Ukraine stresses its potential in science and technology (05/26/96)

Ukraine stresses its potential in science and technology

by R.L. Chomiak

WASHINGTON - When the Soviet Union collapsed, Ukraine's economy lost its purpose: 80 percent of it had served the defense needs of the empire. Suddenly there was no empire and no need for much of what was made in Ukraine.

But there was brainpower in the country, said Ukrainian scientists, and while some of it has drained off (an estimated 5,000 scientists left Ukraine in recent years, including about 500 with doctorates), enough has stayed behind to invent and innovate products and systems for the global marketplace.

Ukraine's scientific and technological potential was outlined April 6 in Washington, when The Washington Group (TWG) hosted seven representatives of Ukraine's severely downsized, but far from destroyed military-industrial complex. They were part of a nine-member delegation visiting the United States to meet with colleagues in the scientific community and in technology development firms.

Marta Cehelsky, executive officer of the U.S. National Science Board and TWG member, who chaired the Washington meeting, said Ukrainian science and technology are in a period of profound change. Last February, she continued, a major forum on Ukrainian science set new national objectives.

One of the objectives is to preserve technologies in which Ukraine held leading positions and adapt them to new conditions. The Dnipropetrovske-designed and manufactured space rockets Zenit (Zenith) and Tsyklon (Cyclone) are the best in the world, Ukrainian scientists say, and the agreement signed during President Leonid Kuchma's visit to Washington last February opens the door for Ukraine to enter the international rent-a-rocket business using these launchers.

Closer to earth, there is Ukraine's T84 tank that tooled around the sands of Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, at last year's military hardware trade exhibition and was judged best in the show.

Then there's a system to reduce vibrations of a space vehicle that may be applied to a car seat- all products of Ukrainian brainpower with potential export-income earnings.

Prof. Victor Pylypenko, head of the Institute of Technical Mechanics in Dnipropetrovske that produced scientists and designs for "the world's biggest rocket factory," or the Pivdenmash complex in that city, recalled that at its height the complex produced 100 strategic rockets per year. By way of comparison, he said the United States at that time needed five years to produce 60 MX missiles.

In 1991, Prof. Pylypenko's institute employed l,260 specialists; now only 500. Then contracts covered 75 percent of the work, now-they cover l0 percent. But the Dnipropetrovske complex still produces Zenith and Cyclone rockets, and, reflecting the changes of the post-Cold War period, it now also produces trolley buses right along the Zenith assembly line, he said.

But, for a mentor of high-tech designers like Prof. Pylypenko, the preferred form of conversion is something like the vibration-suppression system his institute developed to keep rockets on a steady course. "We have demonstrated that it can be applied to automobiles and sold wherever cars are made," he said.

Prof. Volodymyr Savitsky, another member of the delegation, who heads the Institute of Applied Physics at Lviv University, blamed the precarious situation of Ukraine's economy on the fact that 80 percent of it served the defense needs of the old USSR and because, as he put it, manufacturing in the USSR "was done behind a Chinese Wall," everything was done "locally." The trend now, he said, is to establish priorities ("because we can't do everything"), and look for cooperative arrangements on the global scale by buying some technologies and selling others.

As examples he cited Ukraine' s advances in material science, in metallurgy and in geology that could be sold abroad. Ukraine also has good deposits of uranium, gold, zirconium, lithium, sulfur and potassium that could be developed with international partners, he said, adding that there are good but underutilized refineries in Ukraine that need "more than one source of oil" (i.e. Russian). He suggested that Ukraine must look to the Middle East and Central Asia for new sources of crude.

There are revolutionary changes going on in Ukraine, said Prof. Savitsky. Many factories just aren't needed anymore. Revolutionary changes, he contended, "require careful thinking about where to put the money, what to fund that can be taken into the marketplace."

The Lviv professor said he felt "the bottom has been reached" in Ukraine's disrupted economy, and there is a tendency now to stabilize it, but he cautioned that it was too soon yet to talk about growth.

Two members of the delegation, Prof. Volodymyr Andreev and Prof. Oleksandr Slobodyanyuk, both physicists and both members of the six-year-old Ukrainian Physical Society, talked about the society's international contacts, including its new home page on the Internet (http://www.ups.kiev.ua/).

Prof. Andreev talked about Ukraine's world-class capabilities in telecommunications technology, demonstrated at a recent NATO-funded workshop on this subject. (He was a co-chairman of the workshop, along with a representative of the American Physical Society.)

He also talked about l0 international summer schools and seven domestic ones that the society had organized; about a Ukrainian-Polish workshop; and about Ukraine's participation in a European conference on plasma physics, which he characterized as "very productive."

International contacts are vital for the health of Ukraine's technological potential, said Prof. Andreev. A visit to Ukraine by just one American colleague, he said, may offer a chance for him or her to meet l00 Ukrainian physicists, spend time in their laboratories, watch work in progress, "and that's how cooperation with scientists in Ukraine begins."

No small achievement of the Ukrainian Physical Society, noted Prof. Slobodyanyuk, was that the society's first president (Prof. Victor Baryakhtar, vice-president of the National Academy of Sciences), was replaced at the end of the first term by another physicist, because the by-laws of the society call for rotation of the leadership. Under the old Soviet system, he explained, persons in such positions would never be removed by democratic means.

He commended Prof. Baryakhtar for not holding on to the office despite his great stature, and for not resigning from the society when he ceased being its head. (Prof. Baryakhtar led the nine-member delegation, but was not at the TWG meeting, because he had another out-of-town appointment at the time.)

An interesting perspective on Ukraine's military-industrial complex was provided by Maj. Gen. Mykola Honcharenko, chief of the Verification Center of the Armed Forces, which is responsible for facilitating visits of foreign inspection teams that come to Ukraine to check on its compliance with arms limitation treaties.

He talked about the continuing reduction of Ukraine's armed forces towards the goal of only 350,000 troops - not an easy task for Ukraine, because jobs and housing has to be found for demobilized military people. He also talked about Ukraine's T84 tank, the star of the Abu Dhabi show, and about artificial barriers set up by other countries to keep Ukraine's armaments from world markets.

Mykolayiv, he said, is the site of one of the best shipyards in the world, and vessels built there are being bought, but such countries as Japan, Sweden, Denmark work actively to keep Mykolayiv products off the market because they compete with the production of those countries.

Fulfilling the obligations of various arms limitations agreements - treaties such as START, Conventional Forces in Europe, Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces, Open Skies - is no small burden for Ukraine, said Gen. Honcharenko. One nine-hour inspection by a foreign team costs Ukraine $8,000, according to the general, and since 1992, "we have received 400 such inspection teams - all this just to prove that Ukraine is complying with the agreements" made by the superpowers back when the USSR was one.

Gen. Honcharenko made these points not to complain about Ukraine's lot, but to cite some of the difficulties the military-industrial complex faces. He emphasized, however, that it was "up to us, ourselves, to come out of the situation in which Ukraine finds itself," and implied that they are up to it.

Also at the TWG meeting were Prof. Serhiy Doroguntsov, a member of the National Council on the Study of Productive Forces of Ukraine and president of the Environmental Academy of Ukraine, and Prof. Vitaliy Pokhodenko, head of the Institute of Physical Chemistry in Kyiv.

Prof. Stanislav Kvnyukhov, who heads the Dnipropetrovske Design Bureau, like Prof. Baryakhtar, had another appointment and didn't make the TWG function.

The delegation's visit to the United States to meet with colleagues and potential collaborators was arranged by Dr. Cehelsky, who had visited Ukraine last October at the invitation of the State Committee on Industrial Policy. Dr. George Gamota, who had done a study of Ukraine's scientific and technological potential, also helped in the arrangements, as did Natalie Sluzar, TWG's first president, whose firm, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), hosted the delegation for part of its stay in Washington.

Earlier that day the Ukrainian scientists gave a briefing at the Embassy of Ukraine to summarize the research done to date on the effects of the Chornobyl disaster.

| Home Page |