Lesson Five: Beware of “Peaceful Use”
The Cold War bequeathed the world a frightening detritus: thousands of nuclear weapons and tons of fissile material suitable for making bombs—mainly in the United States and in Russia. Because of Moscow’s fiscal and administrative turbulence, control of Russia’s inherited detritus is of special concern. To safeguard it, the United States and European nations have provided assistance for a cooperative program with Russia, a farsighted effort conceived and initiated in 1991 by Senators Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar.17
But leftover Cold War weapons are not the only curse that technologies of mass destruction have placed on mankind. The know-how and wherewithal to make atomic bombs is spreading to more and more countries, including some of the worst dictatorships—and is likely to spread beyond the control of national governments. Endlessly aggravating this process is the “curse of dual use”: the fact that many of the most destructive technologies also have innocent, peaceful purposes, which provide the cover and excuse for dispersing them hither and yon.
As if hexed by a mischievous fate, arms control initiatives meant to limit the proliferation of weapons technology have themselves turned into agents accelerating proliferation. There is an echo of Greek tragedy in this phenomenon. In Oedipus Rex, Sophocles’ finest Greek drama, the parents of Oedipus sought to escape the horrible prophesied fate by contriving a frantic scheme to defeat the prophecy. Yet precisely that scheme became the means—almost the only possible means—to make the prophecy come true. Since the 1950s, the Oedipus tragedy has played out before the world’s uncomprehending gaze: multilateral agreements meant to control dual-use nuclear technologies have worked instead to further weapons proliferation.
The tragic course of events can be traced back to the Atoms for Peace program launched by President Eisenhower in 1953. It was meant to enlist international support for curbing the spread of the atom bomb by offering peaceful benefits of atomic energy to the world at large. Yet countries that were offered an agreement to receive technological assistance exclusively for peaceful uses managed to create loopholes enabling them to divert the assistance to their nuclear weapons program. As in the Oedipus tragedy, capricious developments made the prophesized fate come true. Henry Sokolski’s book, Best of Intentions, offers striking evidence of the errors that drove the United States to spread nuclear assistance so generously without insisting on tight controls. The generally hard-nosed John Foster Dulles and Lewis Strauss (Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission) ordered the U.S. negotiators to accept with minimal restrictions the demands of India and other countries that wished to receive nuclear technology. By yielding to nations that wanted the agreement made easier to cheat—India comes to mind—the United States demonstrated lack of conviction in opposing nuclear proliferation. The Cold War prism through which U.S. officials viewed the perils of proliferation aggravated this weak negotiating strategy. Senior officials believed in the 1960s that America’s interests would only be threatened if a nation could amass a vast stockpile of weapons, enough to destroy the United States.18 We have since learned otherwise. This history of how competent officials can become trapped in a mistaken, yet well-intentioned policy ought to be compulsory reading for all who believe international agreements are the way to control the dark side of technological progress.
No other U.S. policy, no multilateral policy, no United Nations activity has done more harm than the Atoms for Peace program in hastening and expanding the spread of nuclear know-how for building bombs. And once the United States had legitimized the worldwide transfer of nuclear reactors, England, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union began to compete with the American exports. Reactors, either for “research” or for electric power, were thrust upon less-developed countries all over the globe, and these gifts enabled the recipients to acquire nuclear materials and know-how. The recipients included Iraq, North Korea, Iran, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, the Congo, and even Laos. In recent years, we have witnessed a “multiplier effect” of this largesse. China has helped Pakistan to build nuclear bombs, and the developer of Pakistan’s bomb, Abdul Qadeer Khan, has helped North Korea, Libya, Iran, and possibly others with their nuclear weapons program. It is far too late now to close these loopholes of the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. The treaty mandates a review conference every five years, but despite the growing concern about nuclear proliferation, the month-long review held in May 2005 ended in failure.
This is not the end of the Oedipus tragedy. Throughout the world, plutonium accumulating as waste from nuclear power reactors, or excess left from weapons programs, has become a troublesome product whose cost of disposition, as Richard Garwin puts it well, “is greater than the value to anyone who might buy it—except to those who want to make nuclear weapons.”19 The authorities responsible for nuclear energy in Russia, the United States, and other nations have been trying to find a way out of this disastrous situation. They are promoting projects that would let the countries with accumulated plutonium “waste” make the plutonium safer and at the same time squeeze economic value out of it.
The leading proposal now is to recycle the plutonium and mix it with uranium, a mixture called MOX that can be used to fuel power reactors. Yet while the MOX is being shipped to the reactors its plutonium could still be extracted. In fact, that extraction would be easier than obtaining plutonium by reprocessing spent reactor fuel. North Korea, let us note, asserts that it has mastered some time ago the more difficult reprocessing of spent reactor fuel to build bombs. A safer
