Japan will contribute an additional $20 million to a science and technology center established in Moscow six years ago to help curb the proliferation of nuclear weapons by creating jobs for Russian scientists and engineers, Foreign Ministry sources said Thursday.
The sources said Norio Hattori, the ministry's director general in charge of arms control and disarmament, will convey the decision to the secretary general of the International Science and Technology Center at a meeting on Monday in Moscow.
Japan, the United States, the European Union and Russia signed an agreement in November 1992 to create the ISTC to employ nuclear scientists and engineers who lost their jobs when the Soviet Union was dissolved nearly one year previously.