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Email this citationCIAO DATE: 08/05
Preventing the Brain Drain: Russia and Beyond
Vitaly Fedchenko
April 2005
Introduction
As Lao-Tzu once said, 'Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime'. This sentence expresses the essence of effective assistance. If you want to provide somebody with food, there are two options: either to supply him during all his lifetime or to teach him how to earn a living. Similarly, if you want a state to get rid of WMD capabilities, there is always an option to blow up some facilities, but the next day it would be necessary to check whether no new WMD capabilities have developed. Another option is to make the process self-sustaining on the ground, ensuring that the state itself is looking after it.
Initially, international assistance programs in the areas of nonproliferation and WMD dismantlement played the vital role of emergency measures: the Soviet Union was breaking up, and its WMDs needed to be taken care of. Withdrawal of nuclear materials from vulnerable sites, secure transportation of warheads, "rapid upgrades" of nuclear materials protection and other projects designed to meet pressing needs of WMD safety and security in the challenging times of the nineties played a very important role and definitely helped a lot to prevent nuclear, chemical or biological disasters. However, eventually the urgency of the moment had passed, most acute problems were solved and it became more important to consolidate what had been achieved, and to make sure that the process of nonproliferation and disarmament that states had agreed upon has been made irreversible.
