nuclear-news

USA – double standards on India, Iran – in spread of nuclear technology

When narrow national interests obstruct a noble cause

The Economist 7 August 09

“………….The Obama administration, unlike its predecessor, talks of ratifying the test-ban treaty. America and Russia are busy cutting warheads. Nuclear officials from America, Russia, Britain, France and China will meet in London next month to explore ways to build confidence for future disarmament.

Yet all will be in vain unless better ways can be found to deal with a practical problem as old as the nuclear age: how to stop nuclear technologies that can be used legitimately for making electricity from being abused for bomb-making. Efforts to tackle it are in a muddle.

………………..the Obama team may have done itself no favours either by agreeing to open early talks with India, under a controversial 123 deal negotiated by the Bush administration. This will eventually allow India to extract plutonium from spent reactor fuel of American origin. India, which has never signed the NPT, does not yet have any American-built reactors, let alone the spent fuel from them to reprocess. America is creating a muddle by giving India such rights now, when it is telling Iran than it should suspend its work and others that they had better not start.

……………..A quiet change:   In the confusion, few will have noticed that the Obama administration has dropped its predecessor’s plans to restart commercial plutonium reprocessing—because it makes no economic sense, even for rich America, and is a proliferation risk.

August 7, 2009 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, USA | antinuclear, nuclear, nuclear weapons, radioactive, uranium