COLUMN ONE : Wounded Nuclear ‘Heroes’ : Russia’s elite atomic scientists, hidden away for decades, are finally free to speak out. And the world may not like what they have to say.

After decades in the shadows, the anonymous heroes who made the Soviet Union into a nuclear superpower are making a dramatic, and potentially menacing, entrance on the world stage.

The elite scientists who designed and perfected the nuclear arsenal that won the Soviet Union superpower status have been hidden away in top-secret institutes in closed cities for 40 years. To get their jobs, these scientists had to sign documents promising they would never leave the country, talk to foreigners or disclose their knowledge of the country’s nuclear arms to anyone.

Now, articles by these same scientists appear frequently in the Russian press. They complain openly about the questionable security of their country’s nuclear arsenal amid the current political and economic instability and ethnic warfare, and they threaten that if they do not receive better pay and living conditions, some among them will surely be tempted to build bombs for the world’s tyrants.

The nuclear weapon makers of Russia have formed a union to lobby for their interests at home and abroad.

Recent attention and pledges of financial support from foreign politicians who are concerned about nuclear proliferation, including U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker III, have helped give them courage to break the wall of silence.

“We who built a nuclear shield around the Soviet Union are nothing but slaves,” said Boris M. Murashkin, the chairman of the new Union of Designers of Nuclear Warheads and a veteran atomic weapon scientist. “We created this whole nuclear program from nothing. We achieved superiority over America . . . and where has it gotten us?

“It is very difficult to consider yourself a human being when for many years you have been kept under crushing pressure,” added Murashkin, who works at the central Russian city of Chelyabinsk 70, where much of the Soviet nuclear arsenal was designed. “In his time, (19th-Century Russian author Anton) Chekhov said, ‘You’ve got to get rid of the slave inside you drop by drop.’ We’re just starting this process.”

The Soviet nuclear program was cut back during the years of perestroika, when then-Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev was pursuing an arms control policy. But now, as Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin introduces arms reduction packages that would cut Russia’s strategic arsenal more than 80%, nuclear weapons designers feel as if they are on the way to extinction. Gone is the challenge of achieving superiority over America by constantly developing more advanced weapons.

“This has been a terrible blow to us,” said Alexander K. Kalugin, a senior nuclear physicist at the prestigious Kurchatov Institute in Moscow. “The future looks very bleak. There is a big excess of atomic scientists in the country. Most of us were involved in the military sphere, and now there are severe cutbacks.”

Kalugin, Murashkin and other nuclear scientists who worked in the institutes that pioneered Soviet nuclear arms in the late 1950s and 1960s refer to a “romantic” atmosphere of secrecy and an aura of importance that surrounded their work in those days.

“I felt like a hero,” recalled Kalugin. “We were educated to believe that we were making a nuclear shield for our country.

“It was very challenging work--real man’s work,” he added, flashing a wistful smile.

Murashkin remembers with pride how he felt when he went off to Chelyabinsk 70 in 1958, and then the elation he felt at the poligon (Russian for nuclear test site) as he witnessed the explosions of weapons he helped to create.

“It was the Cold War,” he recalled. “We read in the newspapers about how America was getting ready to bomb us out of existence, and we wanted to be ready.”

Murashkin, 57, who now carries a briefcase with a Los Alamos, N.M., logo and brags that his sunglasses and steel-tipped shoes were gifts he received at a Nevada test site, concedes that the time of fast development in his field and intense competition with America is past. But unlike Kalugin, he cannot accept that his work on nuclear warheads has come to an end.

As chairman of the Union of Designers of Nuclear Warheads, which was founded late in February, Murashkin feels it his responsibility to persuade the Russian government to give nuclear scientists the respect and funding they deserve.

He also hopes to ensure that the $400 million the U.S. Congress has earmarked to hasten the dismantling of the Soviet nuclear arsenal will go to keep himself and his colleagues gainfully employed, despite the fact that their government has declared its intention to radically slash its defense spending and nuclear arsenal.

Kalugin, however, doubts that the U.S. funds will keep many Soviet scientists working, because he thinks most of the money will have to be spent on containers to store the radioactive plutonium taken from the warheads. Russia makes no suitable containers, but American companies could provide them.

Murashkin hopes that Russian and foreign leaders will seek advice on such issues from his new union, which he considers the only representative of Russian nuclear warhead designers. But as late as last month, when Baker visited Chelyabinsk 70, Murashkin was denied a chance to talk with him.

Under Gorbachev, Murashkin said, rank-and-file atomic weapons designers had no way to influence the policies that affected them. Gorbachev listened to scientists with no first-hand knowledge of Chelyabinsk 70 or Arzamas 16, two closed cities in the Ural Mountains that form the heart of Russia’s nuclear weapons research and development.

“We were cut off from the highest echelons of power,” Murashkin said. “They said they were helping us, but they did not ask us what we needed.

“This is simply not right,” he added. “This is simply dangerous.”

Many prominent scientists have downplayed the possibility that Russian nuclear scientists will go abroad to help Iraq, Libya or another “renegade” government create bombs of its own, but Murashkin says it is reckless to ignore this possibility.

“More than anything else, I fear that our nuclear arms technology will fall into the hands of some fanatic,” Murashkin said.

Murashkin dismisses statements by Atomic Energy Ministry officials that no Russian scientist is considering going to such countries.

“No one will wear a sign that says: ‘I’m getting ready to go and help a fanatic build a bomb,’ ” Murashkin said.

The best way to prevent the flight of nuclear scientists, he added, is to give nuclear bomb makers the two things they lack most: challenging projects and decent living conditions.

“Could your scientists from Los Alamos go to help Iraq?” Murashkin said. “Of course they could, but they don’t because they earn decent salaries and are respected. Our specialists live in horrible conditions.

“Americans aren’t afraid to send their scientists abroad for a conference--we are,” he added. “What does this tell you?”

Even as a director of the country’s plutonium-producing nuclear reactors, Kalugin said he earns enough only “to modestly feed a family. But to buy clothes or furniture on my salary is impossible.

“When I came to the institute in 1961, I earned 130 rubles a month. This would buy 50 bottles of vodka. Now, earning 4,000 rubles, I can buy 40 bottles of vodka--this is the result of 30 years’ work,” he said, chuckling. “This is not a bad way to value my salary, because in our country vodka is like currency.”

Life in the closed cities of Chelyabinsk 70 and Arzamas 16 is even more difficult, Murashkin said. Many talented nuclear scientists live in cramped two-room apartments with spouses and children.

Because the cities are closed, the local free-market system has not developed enough to provide alternatives to government housing. Also, because travel to these remote cities is restricted, their stores, which used to be better stocked than the average Soviet stores, are now bare in comparison with Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Murashkin, who first traveled abroad less than a year ago, worries that the government might try again to forbid scientists to travel in order to prevent them from spreading their knowledge.

“The non-proliferation treaty has been signed, so we need to observe it,” Murashkin said. “But you can observe it in various ways. You could gather us in a room and shoot us all, but this is not a way out. We are worried that these problems are being solved by seriously limiting our civil rights and freedoms.”

The United States, Germany and Japan have become so concerned about keeping Russia’s nuclear scientists occupied that they are planning to help set up a science clearinghouse to fund their projects.

“We know that right now your options at home are limited, and outlaw regimes and terrorists may try to exploit your situation and influence you to build new weapons of war,” Baker told scientists at Chelyabinsk. “It’s the highest priority of the United States and our allies . . . to help you overcome your hardships and avoid that terrible choice.”

Baker said the U.S. government will allocate $25 million for the project. A proposed location for the center is a branch of the Kurchatov Institute in the town of Troitsky, outside Moscow.

One of the first goals of Murashkin’s union is to persuade the foreign governments involved in the project to reject Troitsky as a location, because it is so far away from Chelyabinsk 70 and Arzamas 16.