It is with some hesitation that I take issue with the latest publication of the renowned Henry Sokolski and Sharon Squassoni on August 15 in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, titled: “Actually, the NPT doesn’t guarantee a right to make nuclear fuel.”
But someone should defend the IAEA and international safeguards! Here are points in question.
‘The [NPT] treaty was designed to prevent dangerous bombmaking activities.’
NPT is far more complex than that. It is common to state the three pillars of NPT: nuclear disarmament; nuclear nonproliferation; and peaceful uses of nuclear technology. Nonproliferation involves the commitment of non-nuclear states not to pursue nuclear weapons and to accept IAEA inspection to confirm that commitment is being followed. Perhaps Sokolsky intends to refer to INFCIRC/153, which lays out how IAEA and the state cooperate to carry out that confirmation. If so, INFCIRC/153 is not designed to ‘prevent’. It is designed to deter and to detect. The objective of safeguards is defined as ‘timely detection of diversion of significant quantities of nuclear material…and deterrence of such diversion by the risk of early detection.’ [para 28]
‘What inspections alone can prevent is precious little and has been exaggerated for decades.’ The assumption that ‘diversions of fissile material from the fuel-making enterprise can be detected early and reliably enough to prevent nuclear bombs from being made. That’s just not true.’ ‘One could monitor such activities and materials, but it was impossible to detect possible diversions early enough to prevent bombs from being built.’
Those statements make me wonder how much the authors know about how IAEA safeguards under the NPT have been implemented. On the matter of detecting diversion, IAEA has continually improved its capabilities as technology has developed. Those with knowledge of implementation procedures believe the probability of detecting diversion is adequate. On the matter of detecting early enough, inspections are carried out at intervals (continuous or 1-month or 3-month or 1-year) appropriate to the type of nuclear material in order to give notice of detection is time for actions to be taken before even a crude nuclear weapon could be fabricated for use in a nuclear test. Regarding bombs being built, including mating them with a delivery system, that would take significant time, on the order of year(s).
‘The dangers of allowing non-weapon states to make nuclear fuel have always been high.’ ‘In the early 1980s, the United States authorized Japan to separate plutonium from American-origin spent fuel. Then, Washington authorized Euratom nations to do the same and accepted their commercial enrichment of uranium.’
As the second and third sentences indicate, the ‘allowance’ is by a supplying state for a receiving state. This process is a part of the nonproliferation regime, but outside NPT. There is nothing about 'allowance' in NPT. Whether a supplier state decides to ‘allow’ can be important. The case in particular today is whether the U.S. will ‘allow’ Saudi Arabia to enrich and reprocess nuclear fuel, as it requests. The U.S. got acceptance by UAE of no enrichment or reprocessing. Let’s see what the current administration does with Saudi Arabia.
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