Soviet Nuclear Physicist Granted Asylum in U.S.

A senior Soviet nuclear physicist defected to the United States on Christmas Eve and has been granted political asylum, Reagan Administration officials said Thursday.

Artem Vladimirovich Kulikov, 51, who had been working in an exchange program at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., requested asylum as he was about to board a homeward-bound airplane at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport.

“We’re always gracious hosts,” said an Administration official who asked not to be identified but who confirmed that asylum had been granted. “We’d rather get one of them (a scientist) than a ballet dancer.”

Kulikov met at the State Department on Thursday with officials of the Soviet Embassy to assure the Soviets that he was not being held against his will, department spokeswoman Kathleen Lang said.

Lang said the department traditionally declines to announce officially whether asylum has been granted because of concern about relatives in the Soviet Union.

Kulikov is believed to be the first high-energy physicist from the Soviet Union to defect.

A man who described himself only as “a soldier with the military attache” at the Soviet Embassy said no one was available immediately to comment on the matter.

Kulikov, a senior scientist and chief engineer at the Leningrad Institute of Nuclear Physics, was one of four Soviet physicists working on an experiment at Fermi, about 35 miles west of Chicago.

“He is a well-known and very respected physicist,” said Joseph Lach, a Fermilab senior scientist in charge of the project. “His defection came as a surprise to everybody.”

A colleague, Dr. Bruce Chrisman, associate director for administration at Fermilab, said Kulikov has a wife in the Soviet Union.

Kulikov had been depressed since the couple’s only child, a daughter, died in a traffic accident in Leningrad two years ago, Lach said.

Lach said the four Soviet scientists were involved in building equipment for the experiment at the facility’s atom smasher near Batavia, studying the structure of the nucleus of the atom.

Soviet scientists have been taking part in Fermilab programs since 1972. Kulikov had been there only three months, and was the first scientist to defect in the 12-year program, Fermilab spokeswoman Margaret Pearson said. She said the other three Soviets in the exchange program are still there.