Antinuclear

Australia’s role in ‘peaceful’ nuclear energy diverted to nuclear weapons

The connections between nuclear power and weapons are well documented and even have a precedent in Australia.

North Korea Steps Up Aggression, Sydney Morning Herald James Norman/Jim Green

December 1, 2010, “………What proponents of nuclear power often fail to understand is the frequent connection between nuclear power programs and weapons programs. North Korea provides one of the most pressing examples of this.

North Korea’s nuclear weapons tests in 2006 and 2009 used plutonium produced in an “experimental power reactor”. Needless to say, many regard it as a military reactor but the ambiguity about the purpose of the reactor provided the regime with important time and political wriggle-room to advance its weapons program.

As outlined in its 2001-02 report (page 15), the Australian Safeguards and Non-proliferation Office used AusAid funding to provide safeguards training to North Korean nuclear officials. In hindsight, if the North Korean regime had any interest in the international safeguards inspection system, it could only have been to learn how best to circumvent them.

The connections between nuclear power and weapons are well documented and even have a precedent in Australia. Prime minister John Gorton had military ambitions for the power reactor he pushed to have constructed in the late 1960s at Jarvis Bay on the NSW south coast. He admitted 20 years later and reported by The Sydney Morning Herald in 1999: “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.”

That particular reactor plan was cancelled by the Whitlam government, which went on to support the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, but in other countries weapons have been developed under the cover of nuclear power programs and now we are starting to see the pernicious harvest of such arrangements all over the world, such as in North Korea, Iran and India. These concerns could spread in North-East Asia and into the Middle East in the future……

The US National Intelligence Council argued in a 2008 report that: “The spread of nuclear technologies and expertise is generating concerns about the potential emergence of new nuclear weapon states and the acquisition of nuclear materials by terrorist groups.” The Council also warned of the possibility of a nuclear arms race in the Middle East and noted that a number of states in the region “are already thinking about developing or acquiring nuclear technology useful for development of nuclear weaponry”.

The harsh reality for Australia is that while our nation continues to export uranium to an ever-expanding global customer base, which now includes Russia under a deal ratified by Julia Gillard at the sidelines of the recent G20 Summit in South Korea, we are effectively adding to a sense of growing nuclear insecurity globally…….

The Gillard government could have followed the advice of Parliament’s treaties committee and insisted on safeguards inspections in Russia before signing off on a uranium supply agreement. But it didn’t.

Instead, we are constantly told that Australia’s “strict” safeguards conditions “ensure” that our uranium will remain in peaceful use.

While the world allows nuclear weapons (and by association nuclear power) to be developed and normalised, ……

North Korea Steps Up Aggression

December 3, 2010 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | AUSTRALIA - NATIONAL, history