U.S. overstates nonproliferation success: watchdog

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Department of Energy has overstated the success of a long-standing program to prevent former Soviet nuclear scientists from selling their secrets to the highest bidder, a U.S. watchdog said on Friday.

The U.S. Initiatives for Proliferation Prevention program was launched a few years after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union to provide employment to former Soviet scientists involved in weapons of mass destruction development.

Western officials feared unemployed WMD scientists could be enticed to share their knowledge with rogue states and terrorists.

But a report by the Government Accountability Office said the department had overstated the number of WMD scientists aided by the program and cast doubt on the stated number of private-sector jobs created.

Department officials had no immediate comment on the report's assertions.

The GAO, a nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress, said the program claimed to have supplemented the income of more than 16,770 weapons scientists, engineers and technicians in Russia and other former Soviet states.

A GAO study of 97 program projects involving 6,450 scientists showed more than half the participants did not claim to possess any weapons-related experience, GAO said.

Scientists without WMD experience received about $10 million in payments, or 40 percent of the money those projects paid their personnel.

Officials from 10 Russian and Ukrainian institutes told GAO investigators that program money had also helped attract and retain not older former Soviet scientists but younger recruits who might otherwise emigrate to the United States or other Western countries.