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Volpe Center Highlights - November/December 2000National SecurityDirector's Notes |
Focus |
Safety |
Mobility |
Human and Natural Environment |
Volpe Supports Strategic Arms Reduction in Russia (DoD) For the past several years, the Volpe Center has supported the Department of Defense's (DoD) Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) in their efforts to assist the Former Soviet Union (FSU) in disabling their nuclear weapons of mass destruction as prescribed by the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I). Beginning in 1993, DTRA worked with the governments of the former Soviet states to design a procedure for eliminating the missiles and their fuel. The multi-step process called for destruction of a missile beginning with its removal from the silo, bunker, or submarine where it had been deployed. Each missile, with its fuel contained inside, then would be moved to the factory where it had been built and the missile designers and builders would disassemble it. In 1993, Mr. Ross Gill of the Advanced Vehicle Technologies Division traveled to Ukraine and Russia to assist in implementing a missile transportation protocol for this effort. DTRA and FSU military planners had concluded that the FSU rail system was the best way to transport the missiles across thousands of miles; however, the railcars designed to carry the missiles had not be used in more than 15 years. Mr. Gill prescribed rehabilitation of these cars, including new brakes, hoses, and internal transport carriage rails, as well as the installation of on-board environmental systems to control temperature and humidity and to promote fire safety. In addition, special containers were needed to transport the missiles' fuel and oxidizer. For the next several years, Mr. Gill assisted the DTRA team in managing several aspects of the equipment planning and procurement for this effort. He oversaw the procurement of $4 million of flatbed railcars from Abakon, Russia, and $44 million worth of International Organization for Standardization (ISO)-compliant fuel and oxidizer containers manufactured by Arbel, a French firm. During the same period, Mr. Gill visited the installations from which missiles were to be removed. The first round of visits revealed that the little-used rail systems inside the military bases were not up to standard for moving the missiles. With extensive experience in track inspection, the Volpe Center's effort refocused on inspecting and upgrading rail, including the replacement of switches, rails, and ties, and the addition of ballast to firm the track bed.
In the latest round of visits from August 19 to 28, 2000, Mr. Gill accompanied Maj. Robert Schultz of DTRA to sites in Nenoska and Zlataoust to review Russian progress on repairs of railroad track and railway missile transport cars. The first train with missiles was shipped from Nenoska to Zlataoust at the end of August to begin the disassembly process. During an October site visit to Zlataoust and Biynsk, Mr. Gill reviewed rail safety procedures and operations as agreed to in DTRA's contract with the Makeyev Rocket Center. The contract provides for the destruction of ten SS-N-20 missiles formerly used by the Russian submarine fleet. Mr. Gill will travel to Russia again at the end of January 2001 to outline the scope of work to be done by the Russian Federation under the START I program to eliminate the train sets that were built to launch intercontinental ballistic missiles, and to oversee track upgrades. It will be Mr. Gill's seventeenth visit. For more information on the Center's role as part of the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, please see the Summer 2000 issue of the Volpe Journal, available at www.volpe.dot.gov/infosrc/journal/summer00/index.html. |
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