Treaty's `Fuel Cycle' Guarantee is Potential Road to Bomb
August 16, 2003
The Associated Press
Charles J. Hanley
WASHINGTON -- The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty has a ``giant loophole'' big enough to slip an atom bomb through, analysts say. Trying to close it would set off a giant political struggle.
The treaty bars 183 nations without nuclear weapons from building them, but allows them to pursue civilian programs, including uranium-enrichment plants to produce fuel. That production, if intensified, can also yield richer fuel for nuclear bombs.
The latest example is Iran, which acknowledged to the International Atomic Energy Agency in February that it was building a centrifuge plant to enrich uranium. The United States contends the plant will fuel a bomb program.
Arms control advocates are growing more alarmed about this ``fuel cycle'' opening.
``There is a giant loophole in the NPT that needs to be closed before other states try to use it,'' George Perkovich of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace told a congressional committee in June.
The world already has too many facilities to enrich uranium and to separate plutonium the other bomb fuel and ``no additional states need acquire such capabilities that are inherently proliferation sensitive,'' Perkovich testified.
The treaty is unlikely to be amended by its member states, however, since this political tradeoff between renouncing weapons and having open access to nuclear technology lies at the heart of the 1970 pact.
Any effort to alter the treaty ``will be detested among developing countries,'' said Patricia Lewis, director of the U.N. Institute for Disarmament Research.
Instead, some say, nuclear supplier nations could agree among themselves to keep the technology out of new hands.
Such exports, usually clandestine, have helped past bomb programs. China sold vital centrifuge magnets to Pakistan as it developed its bombs, for example, and West German engineering firms quietly helped Iraq in the 1980s with centrifuge designs and parts.
In the 1990s, Russia signed an unannounced agreement with Iran for a centrifuge plant, but then backed out of the deal under U.S. pressure. It isn't known what foreign help Iran may have gotten on its new plant.
Stopping the trade ``is something that has to be taken very seriously,'' said arms control scholar Lawrence Scheinman in Washington.
He said suppliers could decide to interpret ``access to technology'' to mean access outside the developing country that is, to fuel production facilities elsewhere. Russia, long keen to sell its nuclear technology, might be convinced of such a plan if guaranteed a big chunk of the uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing business, he said.
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