U of M, Ukraine and non-proliferation

Unique program to be taken up by department of Foreign Affairs

Andrew Sain Staff

For the last 10 years, the University of Manitoba has — unbeknown to most — played a role in the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons through the Science and Technology Centre (STCU) in Ukraine, established in the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union.

Soon the program will be taken over by the department of Foreign Affairs, leading former director of the centre Ostap Hawaleshka to consider the impact the STCU has had.

Hawaleshka, professor emeritus at the university, was the founding director of the centre and was responsible for the university’s longtime role as executing agency for the Canadian contribution to the centre. In 2001, he was named a member of the Order of Canada for his role in establishing the centre.

The original idea for the centre came from European concerns over the proliferation of weapons into areas of Asia and the Middle East, said Hawaleshka.

“They were deadly afraid all those scientists that developed weapons of mass destruction . . . as well as systems [for] delivering those weapons . . . would start fleeing to North Korea, Iran, Iraq and Libya, so the idea was [to] give them some sort of a job . . . let’s see if we can transform them from military research and development into commercially, economically useful research,” he said.

The STCU operates by distributing research grants exclusively for scientists who had worked to develop nuclear weapons in the Soviet Union. The centre evaluates the applications of scientists and their former weapons careers and distributes funding accordingly.

“If the guys built tanks, we didn’t care. If he built submarines, we essentially didn’t care. Kalashnikov rifles — of no interest. But if he was involved in polishing beryllium [to make nuclear weapons], we would be interested,” said Hawaleshka.

The founding countries for the centre were Canada, Sweden and the United States. Each of these countries would evaluate the proposals to decide which projects to fund. Canada’s National Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) initially took on the role of evaluating the projects in Canada upon Hawaleshka’s suggestion. The NSERC would not handle the financial component, however, and with Hawaleshka’s influence, the U of M became the sole executing agency in Canada.

The idea of sharing top-secret technology with Western countries was not something that came easily to the Ukrainian scientists, according to Hawaleshka.

“Remember, these were their major enemies, I mean the West and the Soviet Union, they were enemies . . . and all of a sudden one power collapsed . . . and the guy that won is coming to the guy that lost and [saying] ‘all right fella, you want a few bucks to keep on doing this, tell us what you did.’ Now that was very, very difficult for the Russian and the Ukrainian scientists to accept,” he said.

“You have to understand that this was an unbelievably complicated and difficult task,” said Hawaleshka.

Funding problems, difficulties from Ukrainian state security, a non-existent national banking system, and poor facilities plagued the beginnings of the project, according to Hawaleshka.

“Eventually we got the system going . . . . Let me tell you something, the moment that the money started flowing, they started believing in us,” he said.

He added that the centre provided an opportunity for scientists whose salaries and facilities were decimated by the fall of the Soviet Union to work in their own area of expertise in their home country on projects that were not of a military nature.

Nabil Bassim, the current Canadian project director for the centre as well as the director of international programs for the faculty of engineering, said that the research the centre promoted was perhaps its most important role.

“They are doing very high-tech work, they are doing laser coatings, they are using lasers for fixing the cornea . . . in the old days they used these lasers for military applications, but now they use them at a much lower energy to [perform] corrective surgery on the eye,” said Bassim.

The university’s role is now coming to a close as the federal government has decided to shift the executing agency to the Department of Foreign Affairs.

Since 1993, the centre has provided over $133 million US to over 940 projects, and Hawaleshka estimates that 13,000 former weapons scientists are receiving funding.

The original mandate of the centre has a limited lifespan, according to Hawaleshka.

“This must be one of the most successful projects of aid [and] transformation that has ever been created, and successful not only in terms of delivering money, but in [performing] its actual function of keeping those scientists away from those countries where we don’t want them to go,” said Hawaleshka.

Bassim believes that the University of Manitoba was involved at the most important time in the life of the centre.

“I feel that all of us who have been involved in this, we have lived part of history,” he said.