Canada has become a full member of the International Science and Technology Center, an effort to keep weapons of mass destruction scientists away from employment by rogue nations and terrorist groups.

The ISTC, located in Moscow, is an intergovernmental organization that matches peaceful scientific research needs with projects involving former weapon scientists in the former Soviet Union. Canada will occupy a seat on the ISTC governing board and participate in its science advisory committee, a senior Canadian official told Inside the Pentagon March 15.

Canada plans to spend about $75 million (in U.S. dollars) a year for the next 10 years to halt the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, fulfilling a pledge it made as part of a Group of Eight nations anti-WMD initiative called the Global Partnership. G-8 nations -- the United Kingdom, Russia, Japan, France, Germany, Italy, Canada and the United States -- promised during a June 2002 summit hosted by Canada to collectivity spend $20 billion over the next 10 years to safeguard WMD-related materials and expertise.

As part of that commitment, Canada has approved spending $13.5 million each year for five years on ISTC projects and administrative costs. That makes Canada the third-largest contributor to ISTC, following the United States and the European Union, the official said. Japan, Norway, Russia and South Korea also are full ISTC members.

The Canadian government also has approved $24.8 million for chemical demilitarization programs in Russia and $24 million for Russian submarine dismantlement.

The official said the importance of nonproliferation programs should not be judged merely by budget figures. "You can cut up a nuclear submarine and see that it's gone," the official said. "The same with chemical weapons -- once they're destroyed, they're destroyed." Destroying the human capital associated with WMD, however, is not an option. "Redirecting their expertise into the common good is a very vital element in the war on terrorism and in the goal of eliminating" WMD, the official said.

On March 15, the official added, Canada completed an initial downselect of 20 programs proposed to the ISTC and will conduct an additional review before announcing which projects will receive Canadian funds. Much of the expertise cultivated to create weapons can be used to combat proliferation. Canada favors scientific projects that have "strong counterproliferation potential involving chemical, biological and radiological" elements, the official said. Canada also wants to fund projects that involve the greatest number of former WMD scientists as possible. The goal is to keep them busy and enmesh them in the international scientific community, the official said. The government is promoting interest in ISTC in official agencies and the private sector. Two departments -- health and agriculture -- have indicated a desire to act as collaborators, the official said. Health officials want to use Russian expertise to further bioterrorism-detection technology, while the agriculture department is interested in research on animal and plant disease controls.

"It would be fair to say that the interest of potential of collaborators across the spectrum of our scientific community is really quite high," the official said.

Another variable Canada considers when choosing projects is the possible self-sustainability of the science that underlies them. This is a variable ISTC recently has chosen to emphasize in greater measure than in the past, the official said, because "that will not just provide one-off employment but take some off the street permanently as weapons scientists."