The impulse state Scientific Production Association sits in a drab, unfinished office building half an hour from the center of St. Petersburg. Inside the entrance, two women listlessly check identifications; they are all that stand between the outside world and the engineers and scientists who design and maintain the vitally important command and control systems of Russia's still vast nuclear arsenal. And this past February those scientists did something chillingly unprecedented in the nuclear age: having not received a regular paycheck from Boris Yeltsin's government once in eight months, they went on strike.
展开▼
