Your country was split into 15 new nations.

Four of those new nations ended up with some of your atomic bombs, although those now have been collected by one country -you think and you hope.

All 15 new nations have some of the old mother country's nuclear materials and still are using them for research, commercial purposes and electrical production.

How do you keep track of all of that?

Especially when much of the records are handwritten - some in 40-year-old, smudgy scrawls.

What's worse, most were tabulated in an era when mistakes could lead to exile or executions - prompting a reluctance to admit any errors or make corrections.

And some records still may be tucked away in dusty, top-secret archives.

That's the dilemma facing Russia, which is trying to track down and keep track of all the former Soviet Union nuclear materials after the breakup of the superpower.

"The older we are getting, the more information we are losing,"said Gennady Pshakin, manager of the Russian Methodological and Training Center.

Russia set up a center in Obninsk - about 100 miles southwest of Moscow - to train workers in the accounting of nuclear materials.

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is providing advice for the 3-year-old center.

The Obninsk center has blossomed from teaching 10 courses to 185 students in 1995 to teaching 36 courses in inspections, operating measuring instruments and statistical and accounting methods to 730 people in 1998.

PNNL coordinated gathering experts from the Department of Energy's national laboratories to help the Obninsk center develop its courses and technical materials, said Debbie Dickman, PNNL's manager for the project.

An example of something new that the United States has provided to the Obninsk center is a barcode system - like those found in supermarket checkout lines.

Lots of vital information can be encrypted on a barcode, which can be read instantly into a computer system that can crunch the data, Dickman and Pshakin said.

Russia's and the other former Soviet republics' inventories of weapons-grade and other nuclear materials are staggering.

"Plenty ... A lot," Pshakin said when asked how much nuclear material his government has to track.

According to The Associated Press, at least 30 thefts of nonweapons-grade radioactive materials occurred in Russia from 1992 to 1995.

Russia began its nuclear accountability program in 1992, figuring the task would take 10 years.

But the effort is proving more difficult than Russia originally thought. "How long now? Some people say it will take 10 to 15 years more. Some people say it will take forever," Pshakin said.

PNNL's advisory role is expected to remain steady for a few years, then taper off.

Dickman talked about how people in the nuclear nonproliferation and safeguards fields pick up an extra passion about successfully doing their work.

"All the U.S. people coming into this job hope to put ourselves out a job," Dickman said.