Published today in the Fairfax papers, are reports from Wikileaks cables that the ALP was considering a deal to sell uranium to India.
THE federal Labor government has secretly canvassed the possibility of uranium sales to India while publicly asserting that it cannot allow such exports as long as Delhi maintains a nuclear arsenal outside the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.
Big whoop.
India is a mature country. Sure, they may not be signed up to all the anti-nuclear treaties, but can you blame them? Unlike Australia, they are not "protected" under the US nuclear umbrella, along with South Korea and Japan (although, the likelihood of the US ever actually following through with a nuclear retaliation to a nuclear attack on Australia is fairly low. Would the US really risk Washington, DC for Brisbane? New York for Tokyo? Guam for Seoul?). Would Australia be on the anti-nuclear bandwagon with a nuclear armed New Zealand and an ongoing dispute over who has sovereignty over Tasmania? I bet the answer would be an emphatic "no". Not to mention the fact that the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty treats those outside the "nuclear club" (US, France, China, UK, Russia) as pariahs for even considering a nuclear deterrent of their own. I wouldn't join a club that told me I couldn't have what the founding members had, either.
Additionally, the US-India deal is for commercial power application. According to the CIA World Factbook, India has a population of 1,173,108,018 (July 2010 est.).which makes it the second most populous nation on the planet. With India a developing nation, it requires huge amounts of electrical power generation in order to meet the needs of its population (and growing industry). Without nuclear power, it would be back to the days of rolling brownouts throughout the cities (hardly the best way to get your economy going). The following table shows how big the shortfall between demand and supply was between 1990-91 and 2003-04:
| ENERGY SHORTAGE | ||||
| Year | Demand (billion kWh) | Available (billion kWh) | Shortfall | (%)(billion kWh) |
| 1990-91 | 267.632 | 246.560 | 21.072 | 7.87 |
| 1991-92 | 288.974 | 266.432 | 22.542 | 7.80 |
| 1992-93 | 305.266 | 279.824 | 25.442 | 8.33 |
| 1993-94 | 323.252 | 299.494 | 23.758 | 7.35 |
| 1994-95 | 352.260 | 327.281 | 24.979 | 7.09 |
| 1995-96 | 389.721 | 354.045 | 35.676 | 9.15 |
| 1996-97 | 413.490 | 365.900 | 47.590 | 11.51 |
| 2000-01 | 507.216 | 467.400 | 39.816 | 7.8 |
| 2003-04 | 559.264 | 519.398 | 39.866 | 7.1 |
Source
With that in mind, emphasis also needs to be given to the fact that a commercial nuclear power generation program does not easily become a military nuclear weapons program (despite what some of the more outspoken would tell you). The isotopes required are different....and if the IAEA is anywhere near a credible and competent body, it would have numerous safeguards in place to ensure that each molecule of spent fuel is accounted for and not shipped off to be enriched to become weaponised (yes, a rather idealistic view).
Australia SHOULD be exporting uranium to India. It would help the relationship, which has been damaged in recent times. More than that, Australia, if actually serious about trying to limit the human impact on climate change (or planning ahead for when the coal eventually runs out) should be at least discussing the use of nuclear energy ourselves....but that's a topic for another blog.
Since my research is based around nuclear proliferation, I guess I have to respond to this. I think the sale of uranium to India especially done under the cloak of secrecy is utterly disgusting. It undermines and already fragile Non-Proliferation regime and sets a dangerous precedent for rogue nations to follow. Having said that, the NNPT in it's current form is more a political document than anything really substantive. I argue this is due to the lack of enforcement measures and counter proliferation action within the document itself.
ReplyDeleteIndia, as far as I'm concerned is a irresponsible nuclear power, possibly even more irresponsible than Pakistan. Command and control procedures are not publicly known and safeguards questionable. Weapons are also in at a deployed readiness rather than disassembled like the Pakistanis. With the geopolitical context this is an extremely aggressive stance to take and is highly provocative.
Secondly, while you may be correct in the difference of Isotope production, the fact remains that it is still relatively easy (for nation states) to swap production from PU-240 to PU-239, as all that is needed is time and engineering expertise. Also lets not forget that plutonium based weaponry while ideal for its fission efficiency and high yields is not the only type of weapon. Uraninum based weapons are relatively simple to engineer (as evidenced with the little boy bomb) but require large amounts of centrifuges to enrich enough weapons grade material for use in a war head. Again, time and effort. Both of which states have plenty of.
What we need to remember is that the sale of uranium to India has the potential to destabilise the region, simply by way of the "me too!" factor. and as far as I know Australia is less likely to sell nuclear material to Pakistan than India, further driving resentments between the two nations and also furthering resentment between the Muslim world and the West.
In the end what is needed (and the focus of my research) is to formalise the Nuclear Non-proliferation regime into a formal body of norms and agreements that treat nuclear weapons as a regulated and control weapons system and to demystify them from the images of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.