Antinuclear

Jim Green refutes Ziggy Spinowsky on nuclear weapons proliferation

“For eight years in the White House, every weapons-proliferation problem we dealt with was connected to a civilian reactor program. And if we ever got to the point where we wanted to use nuclear reactors to back out a lot of coal … we’d have to put them in so many places we’d run that proliferation risk right off the reasonability scale.”  – former US Vice President Al Gore……It is disingenuous for O’Neil, Switkowski and other apologists for the nuclear industry to deny the links between nuclear power and proliferation.

The myth of the peaceful atom, The Punch, by Jim Green, 6 Oct 2010, The connection between power and proliferation is the inconvenient truth of the nuclear industry. Articles in The Australian in recent weeks by Ziggy Switkowski and academic Andrew O’Neil trivialise the links between nuclear power and nuclear weapons…..O’Neil seems blissfully unaware that uranium enrichment provides a pathway to nuclear weapons without the need for a reactor of any description….But North Korea provides one of the clearest illustrations of the links between nuclear power and weapons proliferation, not least because the plutonium used in its weapons tests was produced in an ‘Experimental Power Reactor’. The ambiguity surrounding North Korea’s nuclear program provided the regime with the time and political wriggle-room that allowed it to produce weapons.
O’Neil claims that all fissile (nuclear explosive) materials are the product of special-purpose military reactors. But power reactors or research reactors can easily be operated on a short irradiation cycle to produce weapon grade plutonium. India’s first nuclear weapon test used plutonium produced in the CIRUS research reactor, the acronym identifying the suppliers of the reactor, much to their embarrassment − Canada India Reactor United States. It has long been suspected that India also uses power reactors to produce plutonium for weapons and this is no longer in doubt with India’s recent refusal to allow safeguards inspections to apply to eight of its power reactors……..

The government of Prime Minister John Gorton pursued plans to build a power reactor at Jervis Bay in New South Wales in the late 1960s. There is a wealth of evidence revealing that the project was motivated by a desire to bring Australia closer to a weapons capability. Gorton later acknowledged: “We were interested in this thing because it could provide electricity to everybody and it could, if you decided later on, it could make an atomic bomb.”

The above-mentioned countries are just the tip of the iceberg − 21 countries have used their ‘peaceful’ nuclear programs to advance weapons ambitions. Of the 10 countries to have produced nuclear weapons, six did so with important technical support and/or political cover from their ‘peaceful’ nuclear programs − Israel, India, Pakistan, South Africa, North Korea, and France.

Former US Vice President Al Gore has summed up the dilemma: “For eight years in the White House, every weapons-proliferation problem we dealt with was connected to a civilian reactor program. And if we ever got to the point where we wanted to use nuclear reactors to back out a lot of coal … we’d have to put them in so many places we’d run that proliferation risk right off the reasonability scale.”…………

It is disingenuous for O’Neil, Switkowski and other apologists for the nuclear industry to deny the links between nuclear power and proliferation. They ought to acknowledge the problems and do what they can to fix them − including lobbying for a credible safeguards regime.

– Jim Green is the coordinator of the ‘Choose Nuclear Free’ collaboration between the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, the Medical Association for Prevention of War and Friends of the Earth, Australia. http://www.choosenuclearfree.net His PhD thesis, in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Wollongong University, dealt with the history of the Lucas Heights nuclear plant and the debates over the replacement of its research reactor.

The myth of the peaceful atom | Article | The Punch

October 6, 2010 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | people, weapons and war | antinuclear, Australia, nuclear, nuclear weapons