A joint U.S.-Russian operation yesterday recovered about 30 pounds of weapon-grade uranium from a Soviet-era research reactor facility in Romania, according to the Washington Post (see GSN, Jan. 3).
During the operation, eight canisters containing 80-percent enriched uranium were removed from storage at the Pitesti Institute for Nuclear Research, west of Bucharest, according to the Post. The Romanian uranium was chosen for removal because of the significant amount present and because it could have been easily stolen by terrorists, U.S. officials said.
“You could throw it in the back of a truck and drive away with it,” said Paul Longsworth, U.S. Energy Department deputy administrator for defense nuclear nonproliferation. Because the uranium was “fresh fuel” that had not been irradiated, it could have been transported with relatively low risk, he said.
The uranium was transported to the Novosibirsk Chemical Concentrates Plant in Russia, where it will be blended down to a lower enrichment level for use as nuclear power plant fuel, according to the Post. The Energy Department provided $400,000 for the operation. The uranium retrieval operation was planned over the last several months with Russia, Romania and the International Atomic Energy Agency, Longsworth said. To obtain Romanian cooperation, the United States agreed to convert the research reactor at the Pitesti Institute to use nonweapon-grade uranium, the Post reported.
“It’s win-win,” said a senior U.S. energy official. “The Russians wanted the (highly enriched) uranium, the Romanians wanted a new (low-enriched uranium) core for their reactor and to be seen as helpful in the nonproliferation world, and we’ve wanted to get this done for a long time and remove this threat,” the official said (Susan Glasser, Washington Post, Sept. 22).
By Joe Fiorill
Global Security Newswire
WASHINGTON — As a key U.S.-Russian measure to reduce the threat of nuclear proliferation expires today, observers are concerned the thorny legal questions that sank the agreement could have broader repercussions, ultimately increasing the risk that Russian nuclear technology, materials or know-how could fall into the wrong hands.
Washington is refusing to renew the Nuclear Cities Initiative agreement, which expires today, because of concerns that liability language in the agreement is inadequate to protect U.S. officials or workers in case of injuries or damages arising from activities carried out under the initiative. The move follows the related expiration in July of the Plutonium Science and Technology agreement, another U.S.-Russian threat reduction measure (see GSN, July 25).
NCI is a vehicle for the United States to help Russia decrease activity at nuclear weapon sites, converting some of them to other uses. The U.S. Energy Department has described the program on its Web site as “the only U.S. government program whose primary aim is to help downsize the Russian nuclear weapons complex.”
Sixty-nine NCI projects will continue until completion, despite the end of the pact itself, under an agreement signed Friday in Moscow by U.S. and Russian energy officials (see GSN, Sept. 19). No new projects envisioned by the initiative will begin, though, and U.S. officials expressed concern that the liability dispute could drag on, ultimately affecting Washington’s ability to reduce the Russian proliferation threat.
“It’s significant,” a U.S. official said of the liability dispute, “but you won’t see the effects in NCI. … If we don’t resolve the liability, you will begin to see the impacts at some time.”
The NCI agreement and the Plutonium Science and Technology agreement, both reached in 1998, stipulate broad liability exemption for Moscow, including in cases of “premeditated” actions causing damage or injury. The United States is seeking to have a tougher approach — such as the one taken in the 1992 Cooperative Threat Reduction “umbrella agreement,” which does not protect Russia against liability for premeditated acts — accepted as a standard for threat reduction texts.
The dispute is relevant not only to bilateral measures such as NCI but also to the Group of Eight’s Global Partnership for nonproliferation, an ambitious multilateral counterproliferation program launched in June of last year at a G-8 summit in Canada (see GSN, June 6).
U.S. officials have said G-8 countries generally favored umbrella agreement-style liability protections when they launched the Global Partnership last year. Deeming its position to be bolstered by the G-8 agreement, Washington has been pushing for ratification this year by the Russian Duma of the CTR umbrella agreement, an event that could presage the acceptance of U.S.-sought protections as a template for liability language in threat reduction texts.
A U.S. official said today that President George W. Bush’s administration expects the Duma eventually to ratify the umbrella agreement and that the NCI agreement is no longer a priority for the United States. According to another U.S. official, NCI’s demise is of relatively little significance because of Friday’s extension of ongoing projects under the initiative and the existence of various other mechanisms for advancing the same nonproliferation goals.
Democratic members of Congress and nongovernmental organizations have nevertheless opposed terminating both 1998 agreements. In a statement issued in July as it became clear that the agreements would expire, Russian American Nuclear Security Advisory Council Executive Director Kenneth Luongo said that “allowing these agreements to expire is wrong and unnecessary at this time” and “sends a terrible signal about the importance of securing the largest stockpile of weapons of mass destruction on Earth as rapidly as possible.”
At a PIR Center-Carnegie Endowment for International Peace nonproliferation conference over the weekend in Moscow, U.S. and Russian participants disagreed over how best to address the liability impasse.
Russian Ambassador-at-large Anatoly Antonov said the United States has been unwilling to compromise, seeking simply to impose U.S.-style legal standards on the international stage. Citing the possibility of an al-Qaeda strike on a Russian nuclear facility, Antonov criticized the United States for seeking to make Russia liable for the results of premeditated acts.
“Why should Russia be held liable for something somebody else did intentionally?” Antonov asked.
Carnegie Endowment Senior Associate Rose Gottemoeller, a former nonproliferation official in the U.S. Energy Department, said there is “good reason to be looking at some new and innovative approaches to tackling the liability problem.”
Gottemoeller added, though, that the Duma should “release the steam” that has built up over the dispute by ratifying both the CTR umbrella agreement and the Multilateral Nuclear Environmental Program for Russia, signed in May of this year by Russia, European Union countries and the United States (see GSN, May 22). A U.S. official today said the Duma has made MNEPR its priority and is unlikely to ratify the CTR umbrella agreement soon.
Center for Nonproliferation Studies Washington Director Leonard Spector, a former assistant deputy administrator in the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration, called for an international pooling of resources to pay any liability claims under the threat reduction agreements.
Spector, who along with the Fridtjof Nansen Institute’s Douglas Brubaker has published an article in the Monterey Institute’s Nonproliferation Review supporting reform of U.S.-Russian liability arrangements, said asking Russia to accept liability is illogical, since the existence of the threat reduction agreements presupposes financial need on Moscow’s part.
Both Antonov and Natalya Kalinina, an assistant to Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, said that, because of stumbling blocks such as the liability dispute, the West is not making good on its Global Partnership promise of increased nonproliferation aid to Russia. “Realistically, funding has not begun for many of the projects,” Kalinina said.
France, Germany and the United Kingdom last month offered Iran greater civilian nuclear technology cooperation if Tehran were to accept more intrusive international monitoring of its nuclear activities (see GSN, Sept. 19).
The offer came in direct contrast to Washington’s hard-line position on Iranian nuclear development, Reuters reported Saturday. The foreign ministers from the three European powers sent a letter to Tehran suggesting that technology cooperation was possible, but not offering direct nuclear assistance.
“Washington did not consider it very helpful at all,” said a diplomat familiar with the offer. “They were worried it ran the risk of splitting Europe and America on this issue, and they talked to their friends and colleagues in Europe about that and attempted to dissuade them from sending the letter,” the diplomat added.
A British official said, however, that the letter had been sent with U.S. knowledge and that if Iran fully complies with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, “that would bring certain rights with it” (Taylor/Charbonneau, Reuters/Washington Post, Sept. 20).
French President Jacques Chirac supported the letter in a recent interview.
“[German Chancellor] Gerhard Schroeder, [British Prime Minister] Tony Blair and myself sent a joint message to the Iranians, telling them, ‘We are not trying to bully you, but we cannot accept that you tell us that everything’s perfectly all right while we are not sure that there isn’t a nuclear weapons manufacturing process behind it all,’” Chirac said. “We agree on the fact that there is no reason to prevent a country from producing nuclear energy for civilian use, naturally if all the safeguards are there, particularly if all the IAEA inspections are completely unrestricted,” he added (New York Times, Sept. 22).
The International Atomic Energy Agency, however, said that Iran should not be offered a special deal to adopt the Additional Protocol to its IAEA safeguards agreement.
“It’s a one-size-fits-all thing. The protocol is working in 37 countries right now, and nobody’s complaining of our abusing the authority in it,” said IAEA spokesman Mark Gwozdecky. “It works well. Remember, Iran was one of the countries in our membership that helped to negotiate this additional protocol, push it through and umpteen times encourage everybody in the world to sign it. Iran is part of the process that brought us the protocol,” he said (Voice of America, Sept. 20).
An top Iranian cleric, however, suggested Friday that Iran should quit the nuclear treaty. Ahmad Jannati, the leader of the powerful Guardian Council, called the demands for intrusive inspections “extra humiliating.”
“What is the problem with withdrawing from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty?” asked Jannati. “North Korea withdrew from the treaty. Many other countries have not even signed it,” he added.
Iranian nuclear chief Gholamreza Aghazadeh said last week that Iran is committed to complying with the treaty (Nazila Fathi, New York Times, Sept. 20).
Russian President Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, questioned Iran’s hesitance in signing the Additional Protocol.
“If Iran is not striving to develop nuclear weapons, it has nothing to hide. I see no grounds for refusing to sign these additional protocols,” Putin said Saturday (Saradzhyan/McGregor, Moscow Times, Sept. 22).
In a speech before the U.N. General Assembly tomorrow, U.S. President George W. Bush is expected to urge the body to give greater attention to nuclear nonproliferation efforts, according to the New York Times (see GSN, March 5).
During his speech, Bush will describe stemming nuclear proliferation as one of the “next big challenges facing the United Nations,” a senior official said yesterday.
Some senior U.S. officials had expected Bush to use his U.N. address to outline new proposals for strengthening the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty by amending treaty provisions exploited by Iran and North Korea to develop their nuclear programs, according to the Times (see related GSN story, today). Those proposals, however, have only been discussed in general terms within the White House and have not yet been examined by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, officials said.
“Nobody thinks they are ready for prime time,” a U.S. official said.
There are still several issues that would need to be resolved before attempting to strengthen the NPT, such as how to deal with countries that have never signed the treaty and whether it would be possible to prevent treaty members that have developed nuclear programs from leaving the treaty such as North Korea did, midlevel U.S. officials said.
In his speech, Bush is expected to focus on the Proliferation Security Initiative, a U.S.-led effort to interdict WMD-related cargo shipments, the Times reported (see GSN, Sept. 17). Four of the 11 initiative members recently completed the first of a series of interdiction exercises (David Sanger, New York Times, Sept. 22).
An International Atomic Energy Agency team is expected to travel to Niger in the next few months to accelerate the country’s approval of a safeguards agreement that would allow the agency to monitor Nigerien uranium exports, the Associated Press reported today (see GSN, Sept. 12).
Niger is a producer of processed uranium, known as “yellowcake,” that can be used to produce enriched uranium. Niger and Kazakhstan are the only two countries out of 22 that reported producing uranium in 2000 to not have signed an IAEA safeguards agreement, according to the Associated Press.
The purpose of the IAEA visit is “to break any legal logjam” in approving the safeguards agreement, said IAEA spokesman Mark Gwozdecky. The IAEA does not view Niger as a source for terrorists or countries to illicitly obtain uranium for use in weapons, he said.
Nigerien yellowcake “would require considerable conversion and processing to be usable for nuclear weapons,” Gwozdecky said. “We don’t start tracking this stuff until it’s in a form suitable for reactor fuel,” he said (Bruce Stanley, Associated Press/Yahoo!News, Sept. 22).
The Hindustan Times reported today that India has decided to build two bunkers to protect top officials from a potential nuclear strike, according to Agence France-Presse (see GSN, Sept. 2).
The first bunker is set to be built in central New Delhi, with the second to be built at a location within 250 miles of the city, AFP reported. The decision to build the bunkers was made earlier this month during the first meeting of the Indian Nuclear Command Authority (Agence France-Presse, Sept. 22).
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