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Looking out, looking in: competing organizational interests & the proliferation of Soviet WMD expertise.

Article Excerpt
The collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s raised concerns about the security of its nuclear weapons. (1) In response, the United States joined forces with countries of the former Soviet Union, especially Russia, as well as the European Union and other states, to create a series of programs aimed at securing former Soviet weapons of mass destruction (WMD), weapons-relevant materials, and scientific expertise. Of these efforts, the most troubled has been the one aimed at containing WMD skills and knowledge. Former Soviet weapons experts haven't sold their knowledge around the world; indeed, there have been almost no documented cases of such proliferation (although concerns remain about what goes unreported). Rather, it is the means chosen for fighting such proliferation - working with and reemploying WMD experts - that have proven problematic.

Cooperation with former cold war enemies certainly created a host of difficulties, as did the secrecy that surrounds nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons efforts. But there's a significant barrier to success found much closer to home. The U.S. bureaucracies tasked with implementing programs focused on the proliferation of WMD expertise came up against a problem common to all organizations: the need to pursue and protect their own interests.

The notion that organizations have their own interests is well-established, although too often national security issues are assumed to be so important they trump this self-interested behavior. Organizations, the literature claims, seek to manage the environments in which they act. In particular, organizations that have to please similar authorities and that face comparable constraints exhibit isomorphic behavior. That is, they often respond to external pressure by aligning their interests with the interests of powerful external forces. This, in turn, means that organizations that face similar environments come to resemble one another, either through coordinated duplication or mimicry. But organizations also need to fit in at home. When organizations are given new tasks, these tasks come to be defined and implemented in ways that accommodate and reinforce the interests of the parent organization.

U.S. nonproliferation programs tried both to accommodate their external environments and to match their goals with the goals of their parent organizations. The two largest programs, one in the State Department and another in the Department of Energy, adopted similar narratives about how their activities furthered nonproliferation. Each program, however, also adopted an implementation strategy that was heavily influenced by its parent organization. What resulted were two programs that accommodated their internal and external environments but were unable to achieve their original nonproliferation goals.

As the Soviet Union entered its final days, concerns increased about possible proliferation from its WMD complex, in part because of the potential for a violent transition, the accidental or unauthorized seizure and use of weapons, and uncertainty about the future of political relations with any Soviet successor state. Concerns also grew because Soviet security had focused on external border points, paying less attention to protective measures at individual facilities. When the Soviet Union collapsed, many newly independent states inherited weapons facilities that lacked sufficient, measures to ensure that the weapons and material inside were safe from theft. In many cases, the contents of the facilities were inadequately inventoried, and sometimes little was known about what had happened inside. Moreover, economic conditions were grim for most people in the former Soviet Union, including guards and experts at the weapons facilities. Salaries were low - a weapons scientist might make $100 per month or less, for example - and paychecks were often delayed by several months. Weapons facilities saw severely reduced government subsidies, and goods and services overall cost more.

This combination of poor security, uncertainty, and dire economic prospects led the United States to fund a variety of efforts, collectively known as Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR), aimed at countering proliferation from the former Soviet WMD complex. Some parts of CTR focused on securing the weapons themselves; other efforts dealt with weapons-relevant materials; and several programs were created to deal with the possible proliferation of weapons expertise. This last group of programs concentrated on providing income to weapons experts by funding short-term research contracts and, in the long term, working to reemploy the experts in commercial or non-defense, government work. Such programs were created in the Departments of Defense, Energy, and State, and included a variety of private...

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