To predictable cries of shock and outrage, the Australian government has taken another step along the road to agreeing to sell uranium to Russia.
As far as substantive proliferation risks from this, there are none. Russia, you may remember, has a stockpile of 14,000 nuclear weapons, only 5,000 are “operational” – the rest are in storage. Beyond this, the Russians currently have a stockpile of around 1000 tonnes of highly enriched uranium, enough for 80,000 modern weapons, or 20,000 if you resorted to Hiroshima-style technology that you could build in a local workshop. Russia does not need our uranium to build more bombs, or even to supply bomb-making material to other nations if they were silly enough to do so; they have more than enough in stock already for that.
The biggest things that Russia can do for nuclear non-proliferation are to reduce its own arsenal as part of an arms reduction treaty with the United States, get rid of its stockpiles of surplus HEU and bomb-grade plutonium (which, incidentally, Australian uranium is helpful for; you can mix it with bomb material and burn it in a nuclear reactor, at which point it is no longer useful for making weapons), and, most importantly, be very careful what nuclear technology it’s prepared to share with potential proliferators. While it won’t make much difference either way, there’s a perfectly arguable case that selling uranium to Russia may make it marginally more willing to listen to us on those issues.
Personally, I find the recent strategy paper by Rod Lyon of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute on ” Asia’s nuclear future” far more bothering, if you’re concerned about nuclear proliferation. Lyon considers the possibilities of a “de-ordered” Asian nuclear future, where strategic pullback by the United States and other instabilities lead to steps towards proliferation throughout Asia. Thinking about contingencies is what strategic policy wonks are supposed to do, but the suggestions Lyon makes in the conclusion of the analysis bother me greatly:
Over the coming decade or two—say, out to about 2030, the time horizon of the recent White Paper—Australia should attempt to strike a balance between its ordering and hedging strategies. For as long as possible, we should support a low?proliferation Asian security environment and reinforce impulses towards a stable, benign regional nuclear order. We should push an ordering strategy for the good reason that our strategic interests are best served by that approach. Moreover, such an approach would allow us to remain focused on conventional force developments for the Australian Defence Force and to optimise our own options for peaceful
nuclear uses if future governments so choose.Of course, Australia wouldn’t be interested in a civil nuclear power program simply as a means of increasing latency: a well-safeguarded power program doesn’t much enhance prospects for proliferation. A civil program would have to address more central issues, such as how to provide electricity to a modern industrial society with 35 million members.
But our advocacy of order might not be enough. In a darker Asian future of rising nuclear disorder, Australian strategy would be driven by a different set of imperatives. Where possible, we should try to retain hedging options during a possible turbulent era in regional security, and that means we’ll need to keep a weather eye on our own nuclear capacities as the future unfolds.
Lyon’s words are vague here, but I would strongly oppose any “hedging” other than maintaining our position as a developed country with an advanced scientific infrastructure, in the absence of a compelling threat. We don’t have to do anything in particular to be able to beat any of our neighbours to the bomb, if god forbid it ever came to that. Unlike any of our near neighbours, Australia has twice independently developed (and then discarded or sold to GE) uranium enrichment technology quite sufficient, when scaled up, to build a bomb. And, unlike our neighbours, we have many years of experience with building and running potential delivery systems for nuclear weapons. And, much as we may mock our failures in this regard, our capacity for doing complex R&D projects far exceeds any of our near neighbours, and will do so for some time. Any hint, beyond this, that we might be hedging our bets on this issue seems likely to me to encourage further paranoia amongst our neighbours, which is most emphatically not in our interest, as Lyon himself notes.
Perhaps I’m reading more into Lyon’s suggestion than he intended. But, on the face of it, it does seem disappointing that the semi-official strategic policy think tank of the Australian government is making such unnecessarily alarming and potentially inflammatory suggestions.
I wouldn’t mind if the Australian government passed in to law, in the same manner as the recent death penalty and torture act, the absolute prohibition against the manufacture or use of nuclear weapons by Australians. Of course, I may be ignorant and this Act already exists.
Regarding Russia, while my knowledge of the basic engineering/physics/chemistry is almsot entirely absent, why does Russia need to buy our reactor fuel, couldn’t they downgrade their weapon stocks?
You may well need some unenriched uranium to downblend with. Remember, a lot of depleted uranium has been used for other purposes, such as tank armor, bullets, ship ballast, and so on.
This seems like a remarkably naive piece of strategic policy-making.
“the semi-official strategic policy think tank of the Australian government ”
Therein lies the problem. The ASPI is interesting but myopic and limited in both its focus and its intellectual sources. Robert you are probably well aware of the complexity around the use of ‘strategic’ vs ‘security’ and other terms in international relations discourse, but suffice to say that the former is generally loaded with implications. A preference for ‘military’ expertise, so-called realist takes (I say so-called because Iraq has really exposed the massive rift in the realist school between pure realists and hawks), and quite a bit of hawkishness seem to abound.
So this is to be expected.
As to exporting to Russia, it is breathtaking and confirms India’s moral superiority and confident legal standing in their arguments with Australia. Russia is in standing breach or Article 6- so this kind of selective acceptance just confirms the developing world view that we continue to ignore vertical proliferation issues while lecturing everyone in respect of the horisontal. In English- disarmament in there in the convention and it’s high time that provision was taken seriously.
And the present regime in Russia is easily the most hawkish since Stalin. Has this still not clicked- that the likes of Kruschev were actually easier to deal with than the psychopath currently installed in the Kremlin?
There probably just going to use it to murder Russian dissidents, like Alexander Litvinenko, in western cities, so nothing to worry about.
Except that Russia is a NPT signitory … and India is not, neither is Pakistan and Israel… and they are all significant nuclear weapon powers.
The uranium suppliers group (hich Australia is part of) is obligated by treaty not to sell to non-NPT nuclear powers, though the US is trying very very hard to destroy the NPT (replacing it with …WE say who can nuclear power/weapons). Which is a part of the equation in why the US is so anti-Iran (which IS a NPT signitory).
If India wants our uranium all it has to do is sign up to the NPT, pretty easy eh?
Just for a mo, I’ll ignore the pros and cons of the safety issues of the uranium debate.
But I can’t begin to think about the absurdity of selling uranium to a violent, corrupt, dictatorial and militaristic state like the Russians. The article below goes a little way to highlight that if we have any integrity at all, we’d stay well away from the Russians.
And shows that anyone stupid enough to personally represent Australia and / or transnational companies in setting up the deals and doing the on-going logistics, face a fate worse than Stern Hu.
It’ll make the AWB / Iraqi wheat deals look like kindergarten playground stuff!
But I suppose it’s always been lovely Machieavian scheming that give our dipomatics the frissons they so love!
If someone is making money out of it, let nothing else stand in the way!
http://www.opendemocracy.net/od-russia/andrei-loshak/kafka’s-castle-is-collapsing
“……The most sinister oxymoron of all is the term «law enforcement agencies». They are organised crime.
«This could be a Kafka story» is how the American businessman William (Bill) Browder begins his video message on YouTube. Some years ago 3 investigating officers from the Central Directorate of Internal Affairs embezzled 200 million USD from the State Budget. They were assisted in this by several firms which had been illegally «seized» from the American, who was then denied entry into Russia. He hired the lawyer Sergei Magnitsky to state the case for fraud in the courts. «New Times» recounts how another pair of investigating officers used a bribe of 6 million USD to get Magnitsky put in prison. He was held there illegally for a year and died in agony in solitary confinement. There was an international outcry. Prison bosses were sacked. Browder, who is well known in the West, said on the BBC World programme Hard Talk: «I don’t recommend anyone to invest in Russia» and many people with money probably heeded his words. The two investigating officers who arrested Magnitsky are still working for the good of their country. The journalist Olga Romanova told «New Times» that it was these same two who had been «contracted» to institute proceedings against her husband Alexei Kozlov. The client had, according to Romanova, spent 8 million dollars on it. One of the officers, a woman, personally demanded 1500 (USD naturally) from the journalist to ensure that her husband was not put away. He was sent down for 8 years, actually on the very day that the President called for a halt to the «terrorising» of businesses.
The man behind the contract should also be mentioned, though indirectly: he’s a senator, whose name is better not said aloud. People who have done this too often are now six foot under or behind bars. But, to return to the officers who stole 200 million USD from the budget i.e. from you and me and are assumed to have been the paymasters in the Magnitsky case. They are big time tough guys, Russian style – it’s not for nothing that these men, like Russian folk heroes, come in threes. The magazine «Ogonyok» reminded us that four years ago all three (one for all and all for one) were named in an extortion case. The sum was 20 million dollars, a businessman was kidnapped and his wife and children threatened. ………
Last week «Vedomosti» published the news that this inseparable threesome had been promoted to the central management structure of the Ministry of the Interior……..”
If you lie down with dogs, the fleas come gratis.
“Russia does not need our uranium to build more bombs, or even to supply bomb-making material to other nations if they were silly enough to do so; they have more than enough in stock already for that.”
By which reasoning, I can in good conscience ship a few tonnes of methamphetamines to the USA, because after all they have lots already.
Or if you want an historical example, we can send pig iron to Japan as they storm across China, since after all they’re getting iron from the USA anyway. With luck, they might even return the iron to us in the form of bombs.
Or perhaps it would be better just to have nothing to do with the whole thing.
Kiashu, if you’re going to make the arguments that we should impose general trade sanctions on Russia, fine.
But your underlying thinking is that uranium is a strategically important metal for existing nuclear powers. It isn’t.
An interesting sidebar to this discussion:
Why your medical care depends on weap[ons grade uranium
Actually it doesn’t, as the article later makes clear, but the headline will probably attract attention to an interesting issue for anyone needing access to medical isotopes.
“But your underlying thinking is that uranium is a strategically important metal for existing nuclear powers. It isn’t.”
Cool. Then they won’t be upset if we refuse to sell it to them.
Here’s the thing. If we’re against drug abuse, it’s probably a bad idea to sell or smuggle drugs commonly abused to countries where there’s drug abuse. Sure, they’ll probably get them from somewhere else, but at least we’ll have had nothing to do with it.
If we’re against nuclear weapons – and you may recall our PM made a big noise about being against nuclear weapons and wanting them abolished a little while back – it’s probably a bad idea to sell or smuggle material for them to countries who have nuclear weapons. You don’t abolish things by giving people the material for them.
Sure, perhaps our particular uranium doesn’t turn into bombs – but it frees up a lot of their domestic material that they can use for bombs. After all, they’re already reduced to selling their old bombs to the US for making into mixed-oxide fuel to raise some cash.
If we’re actually against nuclear weapons, why should we make it easier for them? We should do our best to make it difficult.
Of course, that would be UnAustralian. Acting according to principles freely chosen? Trying to get the economy reliant on something other than “dig it up and sell it overseas”? Ridiculous!
Kiashu, if you want them to sell more of that stockpile, they need natural uranium to downblend it with.
If nothing else, that’s a pretty good reason to sell it to them.
This has degenerated for some into a “I hate Russia, I like India” sort of conversation.
Too many decades of Cold War propaganda has rotted some minds I suspect.
(1) Russia is a NPT signatory in good standing.
(2) Russia (unlike France and the US) has never assisted another country get the bomb.
(3) Russia has (unlike like the UK, France, China, Israel, India and Pakistan, the last 3 not being members of the NPT) reduced its nuclear weapons, as has, giving credit where it is due, the US.
(4) Russia has been a a party to many weapon reduction treaties which is has adhered to: such as SALT, START, the IRM ban and of course the latest agreeement with the US.
Therefore a resaonable conclusion is that Russia, at least in nuclear weapons terms, is meeting international law and treaties. Therefore the nuclear suppliers group is obliged to sell uranium to it.
If Australia unilaterly stops selling to Russia, but (say) sells to India then we would be unilaterly be breaking the whole NPT system. Then what … sell to North Korea or Israel?