the war with Georgia ends soon, this task, and the privilege of discovering black hole formations in distant galaxies, will pass to Japan, which plans to construct a giant neutrino detector —Super-Kamiokande — in a mine in the Gifu Prefecture...

...Civil war there made it inaccessible to scientists...

...By 1990 it had become a well-planned, beautifully built town free from industrial pollution or noise...

...It was completed in 1990, and the transfer of the bureaucratic personnel from the old mansion to the new tower had not yet been completed when the collapse of the USSR made the Academy beg for money to survive...

...A higher particle energy (four hundred GeV) was only achieved in 1972, when a larger synchrotron, seven kilometers in length, was built by the U.S...

...Tomsk-7 or Seversk, in Siberia, with a population of 107,000, is the largest...

...Some, like the biological center Pushchino, ninety kilometers north of Moscow, or Chernogolovka, were rather small, with populations of about 25,000...

...It belonged to the Institute of High Energy Physics, part of the research network of the Soviet militaryindustrial nuclear empire, commonly known as Minsredmash (short for the USSR Ministry of Medium Machinery...

...The nearest American rival, the Superconducting Super Collider, an eighty-fourkilometerlong, twenty-TeV giant costing $8.5 billion, had been under construction in Texas since 1990 and was not expected to be able to smash protons until 1999...

...One of them was built for Professor Evgeny Chazov, Brezhnev's personal doctor and the director of the Kremlin clinic, and the other for Nikolai Blokhin, the chief government surgeon...

...Others, like Obninsk, Zelenograd, Dubna, and Gatchino were larger, with populations approaching one hundred thousand...

...The two merged later, and by 1990 they had a population of 83,500...

...The USSR Academy of Sciences was particularly renowned for its cosmic ray particle physics...

...By way of comparison, it is interesting to note that the most powerful laser in Europe at present is the twelve-kJ, ten-TW facility at Limeil, which belongs to the French Commissariat a L'Energie Atomique...

...The UNK was designed for three trillion electronvolts (three TeV) energies...

...The DNA-shaped Institute of Bio-Organic Chemistry in Moscow, for example, with its marble floors, opera-style conference halls, a sauna, swimming pool, and winter garden, cost $150 million and took nearly ten years to be completed by its Finnish contractors...

...A special factory had been built in Serpukhov, a nearby industrial city, to manufacture the two thousand magnets needed for the accelerator...

...Liquid helium was required to keep the temperature in the giant vacuum chamber as close to absolute zero as possible...

...They represented a social compromise between the main academies and the government...

...After nearly a year, however, no one has yet received any grants...

...Soviet atomic scientists had never had to consider costs, even when they rose to billions of rubles...

...For each pulse the lasers need about ten trillion watts of electric energy, which is accumulated in special condensers...

...A second ring for the acceleration of protons in the opposite direction was expected to be added and linked to the first part of UNK in 1995...

...The site seemed perfect when it was set up in the eighties with two gigantic halls for the scintillation telescopes in a four kilometer tunnel excavated in the northern slopes of the Caucasus Mountains in the Ka/bardin-Balkar Autonomous Republic...

...Krasnoyarsk is the most modem atomic industrial site, and it is also the most important nuclear waste disposal facility for both military and civilian energy reactors...

...A third astrophysics station of the Lebedev Physics Institute, which boasted the world's largest hadron apparatus, built at an altitude of 3,200 meters on Mount Ararat in the 1970s, was also out of action: after five years of war in Nagomy Karabakh, Armenians cared little about cosmic ray particles...

...The third secret atomic town, which combined theoretical nuclear physics with facilities for designing and producing bombs, was built in the Gorky region, sixty kilometers southwest of Arzamas...

...Later it became known as Arzamas-16 or Kremlev, and it now has a population of 80,300 people...

...A museum of Soviet nuclear weapons systems has already been opened in Arzamas-16, and a museum of big nuclear physics may follow...

...In 1993 Moscow research institutes finally began to earn money by renting out surplus space in their monumental buildings to domestic and foreign businesses...

...The laboratory was designed to detect neutrinos from the gravitational collapse of stars and from past and present supernova...

...Three large reactors, reprocessing plants, and a gas diffusion enrichment plant were located for protection in tunnels and cavities excavated in the mountains by Gulag prisoners...

...He realized that prominent Soviet physicists would be mobilized to participate in the bomb project only if they were able to do theoretical nuclear physics at the same time...

...The Arzamas scientists were ready to build the next generation of laser to make this possible...

...Some of them surprised visitors not only with their excellent science, but also with their architectural extravagance...

...It contains five plutonium producing reactors that also provide electricity and heating for the residential areas, a large reprocessing plant, a uranium enrichment plant, and nuclear waste disposal facilities that dispose of waste by pumping radioactive liquids into the deep porous geological formations four to five hundred meters below the surface of the earth...

...New research institutes were established, but now they were built in the rich suburbs of Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Minsk, Baku, and other capitals...

...The administration of the academies have recently indicated that if there is insufficient money, they will abandon research in favor of supporting people...

...Protvino had already become famous among particle physicists because its previous proton accelerator, one kilometer long and with an acceleration energy of seventy-six billion electronvolts (76 GeV), had also been the largest in the world when it was commissioned in 1967...

...Secretary of State, and American experts from the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories were invited to visit the Cheliabinsk-70 secret center (probably because it was the most modern) in February 1992, the best nuclear physics research was done at the Arzamas-16 institute devoted to plasma physics or controlled thermonuclear fusion reactions in mixtures of deuterium and tritium...

...Andrei Sakharov joined this team in 1948 when he was Igor Tamm's graduate student...

...It was established in 1957 from a small wooden house in which its founder, Professor Mikhail A Levrentiev, lived...

...It was the world's largest proton synchrotron accelerator in Protvino, a small science town about a hundred kilometers south of Moscow...

...A more modem nuclear bomb production plant combined with an experimental physics research institute was also built in the Cheliabinsk region in the 1950s, about twenty kilometers north of the first atomgrad...

...Although James Baker, then U.S...

...In 1992, however, the world's highest altitude cosmic ray station (built 3,340 meters above sea level in the Tien Shan mountains) was nationalized by Kazakhstan...

...But it was difficult to convince prominent scientists to leave Moscow, Leningrad, and other capital cities unless they were promised the relative prosperity and comfort available in the capitals...

...The accelerator (known as UNK, from the Russian term for acceleration storage complex) was expected to begin fixed target experiments in 1993...

...The oil crisis in the West gave the Soviet Union an unexpected flow of hard currency revenues, and hundreds of millions of petrodollars were made FALL • 1993 • 425 Politics Abroad available for science...

...After all, brains are more important in science than big machines...

...There are a few other atomgrads built for military 424 • DISSENT Politics Abroad purposes (Penza-19, Zlatoust-36, Sverdlovsk-44 and 45, and others) but they do not specialize in research...

...The science towns were isolated privileged islands, geographically separated from the usually overcrowded, polluted, and poor industrial cities like Omsk, Novosibirsk, Sverdlovsk, Karaganda, Tyumen, and others, where the legacy of Stalin's crash industrialization and the Gulag slave labor system was still too visible...

...The twenty-onekilometerlong underground tunnel ring with a diameter of five meters (comparable to the circle line of the Moscow metro) had already been excavated, and people were working around the clock to assemble the massive vacuum chamber with large bending and focusing superconducting magnets, each six meters long and weighing many tons...

...The system would be transformed into a six TeV collider, giving Soviet physicists the unique opportunity to make discoveries in the trillion electron-volt range...

...The first of the Soviet secret atomic towns (atomgrads), which were built in 1946-1947, were Cheliabinsk-40 and Cheliabinsk-65...

...The presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences itself, previously comfortably housed in an old aristocratic mansion surrounded by a park, decided to build a monstrous twenty-six-story skyscraper on the banks of the Moscow River with eight modern elevators and full air conditioning...

...A new, smaller Russia embarking on "shock therapy" economic reform did not have the means to subsidize the FALL • 1993 • 423 Politics Abroad expensive projects of big science, which did not produce immediate practical benefits...

...Construction and assembly work in Protvino slowed down, however, toward the end of 1991 and ground to a halt in 1992...

...In Dubna, a science town 120 kilometers north of Moscow, the world's largest synchrophasotron (built in 1957 for the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research) ceased operating because of shortage of funds...

...Further east are Krasnoyarsk-26 or Zheleznogorsk (population 63,300) and Krasnoyarsk45 or Zelenogorsk (population 90,300), built in the 1950s...

...The Minsredmash empire always received free electricity...

...Their highly privileged priority supply systems ceased to exist and they became dependent for money, food, and consumer goods on the rather poor regional authorities in the areas where they were located...

...When the USSR collapsed and Minsredmash disappeared, the atomgrads were temporarily forgotten...

...In 1973-1974 science policy was reversed...

...The first Soviet plutonium producing reactors were built here in underground shelters and the first reprocessing plant, Mayak, was constructed in 1947 to extract plutonium from spent nuclear fuel...

...It took thirteen years to build Iskra-5 and it has been making two pulses a week since 1989...

...In addition to solving some of the puzzles of the thermonuclear bomb, Sakharov made a significant contribution to the creation of the first Soviet plasma reactors, known as Tokamaks, for doing experiments on controlled nuclear fusion...

...The paymaster, Minsredmash, had disappeared along with Gorbachev's government and the USSR itself...

...In the remote science towns, however, no such solution was possible...

...Science Towns in Limbo Nowhere else in the world would one find something like Akademgorodok, the Novosibirsk academic town situated twenty-five kilometers from industrial Novosibirsk on the high bank of an artificial lake in the Siberian taiga forest...

...The latter wanted the scientific infrastructure to be decentralized and to move closer to industrial centers...

...Shortage of money made the government try to select priority research projects, but there was no easy way to lay off scientists or support staff, since there was no alternative employment nearby...

...It has been calculated that a self-sustainable chain reaction could be achieved if the power of the lasers reached the megajoule (GJ) range...

...The Pamir astrophysical station was taken over by Tajikistan...