Humankind’s push-pull approach to nuclear power controversy adds weight to proliferation menace
- US efforts In Georgia to contain nuclear theft being routed by Russian army
- Russian fighting in Georgia putting area’s nuclear materials stocks in jeopardy for theft
- US prez candidate Obama calls on Russia and the world to abandon nukes
- Resurrection of 'atoms for peace' for the creation of an international uranium bank
- Turkish officials bust peddlers of Russia-origin uranium in Istanbul
- Status Report: RTGs still an underestimated foe in securing loose nukes in Russia
- Thieves make off with 14 tonnes of titanium from Sayda Bay submarines
- GAN Says Nuclear Materials Have Been Disappearing From Russian Plants for 10 Years
- US Attorney General says "dirty bomb" plotter apprehended
- Stanford Database Tracks Lost Radwaste to Stem Nuclear Terrorism
Related articles
- IAEA discloses ‘disturbingly high’ number of nuclear and radioactive thefts this year
- Uranium smuggler caught in Georgia
- Report Says US-Russia Threat Reduction Efforts Lack Coordination, Political Will and Cash
Related news
- The G8 Global Partnership against the Spread of Weapons and Materials of Mass Destruction
Related position papers
Averting a Hiroshima déjà vu
The danger of global nuclear proliferation avalanching to explode in a Hiroshima-scale disaster was again brought to light at the inaugural two-day summit of the leaders of the recently launched International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament in Sydney, Australia, in late October. As was summed up at the meeting, covered extensively by the media worldwide, humankind had been “sleepwalking” on the issue of nuclear weapons for a decade.
The organization was first proposed by Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd after his June visit to the Japanese city of Hiroshima, which was devastated by an American atomic bomb in 1945.
The commission’s co-chair Gareth Evans said at the meeting that the dangers of nuclear arms had been largely overlooked as public attention was distracted by climate change and the world financial crisis, the online news publication The Australian reported.
“If we don’t get this right, we face a catastrophe on a massive scale,” The Australian reported him as saying.
In a quote cited by the news agency AFP, Evans added: “Unless we energise ourselves, unless we re-invigorate a high level political debate which is then accompanied by effective action, we potentially have very alarming consequences staring us in the face.”
Evans, Australia’s former foreign minister and now president of the Brussels-based International Crisis Group, said there were between 13,000 and 16,000 nuclear warheads actively deployed around the world and that it was “really a bit of a miracle” that a nuclear catastrophe had not occurred during the Cold War or afterwards, according to AFP.
“We are on the brink of […] a cascade of proliferation unless we are very, very careful indeed and find ways collectively to hold the line," AFP quoted Evans as saying.
IAEA at a crossroads
At least some of the blame for why that collective duty has been put on the back burner by the international community lies squarely with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), a UN entity that was put together on October 26, 1956 with the hope to reconcile the weighty tasks of promoting peaceful ways of application of nuclear energy, on the one hand, and curb the proliferation of global nuclear weapons arsenals, on the other. Fifty-two years later, in statements delivered last September to the 52nd Regular Session of the IAEA General Conference in Vienna, Austria, IAEA Director General Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei was forced to admit the agency’s resources were stretched far enough that it might fail to carry on the job it had been entrusted with.
ElBaradei did not mince words when he said in his report, called quite concisely “IAEA at a Crossroads”: “I must stand here today and let you know that all is not well with the IAEA.”
“In its first 50 years, the Agency has proven its value as a key instrument, both for enabling developing countries to use science and technology for development, and for maintaining international security. […] But we really have reached a turning point,” he continued.
Part of the problem, according to ElBaradei was “years of zero-growth budgets [that] have left us with a failing infrastructure” and that, for example, “no less than 90 percent of our nuclear security programme, which is aimed in part at stopping terrorists from obtaining nuclear material, depends on voluntary funding.”
He went on to say that, “political commitment to the goals of the agency needs to be renewed at the highest level to encourage the transfer of nuclear technology to the developing world and to strengthen safety and security, non-proliferation and disarmament.”
Nuclear terrorism: How tangible is the threat?
In his speech, ElBaradei briefly addressed the IAEA’s efforts in promoting peaceful applications of nuclear technologies but, as any classic double-edged-sword scenario goes, the benefits do not render the threat of nuclear proliferation any less perceivable. In the fifty-two years since the IAEA’s creation, the number of countries that possessed or still possess nuclear weapons has doubled.
The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which became effective in 1970 and to which 189 countries are currently signatory parties, remains the most widely recognised arms control agreement. Still, though it remains a powerful implement in the IAEA’s tool-box, its leverage as a deterrent is limited and its authority has been questioned by some nuclear-capable nations.
In a 2004 statement called “Preserving the Non-Proliferation Treaty,” ElBaradei said: In 1970, the assumption was that relatively few countries had the know-how to develop nuclear weapons. Now, with this knowledge spreading (thirty-five to forty countries, by some estimates), the margin of security under the current non-proliferation regime is becoming too close for comfort.”
“More countries have sought to master the nuclear fuel cycle, both for economic reasons and, in some cases, as a good insurance policy for a rainy day. Whatever the reason, this know-how essentially transforms them into what might be called a ‘virtual’ or ‘latent’ nuclear-weapon state. Experience has shown that a ‘choke point’ for nuclear weapons development is the acquisition of weapon-usable nuclear material,” were ElBaradei’s words in “Reflections On Nuclear Challenges Today,” a lecture he delivered in London at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in December 2005.
“If a country with a full nuclear fuel cycle decides to break away from its non-proliferation commitments, a nuclear weapon could be only months away. In such cases, we are only as secure as the outbreak of the next major crisis. In today’s environment, this margin of security is simply untenable,” ElBaradei said then.
However, Dr. Hans Blix, ElBaradei’s predecessor at the post of IAEA Director General and former UN weapons inspector, believes his former colleague’s approach may yet be too alarmist. In his view, it would be a mistake to include states such as Austria, Switzerland, or Nordic countries, into the camp of “latent nuclear-weapon states.”
Austria is a non-nuclear nation, as is Denmark, although nuclear installations or power or research reactors are in operation in Switzerland, Finland, Sweden, and Norway.
Blix is now chairman of the Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission (WMDC) based in Stockholm, Sweden, an entity which, according to its own description, was launched “to respond to the recent, profoundly worrying developments in international security, and in particular to investigate ways of reducing the dangers from nuclear, biological, chemical and radiological weapons.”
“In order to develop nuclear weapons, not only the resources, but the political will are needed, while the countries that I have mentioned have long made the statements that despite the opportunities that they have to do so, they will not produce nuclear weapons. What they should be called, rather, is ‘voluntary non-nuclear states,’” Blix said in an interview with Bellona*.
Australia’s Evans is a WMDC member, yet he seems to subscribe to that more ominous outlook maintained by ElBaradei.
“The devastation that could be wreaked by one major nuclear weapons incident alone puts 9/11 and almost everything else [in] to the category of the insignificant,” AFP quoted Evans as saying at the October Sydney meeting.
When only a few kilograms of radioactive filler are what a terrorist needs for a do-it-yourself dirty-bomb kit – and the safeguards in place across the world are hardly stringent enough to prevent theft of nuclear materials, while blueprints for making a dirty bomb are available for open access – the risk of proliferation of nuclear weapons by criminal or outlawed organisations remains a cause for severe concern.
According to data released by the IAEA in 2006, the previous four years saw a twofold increase in the statistics of interception of illegal transports of radioactive materials; nuclear contraband was retrieved in more than 300 cases across the world.
New commission, new political will
The new International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament, co-chaired by Evans and Japan’s former foreign minister Yoriko Kawaguchi, is exactly that kind of a push that may have long been called for to bring back awareness of the exacerbating issue of nuclear proliferation and jump-start the international dialogue and political cooperation needed to address it. The commission’s efforts are also a precursor to the 2010 Review Conference on the NPT, which will have been 40 years in effect by then.
 |
| Gareth Evans has been President and Chief Executive of the Brussels-based International Crisis Group since January 2000. A prominent Australian politician, he played major roles in developing the UN peace plan for Cambodia, concluding the Chemical Weapons Convention, founding the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum and initiating the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons. In 1990, the Council of Australian Humanist Societies awarded him the title of the Australian Humanist of the Year. (From WMDC and Wikipedia). |
| wikipedia |
The group’s members include former Clinton era US Secretary of Defence William Perry, Russia’s nuclear arms expert Academician Alexei Arbatov, and Norway’s former prime-minister, Gro Harlem Brundtland. Five of the 15 commission members, including Arbatov and Perry, are representatives of the five nations recognized by the NPT as nuclear-weapon states: the United States, Russia, China, Great Britain, and France.
Other countries, such as Indonesia, Mexico, Germany, and South Africa, have their envoys in the commission. Also present at the Sydney conference were senior figures from India and Pakistan, two nations that, along with Israel and North Korea, have developed nuclear weapons programmes but are not parties to the NPT.
The group plans to meet regularly in the next two years to work out recommendations to bring more staying power to the efforts undertaken within the scope of the NPT’s commitments or, in the words of Rudd’s office, to reinvigorate the global debate on preventing the spread of nuclear weapons and for nuclear disarmament, according to media reports. The Australian government earlier pledged $2.66 million to the commission’s work, reports said.
Have uranium, will enrich
“The big problem with both North Korea and Iran is the demonstration that while doing what you’re totally allowed to do under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, namely develop energy for peaceful purposes, you can acquire the capacity to create enriched uranium, which in turn gives you the capacity to very quickly convert that into the material for making bombs,” Evans said at the Sydney meeting, according to Voice of America.
Many experts believe that this is where the main controversy lies: The core principles on which the IAEA’s activities are built are self-contradictory in nature, wherein the virtue of nuclear non-proliferation simply does not fit. By promoting, in accordance with its fundamental guidelines, dual-use technologies such as what enriching uranium allows with respect to the application of atomic energy, the IAEA essentially contributes to the proliferation of weapons-grade materials. Therefore, no serious prospects for a proliferation-free future and consequent total disarmament can be realistically expected unless humankind abandons nuclear technologies altogether, the civilian nuclear industry included.
As long as the world relies on nuclear power to provide energy, this sword of Damocles, the imminence of nuclear war, will hang indefinitely over our heads, believes the eminent Russian environmentalist Aleksei Yablokov, president of the Moscow-based Centre for Ecological Policy of Russia.
“Though ‘peaceful use of atomic energy’ is usually one of the conditions to be mentioned last when the NPT is discussed, it is that stipulation that is likely to have caused the fall of the non-proliferation regime,” Yablokov wrote in “The Inevitable Link Between Nuclear Energy and Nuclear Weapons,” a report that was published by Bellona in 2005.
 |
| Soldiers deployed for exercise in Nevada watched on November 1, 1951 as a mushroom cloud rose from an airdrop blast dubbed “Dog detonation,” one in the series of seven nuclear weapons tests known as Operation Buster-Jangle and conducted by the United States at the Nevada Test Site in late 1951. Photo from the US National Archives. |
| wikipedia |
As follows from a February 2006 survey conducted by the Public Opinion Foundation, a leading Russian polling agency, the notion that the atomic power industry is tied up inseparably with nuclear weapons development is a widespread sentiment among the Russian population. When asked what first comes to their mind when they hear about the nuclear power industry, every tenth respondent of those surveyed came up immediately with “an atomic bomb” and “nuclear war.”
Former UN weapons inspector Blix, however, feels less idealistic about what results the abolishment of nuclear technologies may yield: “Denouncing the nuclear energy industry on the part of some or all nations will not lead to the disappearance of any single atomic bomb,” he said in his conversation with Bellona Web.
As telling examples, Blix cites nuclear programmes developed by Israel, which, though having no civilian nuclear energy industry, presumably has at its disposal around 200 nuclear warheads, and those in China, which was for a long time producing nuclear weapons before expanding its policies to include building nuclear power plants as well.
“Countries may have their nuclear energy industry without having nuclear weapons as well as they may have weapons without using atomic power peacefully, though the latter is not quite common in the world today,” Blix told Bellona Web. “Of course, most nuclear states, including the United States, first produced nuclear weapons and then turned to civilian uses of atomic energy.”
Dual-use technologies
In an article issued in a 2004 IAEA publication, former Russian Minister of Atomic Energy Yevgeny Adamov wrote that: “Few people, perhaps, may remember that nuclear power was not brought into existence by energy deficiency. Its advent was caused by the Second World War and the associated pressing necessity for the power of weapons.”
The United States and the Soviet Union readily indulged this proliferation of nuclear weapons throughout the Cold War era.
“In the early period of nuclear power,” wrote Adamov, “it was assumed that the commercial industry would develop in the context of bipolar possession of nuclear weapons (NATO with the USA at the head versus the Warsaw Treaty led by the USSR). As it turned out later, weapons-related technologies would not be confined to the circle of five states declared to belong to the nuclear club.”
The same technologies – enriching uranium and reprocessing spent nuclear fuel (SNF), which results in generating plutonium – provide the basis for both the manufacturing of nuclear fuel, which is used in the atomic energy cycle, and the production of nuclear weapons. Promoting and using these technologies is allowed under the NPT stipulations.
According to estimates by the International Panel on Fissile Materials, an independent group founded in 2006 that comprises arms-control and non-proliferation experts from both nuclear-weapon and non-nuclear-weapon states, the world has by now accumulated around 1,700 tonnes of highly enriched uranium and 500 tonnes of separated plutonium, or plutonium recovered from reprocessing spent nuclear fuel – enough to produce over 100,000 nuclear warheads.
Environmentalists argue that the so-called Nuclear Renaissance – the second coming of nuclear technologies prophesised by the atomic industry as humankind’s only energy future – will take the risk of nuclear proliferation to levels so critical a level that it no longer be subject to control. Estimates released by the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, a US-based organisation that works to provide the public with scientific and technical information on energy and environmental issues in order to promote the democratization of science and a safer, healthier environment, show that if 2,000 new reactors are built within the next few decades, the amount of reactor-grade plutonium stockpiled throughout the world will reach 20,000 tonnes by 2050.
Yet, the primary concerns may not lie with the mere number of commercial reactors per se, but with the operations of the nuclear fuel cycle enterprises, those that produce and reprocess enriched uranium.
In a December 2004 report called “A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility” released by the UN Secretary General’s Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change – Australia’s Evans was a member of that group – identified nuclear proliferation as the number-one threat to the well-being of the international community and recommended UN member states “to forego the development of domestic uranium enrichment and reprocessing capacity.”
The GNEP and its problems
Several novel approaches have been proposed in the recent years that were, as before, intended to advocate the use of nuclear energy, on the one hand, and discourage the global community from developing nuclear fuel cycle operations, on the other, as advancing the industry carries a grave risk of proliferation of nuclear weapon materials.
One of these approaches gave birth to an initiative called the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP), a new framework for the application and management of the nuclear fuel cycle suggested by the administration of George W. Bush in February 2006. The idea centres on the creation of a secure international uranium fuel bank for countries with developed nuclear power. To avoid separation of nuclear materials that can be used in nuclear weapons and provide for a more proliferation-resistant nuclear fuel cycle, only a few select nations, which would include the United States, would enrich and lease out – not sell – uranium to prospective client states. Under the leasing agreement, the “nuclear fuel cycle states” – or the fuel suppliers – would then take the spent nuclear fuel back for reprocessing and producing fuel for so-called “breeder reactors,” or nuclear reactors that generate new fissile material at a greater rate than they consume such material. These “nuclear fuel cycle states” are the only ones that own such reactors.
The GNEP programme puts an end to the thirty-odd-year no-reprocessing policy, which compelled the United States to resist any spent nuclear fuel reprocessing projects for fear of aggravating nuclear proliferation risks.
In fact, a moratorium on SNF reprocessing was enforced in the United States by the administration of former President Jimmy Carter – and supported by his successor, President Ronald Reagan - after the 1974 tests that India conducted on a nuclear warhead it had produced using reprocessing capacities.
Yet, according to Blix, the GNEP initiative is of a less than feasible kind: “The U.S. Congress and the American public as a whole tend to look at nuclear waste with caution; it is, furthermore, well known that neither reprocessing nor breeder reactors are economically expedient,” he told Bellona Web.
Moreover, the suggested approach brings out in even starker relief the discriminating nature of the existing non-proliferation regime as it is codified by the NPT.
“In reality, most of the plans devised to prevent the spread of nuclear fuel cycle capacities in other countries risk prompting objections in that these plans reassert and deepen the divide between the nations that are allowed to have advanced technologies and nuclear weapons and those that are not,” said Blix.
Blix’s opinion is not unlike that of former US Secretary of Defence, later President of the World Bank, Robert McNamara, who said in a piece entitled “Apocalypse Soon” that was published by the Foreign Policy magazine in 2005: “If the United States continues its current nuclear stance, over time, substantial proliferation of nuclear weapons will almost surely follow.”
He went on to say that nations such as Egypt, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Taiwan would “very likely initiate nuclear weapons programs, increasing both the risk of use of the weapons and the diversion of weapons and fissile materials into the hands of rogue states or terrorists.”
As if presaging the deep concern expressed three years later by the members of the International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament at their meeting in Sydney, McNamara’s article concludes on a very human, emotional note:
“Indeed, just last summer […], former Secretary of Defence Perry said, ‘I have never been more fearful of a nuclear detonation than now (…) There is a greater than 50 percent probability of a nuclear strike on US targets within a decade.’ I share his fears.”
*Dr. Blix’s remarks, here and elsewhere in the article, first appeared in a Russian translation as quotes used for the Russian version of this story and have been back-translated into English for the purposes of this publication. They may therefore not be word-for-word renderings of his original statements.
Galina Raguzina wrote and reported from Kaliningrad and Maria Kaminskaya researched and translated from St. Petersburg.
