Posted on 01/26/2006 6:29:50 AM PST by b2stealth
ST. PETERSBURG, January 25 (RIA Novosti) - Global infrastructure should be established to give all interested countries access to nuclear energy with reliable guarantees that the nuclear non-proliferation regime will be observed, President Vladimir Putin said Wednesday. Putin said Russia was ready to build an international center "to offer nuclear fuel cycle services, including [uranium] enrichment under the control of the IAEA".
The Russian leader said the center under the control of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN's nuclear watchdog, would be open to every nation.
(Excerpt) Read more at en.rian.ru ...
He's looking for $$$
I don't like his idea of giving control to the IAEA. But it is an interesting idea. What if contries that already have nuclear technology, like Russia - rather than sell it to countries like Iran - just sell electricity rather than technology? Putin may be on to something if I am understanding this right...
LOL... yeah anyway "UN Control" could be in the dictionary for the DEFINITIVE example of an oxymoron.
Allow me to translate: "Wow, we are making a buttload selling and building and teaching Iran... we should make exporting Nuke tech our main industry!"
>It is a very dangerous point of view. Actually, is the >KGB new strategy to topple US power. Give
Exactly..
Because you would have to have a pretty long extension cord.
Power generation is and should be a local issue.
People tell me I'm nuts when I say that Russia and others are just pawns of the NWO.
This sounds much like the "Atoms for Peace" plan that Eisenhower pushed 50 years ago.
The basic concept is that the production and reprocessing of fuel for fission power generation would be centralized in facilities subject to international inspection - for example, Iran could build rectors, but not the facilities to enrich or reprocess uranium.
In theory at least this is a good idea; the Hubbard’s peak of uranium production is not that far out which means that if fission is going to remain a major source of power generation we will need to cut over to breeder reactors, but this is a technology that has a lot of potential for weapons production, so you don’t want large numbers of entities conducting the entire process.
One problem is that in order to create an environment in which this arrangement is attractive to countries which can undertake the entire process themselves (such as Iran) you have to provide a reliable fuel cycle - for example they don’t want to find themselves in the current European situation in which a energy producer such as Russia starts to monkey around with your energy supply to advance its self-perceived national interests, and/or someone else monkeys around with it to pressure the host country.
So for something like this to work the production and transportation infrastructure has to be underwritten by strong international guarantees that such services will be available irrespective of political conditions in facility host countries, which is very difficult to do, and impossible to do on a unilateral basis. A good example of this problem is the current US attempt to pressure India into supporting Iran for referral to the UN by threatening to cut off technology sharing agreements we previously made to encourage India to limit it’s military nuclear program – India can go elsewhere for the technology and just ends up perceiving the US as an unreliable supplier, so we just end up worse off at before on the both the diplomatic and non–proliferation fronts.
The alternative, however, is a world of nuclear anarchy – IMO there is just no way that the handful of countries now providing these technologies will be able to successfully exclude others from the club otherwise.
Conservatives mostly don’t want to think about this – we prefer to continue believing that we are in a unipolar world in which we can somehow dictate terms of such arrangements.
But if in fact our leverage is limited, we are going to have to start thinking about which of our objectives (promiscuous oil use or reducing Saudi Arabian support of terrorism, regime change in Iran vs. a internationalized nuclear fuel cycle and so on) are most important.
There is no guarantee, of course, that any particular policy we choose to follow would work in an Iran or a Saudi Arabia.
But given that we are likely to be facing very antagonistic relationships with many (perhaps the majority) of countries in the “Islamic World” for generations, and that many of there are going to be popularly elected governments or at least governments with sufficient popular support that we can’t “destabilize” then and replace with systems we like better, in addition to the option of unilateral military action (which in many cases – for example a fundamentalist takeover in Pakistan – is impractical in any case) we need to start thinking about how to build international institutions to influence and contain their worst excesses and greatest threats when unilateral action is difficult and/or counterproductive.
"Conservatives mostly don’t want to think about this – we prefer to continue believing that we are in a unipolar world in which we can somehow dictate terms of such arrangements."
This is becuase this worked so well with our agreements with North Korea...
Yeah right.. let's give nukes to everybody..
Given that the number of countires countires with atomic weapons is steadly incrasing, the objctive is to allow "everybody" power generating capicity while withholding "weapons making" ability from the same countries. (Any country with a reactor has the capacity to produce a "dirty bomb" - but then so does anyone with modern medical technology).
IMO, what such regimes need to brought to understand is that in the real world such weapons are very limited assets and substantial liabilities – that first use of such weapons either directly or by proxies would mean the end of an Iran or North Korea (around a half dozen air-bursts would essentially eliminate North Korean society above the rural level) and that no exceptions would be made for “accidental” or “unintended” transfer of there weapons to anyone outside any producing country.
Those contrilling such weapons must understand that they have unlimited liability for their misuse, and that this being the case threats and blackmail are an extremely risky step with a enormous potential accidental downside – behavior only to be engaged in by fools - and on this issue I’m about as “hawkish” as one can be; “Assured Destruction” must be creditably assured.
OTOH, it’s not hard to understand why the leadership of countries branded as an “Axis of Evil” and threatened with externally enforced “regime change” are going to seek as much deterrence as they can obtain at nearly any cost.
To make this kind of threat absent a practical way to follow through on it is to pretty much guarantee that they will make a priority project of obtaining and expanding access to WMD, and to make it to a country with a history of deeply irrational behavior such as North Korea’s only compounds the danger, we have no more deterrent ability than before but they have every incentive to increase their own abilities, and meanwhile we are depending on paranoids to accurately assess our own intentions.
So what might change the balance in our favor?
IMO, the first thing we ought to do is realize we have a fundamental choice: we can have the luxury of calling names and making threats on which (for good reasons) we are unlikely or unable to follow through, or we can undertake a policy of “containment” toward unpleasant regimes in the hope that they can be bribed into pursuing their self-interests. (This is where we were headed in the attempt to set up a reactor deal with NK, an arrangement which both sides apparently reneged for various reasons, and which both would likely be wise to revisit if there was a face saving way to do it).
This does not mean that we have to refrain from “provocative behavior” when it makes strategic or tactical sense to help maintain deterrence (for example, our current troop redeployments back from the N. Korean border and out of range of their massed artillery) or even that we refrain for provocative speech, as long as we are reasonably certain that our actual intentions can be discerned. But it does mean that we also may end up not only ending our own attempts to destabilize such governments, but even that we may end up guaranteeing them against outside interference by others as long as (for example, the case of NK) thay freeze existing weapons programs and enter into external fuel cycle agreements, perhaps with the Chinese.
I’d be the first to admit that this is an imperfect strategy, but I’m pretty much at a loss for a better one.
And more to the point, I don’t see any evidence that the diplomats and military tacticians have come up with a better one.
Nuclear technology for all? OK, let's start with Chechnya.
Nuclear technology for all? OK, let's start with Chechnya.
Good one :)
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