If you’ve been closely following the best daily press or tuning into debates among professional arms controllers, you will have noticed some concern about China’s intention to supply additional nuclear power to Pakistan and South Korea’s growing determination to reprocess nuclear fuels. Just how concerned should we be? To be honest, though I recognize that the ramifications could be significant and negative, I’m not sure these issues are worth much of anybody’s political capital.
I’m reminded me a bit of occasions when somebody stops me on the street and asks me to take a moment to sign a petition. I react hostilely, not because I disagree with the petition, but because the issue it addresses ranks about 27 on my list of most urgent concerns.
The China-Pakistan issue arose from reports this spring that China would supply its ally and client with two more nuclear reactors, having already contributed materially to Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program. Arms controllers have favored taking the issue of the proposed nuclear sales to the Nuclear Suppliers Group, the semi-formal group of major nuclear supplier states that’s been meeting since the 1970s in an attempt to limit sales of potential dual-use technologies (with very mixed success, let it be said).
To the dismay of many in the arms control community, the NSG declined at its June meeting to take up the Pakistan reactor question, but frankly, it’s not hard to see why the NSG demurred. In the first place, its recommendations are merely advisory, not binding, and so if it had tried to intervene in this instance, it might very well have been ignored. Second, given that the United States has already given Pakistan’s arch-rival India exemptions from the NSG rule that any country buying reactors and related equipment must agree to comprehensive (“full-scope”) safeguards, the world community is poorly positioned now to insist on strictly enforcing that rule with Pakistan. The U.S.-India agreement may have been ill-advised, and it certainly would benefit from some radical revision, but regrettably, what’s done is done.
At bottom, there’s no reason the full-scope safeguards rule should still be imposed on India and Pakistan unless one seriously supposes the two countries might still be denuclearized. That’s an idle hope. The fact of the matter is, they believe they are now in a state of mutual deterrence–much as the United States and the Soviet Union were throughout the Cold War–and that their nuclear arsenals are now the best guarantee of peace on the Subcontinent. And they’re not wrong.
Those, like I, who consider the existence of nuclear weapons a scourge and a global catastrophe waiting to happen, naturally are reluctant to concede that anything good can come of them, even in the short run. But in some situations they can indeed produce a cold peace. This is one of such situation.
So as I see it, the priority with India and Pakistan is not to refurbish supplier rules that are essentially obsolete, now that the two countries are nuclear weapons states. The priority is to get them into the Nonproliferation Treaty as nuclear weapons states, so that they will be subject to the treaty’s rules for such states and nothing like the AQ Khan supplier network ever comes back to life.
The situation on the Korean peninsula is fundamentally different. There, the two countries, like the two former Germanies, are destined by dint of culture and nationality to reunite. A reunion of the two countries and a settlement of their differences is inconceivable in the absence of denuclearization. Acquisition of nuclear weapons by North Korea was done in violation of its NPT commitments, and so its arsenal is illegitimate and must somehow be eliminated.
The situation is now aggravated by South Korea’s growing interest in reprocessing nuclear fuels, so as to recycle plutonium recovered from them and reduce the volume of high level wastes that must ultimately be stored.
If you want to familiarize yourself with the case against South Korean reprocessing, you won’t do better than read the article in a recent issue of Arms Control Today by Frank von Hippel, the Princeton University professor who co-chairs the International Panel on Fissile Materials. Von Hippel, the maternal grandson of James Franck, the emigre German physicist who famously chaired a dissenting Manhattan Project panel, has for decades been the world’s leading critic and opponent of nuclear fuel reprocessing and breeder reactors–the bundle of technologies collectively dubbed “the plutonium economy.”
Von Hippel makes an overhwhelmingly persuasive case that reprocessing and recylcing would not save South Korea from having to develop options for intermediate storage of nuclear fuels, contrary to the claims of its nuclear establishment, and that the vision of a breeder economy will be a mirage, just as it’s been for every other country’s that’s fallen under its spell.
But the problem here is that countries often pursue reprocessing and recycling precisely because they want to open a nuclear weapons option, not for the reasons having to do with economics and fuel management that they profess. South Korea, having got seriously interested in reprocessing after the North’s second nuclear weapons test, as von Hippel notes, probably is no exception. So it’s questionable, under the circumstances, whether it’s dissuadable–and questionable how much effort dissuasion is worth, however compelling the arguments against the South’s proposed course of action may be.
