It seems like this is foreign policy week – or, perhaps we’ll call it “fall into line with the USA” week.
Exhibit one: Julia Gillard advocating a change of Labor policy which would allow uranium sales to India. I’m not a Labor Party member, and it’s always puzzled me how certain issues must seemingly receive the imprimatur of the national conference, but not others. Presumably, if Julia Gillard feels comfortable to advocate for it in public, the fix is in – or, at least, the fix will now be arranged.
It seems that, again, the substantive irrelevance of this policy needs to be pointed out. When Australia had the procedural to actually restrict India’s access to imported uranium back in 2009, we squibbed it. India already – with our concurrence – buys uranium from other suppliers on the international market. Whether India buys it from us is 99% symbolism.
The trade-offs of that symbolism are quite complex – the integrity of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty vs. the realpolitik of a rising India. Underlying all of this is the American desire (India’s ability to import uranium came largely through a bilateral deal with the USA) to tighten security alliances in what looks not altogether like a containment strategy against China. The unwisdom of this strategy, and what Australia is doing, and should do about it, will hopefully be the topic of future posts.
Within the Labor Party, of course, positions on uranium sales to India seem largely split along the lines of broader opinions on uranium mining and nuclear power more generally.
For mine at least, the foreign policy direction that Julia Gillard seems to be happy to lead Australia in is far more of a concern than a long-foreshadowed fait accompli surrounding whether India gets its yellowcake from us or the Canadians or Khazaks.
I hate to parrot the plants in the Daily Tele letters pages today but…doesn’t this mean that we’ll be switching to nuclear reactors ourselves in the new future and doesn’t this make the carbon tax obsolete overnight?
No and no.
We’ve been exporting uranium for decades, and domestic nuclear power is still a politically intractable proposition. This can’t and won’t change unless and until the carbon price rises to the point where it really starts to hurt, and renewables don’t deliver on their promise.
And even ignoring the political hurdles, nuclear power is not financially viable without a carbon price. Many around here would argue that it’s not financially viable even with a carbon price; regardless, if CO2 emissions were not an issue we wouldn’t even be having the discussion. Ignoring the horrible externalities, digging up coal and shoveling it straight into the power plant next door is pretty much the cheapest source of power possible.
Excellent! Questions answered! Now the thread is free of distractions and we can talk about strategic implications. I was blindsided by the announcement. Which countries do we export uranium to now? (I’m assuming the US at least.)
The USA, western Europe, Japan, Korea, China, mostly. Here are the stats.
China was the most recent approved destination.
I don’t think there’s any point in talking about nuclear disarmament without a real critical look at the NPT.
I would like someone critical of the decision to sell Uranium to India on nuclear weapons groups to explain to me why India has less right to nuclear weapons than China or the USA.
Are we going to fall into line over the prospective defence of Taiwan now? Because I believe thats about the only one left.
If I was the US, I’d be pushing GIllard on that front now – since she rolls over on everything else.
We should be positioning Australia as the Saudia Arabia of Uranium.
There should be a Nuclear power station in each mainland state near the capital cities.
Our Universities should be world leaders in applied and theoretical nuclear physics. We should also build the world’s biggest particle accelerator/collider with a nuclear power station to run it to attract the best brains – somewhere near Canberra and ANU.
We should have mine site to disposal including enrichment and reprocessing facilities.
We should have our own nuclear weapons program.
If you beleive in Australia being a smart country, an ethically responsible country and are committed to reducing CO2 emmissions then this all makes common sense.
Credit where credit is due – the Greens, NIMBYs and BANANAs have waged a very succesful fear campaign against nuclear power. It needs to be seriously countered by rational people.
And to keep Fran happy we should also be researching Thorium reactors.
@7 – I just can’t see China thinking it is worth the pain invading Taiwan anymore.
The unwisdom of this as containment strategy was demonstrated last year when China decided it would sell reactors to Pakistan, and claimed this arrangement predated the establishment of the NSG.
Why does India want to buy our Uranium? They have boggins of the filthy stuff. They are also apparently the leaders in research into Thorium reactors which could make their own Uranium resource redundant.
http://earthbytes.blogspot.com/2007/09/uranium-in-india.html
The reference above cites 54,000 tonnes of U plus 23,500 tonnes. Wiki cites a new mine with 170,000 tonnes.
There’s something else going on here and it’s not about bombs or energy production. Follow the money.
This plus an expanded Olympic dam equals smooth passage of an MRRT?
Salient Green @ 11 – the quality of the ore in India is not very good so it costs them more to extract their uranium compared to just buying it from other sources. Which is really just another reason to allow the export – for making weapons where cost is less relevant they have their own sources.
I think if we sell to countries that have or make nuclear weapons then there is no substantive reason to treat India, democracy with rule of law, worse than China. I also think we have our own separate reasons from the US for building a good relationship with India.
I’d like to believe in the NPT however vertical proliferation is as important as horizontal, India has stable numbers of warheads as I understand it so promotes neither vertical or horizontal proliferation at present, the US is considering expanding its targeting and has done nothing to obey Article 6, and it is about time the leading nuclear nations put up on Article 6 and started reducing numbers. I remain at a loss to see why anything more than a few hundred warheads, well maintained, is needed for the US to have a complete deterrent.
Eventually I’d like to see them abolished. I’d like to see us stop selling to countries that are vertically proliferating now. As for India, in the present circumstances, I think she is making the right call.
No uranium sales to anyone…
I cant understand Julia Gillard but I now like her even a little bit less if thats possible. Just another right wing labor wannabe.
Today India..tomorrow Iran.. the day after North Korea.
Damn well leave it in the ground.
Forget about the historical inconsistency of Labor Cabinets referring matters to federal/national conference, PM kept Rudd in the dark about the original decision. There’s the root cause for the showing of the finger to multilateralism.
I think Gillard and Martin Ferguson and Simon Crean have decided to shed some of that new found respectability the government got from the carbon tax. This is industry-capture totally screwing over dispassionate policy.
Not a very good intro to a piece about our relationship with India, Robert—though perhaps you see every breach of international-good-governance as being some kind of Americanism. Other than non-mineral-industry free trade, that is. I gather you like that more than you dislike US hegemony.
That’s some numbers counting game. Gillard gets the votes of Katter and/or the WA Country member to create an unnecessary (?) buffer for the mining tax, yet she risks provoking Wilkie to do god only knows what in the new year. I don’t like the idea of Nader On The Derwent coming to the conclusion this government is just another pack of war criminals like the last one—after all he’s the deciding vote in a hung parliament, not a blog commenter.
On the thread about gay marriage reform I opined that this was actually a quid pro quo for the platform amendment allowing a conscience vote on marriage rights, but that all depends on the priorities of the ALP Left. I can absolutely see there being more pro-marriage-equality voters in the division of Grayndler than pro-nuclear-proliferation-treaty ones.
Perhaps we could argue about whether it makes good sense to put some effort into our relationship with India. A symbolic gesture of no real practical significance might be a good start.
It would make sense of course, if Julia emphasized that decisions re who to import uranium too are not made in haste.
well i suppose india already has enough nukes to blow up 25% of the world, but to be a *real* superpower these days, you need enough to blow the whole world up 50x.
maybe the gov should approach the international community 1st and review the non-proliferation treaty. in this day and age of energy demands for emerging nations and climate change combat maybe selling uranium for energy production should be written into the treaty.
we should also push for a nuclear free southern hemisphere, but it’s probably too late. the doldrums are a good defence, but ocean currents would spread contagion anyway.
but yeah, getting to one of the thrusts of the original piece… the timing, along with other decisions clearly shows this is what america wants, so it WILL happen, labor conference be damned.
considering we only get 30% of the profits of sale of minerals, no wonder external pressure is on the pm.
jusme, India will always have enough uranium to produce nuclear weapons, whatever Australia does, on the reasonable assumption that they would prioritise weapons over power generation. So this decision has zero practical effect on nuclear weapon proliferation. Note that we sell uranium to China, France, the UK and the USA, all nuclear weapon countries.
Why do we single out India? Only because they haven’t signed the NNPT. This is the treaty that says that nuclear weapon states must work to disarm. And how much nuclear disarmament has there been? Zero.
The treaty of course also says that nukes mustn’t spread. And India has demonstrated zero willingness to spread nuclear weapons, they’re proving to be model world citizens in that regard.
India believes, and with some justification I think, that this ‘nuclear club’ approach is faintly colonialist, and they have precisely as much moral claim to nuclear weapons as anyone else, and when the club members start sincerely talking about disarmament, they can start talking legitimately.
I certainly think that India has a much better demonstrated need for nukes (against China) than the UK (against who?). The UK and France only keep nukes as a matter of national ego.
Wilful said:
I don’t agree that anyone has a demonstrated case for holding nuclear weapons. Nobody. Not_at_all. They should be decommissioned without delay.
That said, the nuclear powers keep them in part because that means they stay on the Security Council. The US and Russia and China would remain there anyway now, but in the case of the UK and France, this is about hanging onto relevance in international affairs. Nobody in their right mind is going to use them, and nobody in their wrong mind ought to have them. (Perversely of course, their deterrent value is greatest when it’s the latter kind who hold them).
The essential point is, Fran, the NNPT is the wrong symbolic or tokenistic piece of paper to be waving when considering whether or not Australia should sell Uranium to India (for peaceful purposes only, just like all of our other sales).
jusme @18: “….. review the non-proliferation treaty. in this day and age of energy demands for emerging nations and climate change combat maybe selling uranium for energy production should be written into the treaty.”
This actually raises a very good point, though it goes past just selling uranium, and bears also on what is actually already in the treaty.
There is a lot of naïve misunderstanding of the NPT. It is not solely about nuclear weapons. It has been described in its original intent as a “a tripartite Grand Bargain”. The first part of the bargain called for the Non-Nuclear Weapon States to foreswear the right to acquire nuclear weapons. The second required the nuclear weapons states to pursue negotiations in good faith on cessation of the nuclear arms race and nuclear disarmament.
The third (article 4) was about the right of all states to peaceful use of nuclear power, and undertook that all states should co-operate with regard to the technology and materials necessary to allow states to develop capabilities for nuclear power.
The carrot of (they thought) assistance from the rich nuclear states to develop nuclear energy was what brought many non-nuclear states on board. It largely didn’t happen, as anti-nuclear lobbies in the West wound up their campaigns against nuclear energy as just as evil as nuclear weapons. One can argue that this was a classic shot in the foot, and major reason for the NPT and its safeguards systems losing authority.
Now with the imperative of CO2 reduction as an added incentive, it might indeed be time to look again at Article 4 and what might be done to re-energise it, with hopefully some spin-offs in re-energising the other articles too.
Wilful said:
Perhaps so, but then the better course would be to call for a review of the NNPT and a rewriting of the terms to reflect those that states can live with. Right now it’s open to states making it up as they go along and finding excuses to do as they please. Clearly the US opened the door when it breached by selling to India.
It appears that Fran, Wozza and myself are in broad general agreement. The NNPT is not serving its claimed purpose.
I just can’t see China thinking it is worth the pain invading Taiwan anymore.
If Taiwan ever declares independence, that theory will get a good testing.
We should have our own nuclear weapons program.
That would be an excellent way of getting China to target our cities with their nukes, seeing as we’re an ally of the US and US-China rivalry is going to be hottest show in town over the next few decades.
Not to mention the cost. The budget for a nuclear weapons programs is measured in units of shitloads.
Thanks, but no thanks.
The realpolitik of this decision is strategic and designed to protect American interests by allowing an arms race to develop such that India has the capacity for massive weaponhead overkill over Pakistan. This is because no-one, least of all Americans, has any real idea of what is currently going on or liable to happen in Pakistan.
This is a death knell for the NPT. The real significance of this step is to discard the NPT. It is no good claiming that the NPT was ineffective or already breached by weapons grade sales to India in the past. The loss of the diplomatic (ie, political) instrument of the NPT opens the door to real nasties because without an effective NPT no-one’s demand for the ‘right’ to equal armament is invalid.
I find the argument that we may as well go ahead and sell uranium to India on the basis that they already are ‘good nuclear citizens’ about the moral equivalent of saying that we may as well get involved in making a quid from child prostitution because if we don’t someone else will. And anyway, the kids are already rooted for life, so why not?
Thanks M’arn and the mining unions. No-one will be counting on anything other than self interest here. The good thing about race horses over humans is that they run fast in a predictably straight line when the winning post comes in sight. From behind, though, all you can see is a bunch of horses arses. Trouble with M’arn is that he looks like a horses arse head on so it is hard to see which way he is running.
I find the argument that we may as well go ahead and sell uranium to India on the basis that they already are ‘good nuclear citizens’ about the moral equivalent of saying that we may as well get involved in making a quid from child prostitution because if we don’t someone else will. And anyway, the kids are already rooted for life, so why not?
I find arguments that the USA, UK, France and China get to completely ignore the provisions of the NNPT but that India must abide by it or the world will end to be distinctly odd, not requiring a laboured and offensive analogy.
This is a death knell for the NPT. The real significance of this step is to discard the NPT. It is no good claiming that the NPT was ineffective or already breached by weapons grade sales to India in the past. The loss of the diplomatic (ie, political) instrument of the NPT opens the door to real nasties because without an effective NPT no-one’s demand for the ‘right’ to equal armament is invalid.
This happened a very long time ago, and Australia had no part in it.
A bit OT, but since we are talking about India, why is that there is so little regional variation among Indian restaurants? We used to have this problem with Chinese restaurants when everything was bog standard Cantonese but those days are long gone. Not so with the Indian restaurants, though. How come?
Is it just me, or does the idea of 2500 US Marines in a small town like Darwin sound like us getting royally rogered into a extremely bad idea for no siognficant strategic advantage?
Gillard wants to careful of Australian ideas of dignity and balance here. I think she’s going way too far on several fronts.
Quite OT, Sam.
But lots of regional variation in Footscray. probably other parts of Melbourne where there are substantial immigrant communities too.
I just had the worst bloody Rogan Josh I’ve ever had.
Wilful</em. said:
You left out the USSR –> Russia
I don’t accept your description. The “P” in the name of the treaty is for “proliferation”. That’s an asssertion of nuclear weapons monopoly by the states that got them prior to the treaty. That’s a perfectly defencible position, since the view was that persuading lots of states to agree to disarm once they got them would be much harder than if there were only 5. It never implied that the world would end if someone else acquired them.
Of course, that was never going to hold, but there you have it.
damn! ital fail. close at Wilful …
Here we go! Obama takes aim at the sole remaining quasi-independent foreign policy line we have: China.
Way to reassure them about the increased US presence.
Me, I say we oppose 2500 marines in Darwin. 250 will do fine, thanks.
http://www.theage.com.au/national/obama-takes-aim-at-china-in-new-asian-world-order-20111117-1nk6j.html
LeftyE @ 29 – 2500 marines permanently stationed in Darwin? I bet there are some very happy local businesses!
The NPT was predicated on the presumption that no nation outside the Big Five had the capacity to produce nukes without the assistance of one or more members of the Big Five.
This presumption has been proven to be absurd. The NPT describes a world that does not exist. Such a treaty cannot be expected to deal with realities on the ground.
As opposed as I am to most aspects of the nuclear industry, I cannot in good conscience support the ostracism of India on the basis that India has refused to subject itself to this diplomatic dodo.
I love it when Katz makes sense.
Yeah, till it turns into Okinawa, Chris. Seems like a great way to create regional tensions rather than deal with them.
I bet there are some very happy local businesses!
Such as this one.
http://www.darwinescorts.com.au/about.htm
I can actually understand India’s decision not to sign the NPT (especially back in 1970 when China had nukes and they didnt). But they could join now.
Either way, it doesnt mean we have to start selling uranium to them. Though I can agree with Katz – the wider problem as I see it is we are jumping onboard with a US bilateral initiative exclusively designed on Huntington style cultural grounds. The NPT might be a dog, but that doesnt mean something good is replacing it.
I might add, the Indian left – including its parliamentary wing – are quite opposed to this new US-Indian bilteralism.
.
Not to mention a wonderful way of encouraging our Indonesian neighbours to get nukes of their own. Personally, I’d feel much more secure knowing the Indonesian military had nukes its disposal. Wouldn’t you?
Yes, the NPT is dead in the water. Now we’ve all had a turn agreeing with Marn’s logic let’s consider the other implications, the ones that the NPT was designed to address. Yep, nuclear proliferation. The South Asian Terrorism Portal has a list of the number of terrorist and extermeist groups operating in India (see http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/countries/india/terroristoutfits/index.html).
Funny what happens when you find yourself caught up in ‘look, over there’ media reportage that just never addresses the real implications. Money, power, development with India. Bad guys of the West denying equal rights to the downtrodden masses, refusing to acknowledge the god given right of Indians to live like the middle and working classes of the industrialised world. That sort of thing is all the go. Wondering what the security implications of allowing significant quantities of weapons grade material loose in India get s dropped off the agenda of consideration.
The site (http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/countries/india/terroristoutfits/index.html) lists no fewer than 174 terrorist or extremist groups. That’s not counting the BJP Hindu supremacism, because they’re a legitimate party. And other’s of the same ilk. Then there are renegade elements in the armed services, the secuirty services and the police. Similar to Pakistan but not not so spooky. They’ll all be very interested in loose nukes, for sure.
But of course, India is just as stable as France, the USA, GB and Russia so it is entitled to its coming of age present of membership of the nuke club. And we’ll make a quid out of it too. Can’t beat that logic. You never can beat the logic of the war industry.
I agree with LE.
There are excellent reasons not to sell uranium to anyone. The NPT is not one of those excellent reasons.
If we sell it to China we have no good reason not to sell it to India. Moreover, we trade with Iran. Why sell them coal but not uranium?
Re: USA base in NT. Terrific idea. Boatloads of S-E Asian hookers arriving soon and not via Christmas Island or Nauru. Should be called the whorehouse solution. Finally, an economic future for all those young and illiterate Aborigines in the Territory. What about the Hazara’s? Would they want work too? I’m buying into lubricant today.
Lefty E @ 37 – I think thats being overly pessimistic. Sure there will be some problems, but its not as if we’re being occupied by US troops after being at war with them. Visits by US troops are already pretty common and apparently they are not actually establishing a base where they would have legal authority over the land.
Katz @ 42 – surely we don’t sell Iran coal for energy production? Why wouldn’t they just burn their oil?
Katz, there are, as cited @41, 174 reasons not to sell to India compared to … errrm…no terrorist groups in China.
What you mean is that there is no rationally consistent reason to sell to China but not to India beyond non-proliferation. That’s the problem with pulling on Marn’s gumboots – you start to walk just like him.
Coking coal.
Katz @ 47 – right, so there is a significant difference between selling uranium to India for energy product versus selling uranium to Iran for weapons production…
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/lindsay-tanner-tried-to-block-rise-of-conservative-careerist-julia-gillard/story-e6frg6nf-1225778205660
Chris @45
Just guessing, but perhaps because oil is worth a whole lot more than coal. Australia produces rock lobster, and yet we import dog food. Why aren’t we feeding our dogs lobster meat, eh? We must be as crazy as those Iranians!
In the 19th century, there were laws to limit the amount of crayfish that cornishmen could be paid in lieu of real cash.
Of course, it’s not as if not selling India Australian uranium makes it harder for them to produce nuclear weapons. As others have pointed out, they have an ample supply and could easily get more.
On the whole, it would be better if there was renewed urgency about decommissioning actual nuclear weapons, dismantling maintenance programs for nuclear weapons, agreeing on further bans on nuclear weapons tests and so forth and backing these provisions with sanctions for non-compliance. There’s an obvious transgressor here in the Middle East and it isn’t Iran.
Virtually all the posts in this thread either explicitly or implicitly link nuclear power generation and nuclear weapons.
Funny about that.
I thought there was no connection at all.
Must be the senility.
Huggy
There’s also the issue, of minor note, of nuclear power safety. However, as we all know, engineering safety standards in India are world leading so there’s no real problem. And management systems too. Besides, what could go wrong when design, construction and management is being supervised by a big corporation like, say, Union Carbide. Nothing at all could go wrong. Moreover, there is also the terrific way that India redistributes wealth along lines of class and ethnic equality. The very model of a democratic society.
Hal9000 @ 50 said:
Except they don’t actually have any coal fired power plants so that would make it a little difficult. And in addition to oil they also have a lot of natural gas.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Iran
I’d guess that Katz is right and they use the coal for smelters rather than energy production.
There isn’t any connection Huggy, except in your mind.
Note to all and in particular 34 and 35.
This is not a permanent basing proposal. It is a proposal to have US Marines training in the NT in the Dry Season – the other six months of the year they go back home to Hawaii. The proposed size starts at about Battalion (minus) and grows to what tehy call a Regimental Combat Team and we would call a Brigade.
This actually show the US have watched what we have done basing our one and only Armoured Brigade in the NT which then has to deploy back to the southern half of Australia if they want to train in the wet season.
I reckon that India wants a reliable supplier of Uranium to support the deployment of it’s indigenous pressurized heavy water reactors (PHWR) . Russia is supplying the fuel for the two VVERs it is building and I assume Areva will supply the fuel for the EPRs. Thorium is still a fair way off, as is deployment of the indigenous fast reactor though a demonstration plant is under construction.
The PWHRs reportedly have a cost of $1300/kW to $1700/kW. This is hard to beat – even for coal. Solar and wind are not even remotely competitive.
If it is not nuclear it will be more coal, which should be good enough reason to supply the uranium. Any incremental proliferation risk is minimal to non-existent.
Nuclear Power in India: http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf53.html
Thought experiment: if Gillard had just decided to sell uranium to Israel would people here be as sanguine about her ignoring that old irrelevant non-proliferation treaty?
I don’t think this is a trolling comment, not when you think about the relative possibilities of India nuking Pakistan versus Israel going for Iran, and about Israel and India both being functional democracies with problematic national security & human rights issues.
It seems to me that the only thing separating the two countries policy-wise is their respective relationships with the UN family—but discounting the actions of the security council, the ongoing UN-v-Israel tensions are merely pointless old multilateral guff, innit? It’s not realpolitik.
If you beleive in Australia being a smart country, an ethically responsible country and are committed to reducing CO2 emmissions then this all makes common sense.
Well the sense isn’t that common. In fact it’s contrary to conventional views and many here would hyper oppose those measures. What would the consequences be, I wonder, of Australia starting nuclear arms programme. And how do you make our universities the top physics academies? Order Australian women to give birth to Albert Einstein, Marie Curie and James Clerk Maxwell?
Or were you just trying to start a fight?
I’m not a Labor Party member, and it’s always puzzled me how certain issues must seemingly receive the imprimatur of the national conference, but not others. Presumably, if Julia Gillard feels comfortable to advocate for it in public, the fix is in – or, at least, the fix will now be arranged.
Of course she feels comfortable. It’s bipartisan. Why? Because it’s not up to us. Defense policy has never been up to us because we’ve never taken responsibility for our own defense. We follow our imperators.
Re: US based troops in NT – I’m sure that the Americans will just put their end in, so to speak, and will take it right out again if we say we don’t like it. Besides, the American troops are such gentlemen that the sort of problems that plagued the native populations around Okinawa and Subic Bay wouldn’t happen here. Terribly nice chaps, the Yanks, quite clean with good table manners, they say their prayers and write to mom every week. Might even teach those crude territorians a thing or two.
And if that well spoken dark chappy, the President, whatsizname, says its alright to sell yellowcake to well educated Indians then I’m sure it’ll all be fine.
I’m off to put the flying pigs to bed for the night. On the way I’ll tell all of the faeries in the garden the good news about our happy future in which not only lunch will be free but all meals will be free thanks to Smiling Mr Yellowcake. See, even the name Yellowcake conjours up a cheerful don’t-worry-be-happy mood.
“We should have our own nuclear weapons program.”
We’re off to see the Wizard.
Selling uranium to the Indians has all the equivalence of throwing a box of razor blades over the wall of a child minding centre. It wasn’t that long ago the world was holding its breath waiting for a possible exchange between India and Pakistan. Short memories.
Has anyone breached the agreement , doesn’t the waiver granted to India by the NSG in 2008 mean that no signatory that sells to India is breaching their agreement (merely undermining it)?
This wasn’t as some of the comments above seem to suggest a bilateral process outside of the International Non-Proliferation framework. The US spent a lot of “diplomatic” energy on getting the NSG to approve it first. France was actually the first to take advantage.
It’s worth bearing in mind that historically the US has been a supporter of Pakistan against India. It shows the stress on the relationship when the US is now virtually backing a measure that will India wants. I think the geopolitics is what matters, but of course there’s the happy byproduct of big cash payoffs to already wealthy mining companies. Yip – fucken – ee.
South Asian Terrorism Portal = SATP = Steve At The Pub. Whoaaaa dude.
Huggy, the relevant connection in this case is that uranium is the raw material from which the weapons are constructed.
The question is whether India’s domestic uranium supply is sufficiently restricted that imported uranium adds significantly to their ability to build an arsenal while simultaneously running a nuclear power program.
The short answer is no – while their domestic supplies aren’t as good as others, they are more than adequate to build an arsenal of basically any size required.
Perhaps the only nuclear power for which Australian uranium supplies were a necessary precondition of an arsenal was the United Kingdom.
That’s right PatrickB: SATP has been outed at last as a spook.
dear all
has anyone read “climate wars” by gwynne dyer?
http://www.amazon.com/Climate-Wars-Gwynne-Dyer/dp/1921372222
yours sincerely
alfred venison
alfred @ 69, yes.
Robert remarked:
And as they could, had they been determined to build nuclear weapons and yet denied access by 100% of external jurisdictions, have simply extracted uranium from coal or seawater (remember that this is not an exercise driven by commercial considerations) even here the claim would be untenable. Building nuclear power stations is not only not technically or economically helpful when seeking to acquire nuclear weapons, it’s a drain on your capacity to do so. Nuclear power stations, as everyone knows, are not cheap to build or operate and would be “wasting” feedstock that could be used for weapons.
As China slowly becomes more expensive, the cheap labour costs of India will become more attractive, and the focus there will increase. We will need to dig something out of the ground for them. Why not uranium? Profits before thinking!
dear Brian
that book, “climate wars”, scared the bejeezus out of me when i read it in ’09. so glad i saved it for the airplane & airports of the flight back & didn’t read it much during the holiday; took months to get out of the funk it left me in. even if only a part of his scenarios are plausible, i’m still very worried, and i certainly won’t be re-reading any of it soon in light of this week’s news.
yours sincerely
alfred venison
alfred, the thing about Gwynne Dyer is that he has a national security background, and was able to talk to all the people who are actually working in national security as well as using his credentials as a widely published columnist to gain access to the top climate scientists and find out what they really thought.
It comes down to when things are going to go seriously pear-shaped and whether international co-operation will survive when they do. He thinks the 2020s, I’d say the second half of this century at the latest
dear Brian
you’re right, dwyer’s credentials are stellar, both solidly academic & well grounded in real world/contemporary developments. his access to people of rank & influence is commensurate with his talent, too & is something all parties should be commended for. that’s why he’s so scary, eh.
and, as for the timetable, i’m not a betting/numbers man, so i can’t project a date like thing, but if i want to get a feel/vibe (post reading “climate wars”) i hold these thoughts in my head at the same time:- (1) this week’s news of uranium sales to india, (2) the news of the agreement to establish usa military facilities at darwin, (3) that its said the ipcc projections are conservative due to consensus & (4) recent memorable storms. the feel/vibe i get from this exercise is: “1912″, dreadful expectation, and a clock face obscured by storm clouds.
looks like we’ll have a ring side seat in australia now, though. but really, in my time-to-time lapses of joie de vivre & optimism, i envisage flotillas of refugees, in the fullness of time and with the accumulation of natural catastrophes & resource wars. oh dear, now i’ve done it again: the funk, igor, the funk; darn that dwyer!
yours sincerely
alfred venison