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?

If nothing else, that’s a pretty good reason to sell it to them.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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?

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?