Australia should insist on weapons proliferation safeguards in any nuclear deal with India

Parliamentarians should consider that what Australia requires in its arrangement with India may have signal impact this May when the NPT’s 189 parties review the treaty. They might also consider that the international reputation of Australia’s uranium industry has increasingly depended upon transparent implementation of national policies, including on nonproliferation

Tracking India’s Imported Uranium Uranium suppliers should insist that India adhere to international standards for information sharing. The Diplomat By Mark Hibbs February 06, 2015 India is busily negotiating bilateral agreements with its nuclear trading partners to assure them that the uranium they supply to India will not end up in Indian nuclear weapons. This is a standard practice for states involved in nuclear cooperation, yet India has set out to weaken the information sharing provisions in its agreements with Canada, the United States, and soon Australia. All three supplier states support India’s bid for membership in the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), but India’s behavior here hardly supports New Delhi’s contention that it is like-minded………

In the nonproliferation interest, uranium exporters’ nuclear cooperation agreements are designed to ensure that exported uranium is not enriched to weapons-grade, is not re-transferred to third parties, and is not reprocessed to separate plutonium without consent. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards, which may apply to foreign-sourced uranium in India’s civil nuclear program, do not consider the origin of the uranium subject to safeguards. That’s important because some producers whose uranium market shares are on the rise, such as Kazakhstan and some African states, do not scrupulously track the uranium they export. Their uranium safeguards policies put commercial pressure on other supplier states to follow suit in India……….

Next week Australian lawmakers will debate Canberra’s ongoing uranium safeguards discussions with India. They should take note that, unless perhaps all Australian uranium destined for India were to be processed and fabricated into fuel before being exported to India, the U.S. approach would not cover all Australian uranium destined for India. Under its agreement with India, Australia may supply India with bulk uranium as well as fabricated nuclear fuel.

Indian cooperation with Australia therefore seems essential to meet the tracking requirements of Australian safeguards policy and the best solution would be for India to provide the information which Australia needs. Again, it is worth reiterating that what is being requested of India is standard practice; New Delhi is not being asked to uphold a higher standard.

India and uranium suppliers must know that the separation of military and peaceful-use nuclear activities is a cornerstone of the world’s nuclear governance system. States that dismiss as inconvenient controls designed to verify that separation signal instead that it matters little if their commerce might contribute to production of nuclear weapons……..

Mark Hibbs is a research scholar in the Nuclear Policy Programme at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a think tank in Washington, D.C. http://thediplomat.com/2015/02/tracking-indias-imported-uranium/