COLUMN ONE : Moscow’s Atomic Point Man : Powerbroker Viktor Mikhailov is charting the future of Russia’s nuclear empire. But as the old Cold Warrior dismantles a dangerous arsenal, some fear his willingness to make deals with pariah states.

His autobiography is titled “I Am a Hawk,” and an anxious West is watching him like one.

Viktor N. Mikhailov, Russia’s nuclear czar, is one of the most powerful but least accountable officials in Russia.

To some American policy-makers, the minister of atomic energy is a longtime obstructionist on arms control issues and a potential rogue who could market Russia’s most sensitive nuclear technology to the world’s pariah states.

Others view him more sympathetically, as a 61-year-old Cold Warrior now taking huge strides to adapt his secretive empire to the financial and political constraints of the post-Soviet period--without incurring nationalist ire for relinquishing Russia’s nuclear treasures to the West.

To Russian environmentalists, the minister is Enemy No. 1, a true believer in the glory of the atom who routinely ignores nuclear safety concerns and silences dissent by intimidating critics and whistle-blowers.

Mikhailov’s domain dwarfs that of his closest American counterpart, Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary. His Ministry of Atomic Energy, known as MinAtom, employs about 1 million people--50 times more than the U.S. Energy Department does.

His responsibilities would span several U.S. federal agencies. He must guarantee the safety of Russia’s nuclear arsenal and dismantle surplus nuclear weapons in compliance with international arms control agreements. He directs nuclear research, development laboratories and weapons testing programs, and is converting a huge swath of the Soviet military-industrial complex to civilian purposes, deciding what--if anything--to privatize. And Mikhailov oversees the design, building and operation of Russian civilian nuclear power plants.

“MinAtom is on the level of General Motors--but with nukes,” said Georgetown University professor Harley D. Balzer.

Increasingly, MinAtom survives by exporting. It sells gold, silver, platinum, emeralds, diamonds, uranium and now advanced nuclear technology.

This new capitalist zeal unnerves many Westerners, who fear both the construction of accident-prone nuclear power plants in such countries as Libya, Cuba and India and the potential for Russian civilian nuclear technology to be turned to military use by outlaw states.

It was Mikhailov who clinched a January agreement to sell $1 billion worth of light-water nuclear reactors to Iran. The minister’s even more inflammatory promise, to supply Tehran with gas centrifuges that can be used to enrich bomb-grade uranium, was torpedoed by Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin in May--but only after President Clinton went to Moscow to plead that the dangerous technology transfer be stopped.

The gas centrifuge deal was struck behind the back of the Russian Foreign Ministry and reportedly took other parts of the government by surprise. It also set off alarm bells in the Pentagon.

A chain-smoking, tough-talking veteran of the Soviet bomb-making program, Mikhailov once headed the experimental physics research laboratory in Arzamas-16, the Soviet equivalent of the Los Alamos National Scientific Laboratory. In the late Soviet period, he had a reputation among Western arms control negotiators as a tough customer.

*

Yet it was Mikhailov who first recognized that Russia needed Western help to dismantle its obsolete nuclear arsenal and who went to the United States in the euphoric early days of Russian independence in 1991 to lobby for assistance. There, he met Sens. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) and Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), who later wrote a law providing U.S. aid for nuclear disarmament in the former Soviet Union, said Christopher Paine, senior associate at the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington.

“It was partly as a result of those meetings that the Nunn-Lugar bill was born,” Paine said. “He’s a lot more flexible than some people seem to think.”

However, Mikhailov is seen by his critics--especially since the aborted centrifuge deal--as a back-door player who might be willing to sacrifice international environmental and non-proliferation concerns to earn profits for his cash-strapped agency.

“I consider the ministry both dangerous and out of control,” said a Southern California academic who, like many others interviewed about Mikhailov, asked not to be named. “He has taken advantage of the disarray in the Russian government to do what he wants.”

A senior U.S. official disagreed. “In some cases, he may act alone, but in most cases he’s acting with at least the tacit support of the Russian government,” the official said. “This guy has a very significant part of the nuclear chain of custody, and we can’t afford to ignore him.”

Inside the Russian government, Mikhailov’s star is rising. His position on the Iran reactor deal initially prevailed, despite intense U.S. lobbying. He is said to be a close ally of Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin, and Yeltsin recently promoted him to the Russian Security Council, the influential body that advises the president and whose full membership remains secret.

Many people argue that the best way to prevent MinAtom or its impoverished scientists from peddling nuclear products indiscriminately is to help Mikhailov break into legitimate international markets.

“I don’t agree with him about anything, but I think it’s a mistake to demonize him,” said Princeton University physicist Frank von Hippel, a former White House science adviser. “I’ve been told by friends in the Russian government that, if Mikhailov were replaced, we’d like his successor even less.

“The primary motive driving Mikhailov is the survival of his empire,” Von Hippel added. “He recognizes that the empire has to be converted from the original military mission to a civilian mission. The question is: ‘How can we make money for these industries?’ ”

Mikhailov scored two profitable victories over Washington last month. After accusing the United States of reneging on a crucial deal to buy 500 tons of enriched uranium from dismantled Russian warheads, he won a series of concessions that American officials said would put the deal back on track.

*

Mikhailov insists that Iran has complied with all inspection requests at its nuclear facilities and has given no evidence of trying to develop nuclear weapons. In a recent interview, he scoffed at the quality of the American intelligence supplied to Moscow--which Clinton gave Yeltsin in May. According to the United States, the information shows that Iran’s intentions are not purely peaceful.

“I saw them [the documents],” Mikhailov said, adding that the evidence was so thin that, “if I were President Clinton, I would withhold the salaries of all the intelligence services of the United States for two to four months.”

According to Mikhailov, the West preaches to Russia about nuclear non-proliferation, but nuclear technology now found in South Africa, Iran and Pakistan was manufactured in Western Europe or the United States.

“It’s not Russian technology that’s ended up there,” the minister said. “So don’t lecture Russia. . . . Russia does not require instruction. We know what needs to be done.”

Nevertheless, the senior U.S. official said, Mikhailov has recently softened his tone and is forging a better relationship with America’s Energy Department than he had with the Pentagon. “The last couple of meetings, he’s been much less vitriolic and much more factual,” the official said.

However, if Mikhailov is softening his rhetoric, his advocacy of nuclear exports, weapons testing and continued production of plutonium is likely to keep causing friction with the United States.

In an interview, he said he had warned the United States in 1992 that the West was shutting MinAtom out of its markets and that MinAtom intended to pursue clients in the developing world.

“You are deliberately closing your markets to us with your own hands. How do you expect us to react?” Mikhailov said.

Congress is threatening to cut Nunn-Lugar funds for one of Mikhailov’s pet projects, a storage facility for dismantled nuclear weapons at the Mayak plant near the city of Chelyabinsk. That project’s demise would probably reinforce complaints from the Russian right that Western promises of aid are not to be trusted.

The future of Russian nuclear testing is also a potential point of conflict. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Mikhailov opposed a comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty. Although Russia now observes the ban--and has criticized France’s recent announcement that it will resume testing--Mikhailov believes that Russia needs to perform small nuclear tests to maintain its arsenal.

“Nuclear blasts could be instrumental in creating cavities for dumping chemical and petrochemical waste,” he told the Moscow News in a February interview that gave environmentalists fits. “There must be no ban on nuclear blasts for peaceful environmental purposes.”

*

Nor is the friction over Russian reactor sales likely to end. Mikhailov said he plans to boost MinAtom’s exports from $1.2 billion in 1994 to $1.5 billion this year, primarily by contracting to build nuclear power plants abroad.

“Russia has occupied firm positions in atomic energy in China and India,” he said, adding pointedly: “This is especially important after the Western contenders have pushed our country out of the North Korean market.”

So far this year, MinAtom has received about 70% of the money it had been promised under a tight 1995 Russian budget. Only when exports rise to $3.5 billion per year will MinAtom be “comfortable” without large government subsidies, he said.

Meanwhile, MinAtom’s domestic critics argue that the agency is almost as secretive as in Soviet days and that its tactics are nearly as strong-arm. Unlike his U.S. counterpart, the Russian minister need not be confirmed by Parliament. Nor is he obliged to answer questions from lawmakers.

Moreover, said reformist lawmaker Sergei S. Mitrokhin, MinAtom has marshaled lobbyists to water down attempts to increase oversight of the agency. Last month, they secretly altered a bill on civilian nuclear energy use to specify that the rules on nuclear power safety standards would be written, conveniently, by MinAtom, Mitrokhin said--in a nation still traumatized by the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power accident.

In Soviet days, the atomic program was so secret that even the ministry’s name--the Ministry of Medium-Scale Machine Building--was meant to deceive the West about its real function. The traditions were so ingrained that, shortly after Mikhailov was chosen to head the renamed MinAtom in March, 1992, a Russian reporter timidly asked the new minister for permission to publish his photograph for the first time.

Today, Mikhailov said, only 15% of MinAtom’s activities are military. But its empire still includes the huge construction concerns that built entire cities during the Soviet decades, mined many of the nation’s diamonds and emeralds and manufactured much of its fertilizer. MinAtom also owns 70 farms where 50,000 workers still raise food and livestock exclusively to feed employees.

“Even now, you cannot say the government has full control over MinAtom’s activities. . . ,” the lawmaker said. “It’s a question of MinAtom pressuring the government” for money and the bureaucratic clout to keep the massive agency on its feet.

One of Mikhailov’s fiercest domestic critics is Vladimir M. Kuznetsov, who was forced out of his job at the Federal Inspectorate on Atomic and Radioactive Safety in 1992. Kuznetsov claims the watchdog agency ousted him, on Mikhailov’s orders, for temporarily shutting down 10 civilian nuclear reactors that regulators deemed unsafe, though the official reason for his departure was a subordinate’s malfeasance.

Two other whistle-blowers who publicized safety or environmental problems at MinAtom have also been fired and sued, Kuznetsov said. Scientists blackballed from MinAtom for disagreeing with the minister do not find work in their specialties again, he said.

“God forbid you should cross MinAtom,” he said. “It could have the most unpleasant consequences.”

Von Hippel said the watchdog agency has since improved and become more independent from MinAtom but that “it’s still a Pekingese trying to discipline an elephant.”

Mikhailov appears to have won his latest fight with the environmentalists, hands down. Greenpeace has campaigned to stop the importing of nuclear waste from Europe for cheap storage--or dumping--in Russia, and Parliament has passed several laws banning any import of radioactive waste.

Nevertheless, Mikhailov has promised to complete a half-finished plant at Krasnoyarsk-26 to reprocess spent nuclear fuel--including fuel from the Russian-built plants in Hungary, Bulgaria and Iran. Western experts think the plant is an environmental nightmare that will separate up to 15 tons of plutonium a year at a time when the world is trying to stop the production of more nuclear weapons components.

*

The Russian Parliament voted to challenge the project in the Russian Constitutional Court--an important test of the balance of powers supposedly guaranteed by the new Russian constitution. But the high court bowed out, saying it did not have the authority to rule on the issue.

Environmentalists are left hoping that even Mikhailov won’t be able to find the money needed to complete the plant.

In the end, the hard-nosed, business-minded Mikhailov may find a modus vivendi with the West long before he makes peace with Russian environmentalists. “It would be wrong to categorize him as a loose cannon or a crazy person or someone the West cannot deal with,” said Paine. “We can do a lot of business with him.”