COLUMN LEFT : Entrepreneurs the World Can Do Without : A Moscow firm offers to nuke foreigners’ hazardous waste.

I t is the mutant child of the new Soviet capitalism. The International Chetek Corp., a well-capitalized, Moscow-based company, is offering to destroy chemical, biological and nuclear wastes using underground nuclear explosions. Is Chetek simply a broker for commercial nuclear explosions, as one of its directors told me, or is it the world’s first privately held nuclear power--a multimegaton mercenary with nuclear weapons for hire? Whatever it is, there is more to Chetek than meets the eye.

Two weeks ago, I walked, unannounced, into Chetek’s Moscow headquarters at 15 Varvaka St., just three blocks from Red Square. The building that houses Chetek used to belong to the Communist Party Central Committee and boasts what appear to be new stainless-steel doors. After being told by a young woman that no one was available to talk with me, I was immediately confronted by an intimidating gentleman who demanded to know who I was and what I wanted. Welcome to Chetek.

Before I could explain, another man appeared and demanded that I state my business. The look on his face was the same one Mike Wallace gets when “60 Minutes” shows up where it’s not wanted.

The second gentleman turned out to be Chetek’s director of foreign economic affairs. Although he repeatedly said that he could not talk with me, I did manage to engage him for several minutes. Halfway through our conversation, during which I took notes, he insisted that I not identify him by name for this article.

“We have no nuclear devices,” he told me, anticipating (incorrectly) that that would be my first question. “We will simply collect the money (from those who want to destroy dangerous wastes) and pay it to the government to conduct the nuclear explosions.” He cited the Soviet government’s need for hard currency as the driving force behind commercial nuclear explosions. But in the Soviet Union these days, just who is the government? And just who will receive the cash?

Chetek has close ties to the Ministry of Atomic Energy and Power, the heart and soul of the Soviet nuclear weapons complex. One disturbing question is whether the ministry is still under the control of the civilian leadership or any governmental authority other than itself. Chaos reigns in the Soviet Union right now--no one seems to know who is in charge of what, or whether the central government or the republics own certain vital assets (like nuclear weapons, for example).

The Ministry of Atomic Energy and Power has access to nuclear weapons, and Chetek may be its commercial arm. Whether “the government” will ever see the cash from Chetek’s venture is questionable. But individuals in the ministry might, if the plan gets off the ground.

My reluctant host claimed that Chetek could dispose of up to 1,000 tons of chemical, biological or nuclear wastes (including nuclear warheads) in a single, ecologically safe blast. Indeed, he made Chetek sound like it was performing an environmental service, notwithstanding the serious environmental damage that attends underground nuclear blasts.

Just where these nuclear explosions would occur is also unclear. The Soviet central government has banned nuclear explosions for one year, and the presidents of Russia and Kazakhstan have legally closed the testing grounds located in their republics, the only two underground nuclear test sites in the Soviet Union.

In Moscow today, there is nothing to buy (if you’re paying rubles) but everything is for sale (if you’re paying in hard currency). Everyone, including government agencies and ministries, is looking for ways to make a buck. Red Army troops in Eastern Europe and inside the Soviet Union, for example, reportedly are selling conventional weapons for cash to willing buyers. That people with access to nuclear weapons, or weapons components, would sell them seemed eminently plausible to many Russians I spoke with. After all, if the U.S. Commerce Department could authorize $25-million worth of sensitive exports to Iraqi military or nuclear-development agencies, why wouldn’t hard-pressed Soviets do the same?

Chetek seems to be well-positioned to be a conduit in such sales.

William Potter, a Sovietologist at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, says that Chetek employs a number of people who are nuclear weapons designers or engineers. When I asked about this at Chetek, I got a flat denial.

Moscow is a lawless place these days and all sense of order has disappeared. In desperate conditions, anything seems possible. “You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant,” Arlo Guthrie once wrote. Perhaps at 15 Varvaka St. as well.