Abstract

In the former Soviet Union, defense-oriented industry and its research and development organizations could play a large role in addressing environmental problems. Examples include monitoring the environment from ground-based and space satellite systems and mitigating the impact of supersonic transport on stratospheric ozone. The prospects of cooperation with foreign national and multinational corporations are also considered.

Introduction

To write an essay about linkage of military conversion and environmental quality would seem bizarre to almost anyone in Russia, or elsewhere in the former Soviet Union (FSU), or anywhere. In principle, the essay can be produced—by digging through diverse materials and talking to knowledgeable people. But both the economic and the political scene change so rapidly now in the FSU that by the time one understands some feature, it has taken a new shape. To make the preparation of such an essay even more difficult, for many decades the true financial and material state of the defense-related industries was classified. There are no open detailed official statistics even now, in mid-1992. What is worse, the Russian Committee on Statistics has ceased to publish detailed quarterly reviews of the state of the economy and society. Its predecessor in the FSU, the State Committee on Statistics, regularly published such reviews in all major national newspapers. Although data in the reviews were often distorted, at least there was something official available. In 1992 only one newspaper, the weekly Economy and Life1 (E&L hereafter), has published a review of the performance of the economy in Russia in 1991, and this yearly (not quarterly) review considered many fewer items than earlier reviews.