The new Aipac -- India lobby

THE NEW AIPAC?

Forget the Israel Lobby. The Hill's Next Big Player Is Made in India.

By Mira Kamdar

Sunday, September 30, 2007; Page B03

The fall's most controversial book is almost certainly "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," in which political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt warn that Jewish Americans have built a behemoth that has bullied policymakers into putting Israel's interests in the Middle East ahead of America's. To Mearsheimer and Walt, AIPAC, the main pro-Israel lobbying group, is insidious. But to more and more Indian Americans, it's downright inspiring.

With growing numbers, clout and self-confidence, the Indian American community is turning its admiration for the Israel lobby and its respect for high-achieving Jewish Americans into a powerful new force of its own. Following consciously in AIPAC's footsteps, the India lobby is getting results in Washington -- and having a profound impact on U.S. policy, with important consequences for the future of Asia and the world.

TOOLBOX Resize Text Save/Share + Digg Newsvine del.icio.us Stumble It! Reddit Faebook Print This E-mail This COMMENT washingtonpost.com readers have posted 15 comments about this item. View All Comments » POST A COMMENT You must be logged in to leave a comment. Log in | Register  Discussion Policy Discussion Policy CLOSE Comments that include profanity or personal attacks or other inappropriate comments or material will be removed from the site. Additionally, entries that are unsigned or contain "signatures" by someone other than the actual author will be removed. Finally, we will take steps to block users who violate any of our posting standards, terms of use or privacy policies or any other policies governing this site. Please review the full rules governing commentaries and discussions. You are fully responsible for the content that you post.

"This is huge," enthused Ron Somers, the president of the U.S.-India Business Council, from a posh hotel lobby in Philadelphia. "It's the Berlin Wall coming down. It's Nixon in China."

What has Somers so energized is a landmark nuclear cooperation deal between India and the United States, which would give India access to U.S. nuclear technology and deliver fuel supplies to India's civilian power plants in return for placing them under permanent international safeguards. Under the deal's terms, the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty -- for decades the cornerstone of efforts to limit the spread of nuclear weapons -- will in effect be waived for India, just nine years after the Clinton administration slapped sanctions on New Delhi for its 1998 nuclear tests. But the Bush administration, eager to check the rise of China by tilting toward its massive neighbor, has sought to forge a new strategic alliance with India, cemented by the civil nuclear deal.

On the U.S. side, the pact awaits nothing more than one final up-or-down vote in Congress. (In India, the situation is far more complicated; India's left-wing parties, sensitive to any whiff of imperialism, have accused Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of surrendering the country's sovereignty -- a broadside that may yet scuttle the deal.) On Capitol Hill, despite deep divisions over Iraq, immigration and the outsourcing of American jobs to India, Democrats and Republicans quickly fell into line on the nuclear deal, voting for it last December by overwhelming bipartisan majorities. Even lawmakers who had made nuclear nonproliferation a core issue over their long careers, such as Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), quickly came around to President Bush's point of view. Why?

The answer is that the India lobby is now officially a powerful presence on the Hill. The nuclear pact brought together an Indian government that is savvier than ever about playing the Washington game, an Indian American community that is just coming into its own and powerful business interests that see India as perhaps the single biggest money-making opportunity of the 21st century.

The nuclear deal has been pushed aggressively by well-funded groups representing industry in both countries. At the center of the lobbying effort has been Robert D. Blackwill, a former U.S. ambassador to India and deputy national security adviser who's now with a well-connected Republican lobbying firm, Barbour, Griffith & Rogers LLC. The firm's Web site touts Blackwill as a pillar of its "India Practice," along with a more recent hire, Philip D. Zelikow, a former top adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice who was also one of the architects of the Bush administration's tilt toward India. The Confederation of Indian Industry paid Blackwill to lobby various U.S. government entities, according to the Boston Globe. And India is also paying a major Beltway law firm, Venable LLP.

The U.S.-India Business Council has lavished big money on lobbyists, too. With India slated to spend perhaps $60 billion over the next few years to boost its military capabilities, major U.S. corporations are hoping that the nuclear agreement will open the door to some extremely lucrative opportunities, including military contracts and deals to help build nuclear power plants. According to a recent MIT study, Lockheed Martin is pushing to land a $4 billion to $9 billion contract for more than 120 fighter planes that India plans to buy. "The bounty is enormous," gushed Somers, the business council's president.

So enormous, in fact, that Bonner & Associates created an India lobbying group last year to make sure that U.S. companies reap a major chunk of it. Dubbed the Indian American Security Leadership Council, the group was underwritten by Ramesh Kapur, a former trustee of the Democratic National Committee, and Krishna Srinivasa, who has been backing GOP causes since his 1984 stint as co-chair of Asian Americans for Reagan-Bush. The council has, oddly, "recruited groups representing thousands of American veterans" to urge Congress to pass the nuclear deal.

The India lobby is also eager to use Indian Americans to put a human face -- not to mention a voter's face and a campaign contributor's face -- on its agenda. "Industry would make its business case," Somers explained, "and Indian Americans would make the emotional case."

There are now some 2.2 million Americans of Indian origin -- a number that's growing rapidly. First-generation immigrants keenly recall the humiliating days when India was dismissed as an overpopulated, socialist haven of poverty and disease. They are thrilled by the new respect India is getting. Meanwhile, a second, American-born generation of Indian Americans who feel comfortable with activism and publicity is just beginning to hit its political stride. As a group, Indian Americans have higher levels of education and income than the national average, making them a natural for political mobilization.

One standout member of the first generation is Sanjay Puri, who founded the U.S. India Political Action Committee in 2002. (Its acronym, USINPAC, even sounds a bit like AIPAC.) He came to the United States in 1985 to get an MBA at George Washington University, staying on to found an information-technology company. A man of modest demeanor who wears a lapel pin that joins the Indian and American flags, Puri grew tired of watching successful Indian Americans pony up money just so they could get their picture taken with a politician. "I thought, 'What are we getting out of this?', " he explains.

In just five years, USINPAC has become the most visible face of Indian American lobbying. Its Web site boasts photos of its leaders with President Bush, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and presidential candidates from Fred Thompson to Barack Obama. The group pointedly sports a New Hampshire branch. It can also take some credit for ending the Senate career of Virginia Republican George Allen, whose notorious taunt of "macaca" to a young Indian American outraged the community. Less publicly, USINPAC claims to have brought a lot of lawmakers around. "You haven't heard a lot from Dan Burton lately, right?" Puri asked, referring to a Republican congressman from Indiana who has long been perceived as an India basher.

USINPAC is capable of pouncing; witness the incident last June when Obama's campaign issued a memo excoriating Hillary Rodham Clinton for her close ties to wealthy Indian Americans and her alleged support for outsourcing, listing the New York senator's affiliation as "D- Punjab." Puri personally protested in a widely circulated open letter, and Obama quickly issued an apology. "Did you see? That letter was addressed directly to Sanjay," Varun Mehta, a senior at Boston University and USINPAC volunteer, told me with evident admiration. "That's the kind of clout Sanjay has."

Like many politically engaged Indian Americans, Puri has a deep regard for the Israel lobby -- particularly in a country where Jews make up just a small minority of the population. "A lot of Jewish people tell me maybe I was Jewish in my past life," he jokes. The respect runs both ways. The American Jewish Committee, for instance, recently sent letters to members of Congress supporting the U.S.-India nuclear deal.

"We model ourselves on the Jewish people in the United States," explains Mital Gandhi of USINPAC's new offshoot, the U.S.-India Business Alliance. "We're not quite there yet. But we're getting there."

miraukamdar@gmail.com

Mira Kamdar, a fellow at the World Policy Institute and the Asia Society, is the author of "Planet India: How the Fastest-Growing Democracy is Transforming America and the World."

U.S. presidential campaign and India

http://www.hindu.com/2007/06/11/stories/2007061103341100.htm

Hindu June 11 2007

 

U.S. presidential campaign and India

Derek Chollet

The strong U.S.-India relationship has deep support from both Republicans and Democrats.

WITH THE U.S. 2008 presidential campaign in full swing, nearly 20 Republican and Democratic contenders (and possibly more to join soon) are already crisscrossing the country and outlining their policy positions and platforms. This frenzy of campaigning even seems early for most Americans, but for those abroad — in India and elsewhere — it is worth asking: how does this matter to us?

All American presidential elections are consequential, but the next one seems more so. For the first time in over 50 years, no incumbent President or Vice President is in the race, making this a truly open contest to be the first post-Bush, post-9/11 President. The next President — whether Republican or Democrat — will have an opportunity to assess the successes and failures of the Bush years, and then change course accordingly.

It is fair to expect that after 2009, the world will witness a major readjustment of American foreign policy across many issues.

Every new administration spends its first few years dealing with the difficult inheritance of its predecessor, and Mr. Bush's successor will have his or her hands full — from winding down the disastrous Iraq war to reversing the animosity toward the U.S. around the world. Most analysts concede that when it comes to America's place in the world, Mr. Bush's successor will face the most difficult circumstances in U.S. history. That's why it's so significant that one of the good news stories a new U.S. administration will inherit is a relationship with India that is stronger than ever before.

For this reason, the U.S.' relationship with India will not be a major issue in the 2008 campaign. So far, the subject has hardly been mentioned at all. But it's fair to ask: what would a change in administration, especially to a Democratic one, mean for India? There are some who believe that because of Democratic concerns about nuclear proliferation (the former U.S. Ambassador, Robert Blackwill, derides them as nonproliferation "ayatollahs") and trade issues, a Democratic victory in November 2008 would somehow be bad for India or set our relationship back.

There is always a temptation for a new President to make his mark by doing the opposite of his predecessor. George W. Bush did this with his "ABC" — anything but Clinton — attitude after he took office, and the next Democrat in the White House will have plenty of incentive to return the favour. But importantly, the U.S. relationship with India was an exception to this in 2001, and there are powerful reasons to expect the same in 2009.

Importantly, the strong U.S.-India relationship has deep support from both Republicans and Democrats. While many Bush officials like to herald their work as opening a new era in U.S.-India relations, most Democrats see the past seven years as a continuation of the course set by President Bill Clinton in the late 1990s. To be sure, steps such as the nuclear deal are historic breakthroughs, and these have strong support from most Democrats — especially the dominant presidential contenders. The fact is that the strong U.S.-India relationship is one of the great bipartisan achievements since the end of the Cold War. At a moment where American politics is so soured by partisanship, that's no small feat.

Trade issues

While trade issues remain a point of anxiety for many Democratic constituents and politicians — and the campaign might produce some heated rhetoric — there is broad recognition of how important the economic relationship with India is. The Democratic presidential contenders recognise that outsourcing is a fact of the global economy, and instead of talking about ending trade or building economic walls with India, they talk about ensuring that the government does more to help those who suffer most. In fact, one could argue that because of their credibility with labour unions and working Americans, Democrats are better positioned to put U.S,-India trade relations on a solid footing.

Democrats have also raised concerns about the deep problems of India's neighbour, Pakistan. The Bush administration has pursued unprecedented cooperation with Islamabad — showering Musharraf with $10 billion in aid since 2002 — in exchange for cooperation in fighting terrorism. Yet most Democrats believe such cooperation has been too episodic, and that the peace deals Islamabad recently signed with pro-Taliban elders in western Pakistan have amounted to a failed policy and a Musharraf retreat. Democrats are concerned over negative trend lines in Pakistan — the lack of democracy, rising anti-Americanism, and deep social tensions. And they are alarmed that the vast majority of U.S. assistance money to Pakistan's military is going to weapons that are more appropriate for confrontation with India than rooting out Al-Qaeda. A new administration would reassess this policy and look for ways to fix it.

But most important, Democratic presidential contenders (and those who would staff their administrations) realise that in a world where the U.S. has far fewer friends and seems more isolated than ever before, the U.S.-Indian partnership can be a foundation for greater American engagement in Asia and beyond.

They believe in working to give India the place of leadership it deserves as the world's largest democracy — whether by including it on the U.N. Security Council, or as a founding member of a new "Alliance of Democracies."

In short, no serious Democrat is talking about undoing the great work the past two Presidents have done to strengthen U.S.-Indian relations. If anything, they are planning for a more ambitious agenda. So as one of the most interesting American presidential elections unfolds, America's friends in India should watch with close interest — and with the confidence in our strong partnership.

(Derek Chollet is a senior fellow at The Center for a New American Security and served in the State Department during the Clinton Administration.)

from the May 30, 2007 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0530/p03s01-usfp.html

China, nuclear technology, and a US sale

Critics of a deal to sell China cutting-edge reactors hope to stall it in Congress by questioning the sale's taxpayer-backed financing.

By Mark Clayton | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

China has its heart set on buying a cutting-edge US design for a nuclear-power reactor, and the Bush administration has said it is willing to sell because the transaction will mean jobs for Americans and pave the way for a "nuclear [power] renaissance in the US."

But critics of the mammoth $5 billion-plus sale are raising concerns that China might not use the advanced technology strictly for peaceful purposes, perhaps intending to "reverse engineer" pieces of it for military purposes.

That worry surfaced this month in a letter four members of Congress sent to Defense Secretary Robert Gates. The May 18 letter asked whether the sale of four nuclear-power reactors to China, approved by the administration in December, could end up enhancing Beijing's military, including its ability to produce nuclear fuel for bombs and increase the stealthiness of its submarines.

"This transaction presents potential security concerns that Congress will have to consider," wrote Reps. Jeff Fortenberry (R) of Nebraska, Ed Royce (R) of California, Christopher Smith (R) of New Jersey, and Diane Watson (D) of California. All serve on foreign or international relations committees of the House of Representatives.

The sale of US civilian nuclear technology to China has long been a matter of contention. The debate is intensifying now because Westinghouse Electric Co. is expected within weeks to apply for up to $5 billion in loans from the US Export-Import Bank to finance the sale of the reactors to China. When it comes, the application will trigger a review by Congress, where critics of the deal hope to raise enough questions about it to hold it up, perhaps for good.

If approved, the deal would be the largest by far in the history of the bank, a taxpayer-supported entity charged with creating and sustaining jobs by financing sales of US goods to international buyers.

Besides security, an array of concerns

Though security concerns are paramount, any congressional hearings on the deal are likely to address the following sensitive topics, as well:

•Financing of the sale. Should US taxpayers be financing a multibillion-dollar loan to China at a time when China is running a massive trade surplus with the US? What do the taxpayers, who by some estimates contributed at least $300 million to Westinghouse Electric's advanced reactor design, get out of the deal – especially considering that a Japanese firm now owns 77 percent of Westinghouse?

•Technology transfer. China reportedly will get most of the new AP1000 technology, the latest US reactor design, as part of the sale. Some nonproliferation experts say the design of the reactor's coolant pump is of particular concern, and that China might be able to reverse-engineer it for use on its nuclear submarines. Westinghouse spokesman Vaugn Gilbert, though, says the company is bound by a federal technology transfer agreement "that precludes certain elements of that pump technology from being provided to China – therefore we will not be providing it."

Experts are concerned about the technology transfer issue and whether the sale will compromise America's technological lead on nuclear-power systems for subs.

"You're building an infrastructure that can be used and retooled to help out in [China's] naval reactor sector – and they do want this for nuclear subs," says Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, a think tank on nuclear-policy issues.

Because China is already a nuclear-weapon nation, others don't see a problem with sharing US light-water power-reactor technology, a design considered less useful for making bomb fuel. But they do have other worries.

"Our concern is more about whether the US should be supporting building a commercial nuclear infrastructure when there are serious questions about whether the Chinese regulatory system [for nuclear-waste disposal] can do this safely," says Edwin Lyman, a nonproliferation expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental group.

A boon to US industry?

Westinghouse and administration officials say the sale is economically justified and concerns about technology transfer unwarranted.

"This deal ... would affirm that the US remains a leader in the design and construction of civilian nuclear-power plants," said David Pumphrey, a deputy assistant secretary at the Department of Energy (DOE) in February testimony before the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission. It would also create "some 5,500 new jobs in the US," he said. He echoed DOE Secretary Samuel Bodman, who spoke in December of the deal's potential to "spur development of a nuclear renaissance in the US."

Westinghouse's Mr. Gilbert says a key benefit is simply getting the new design working the first time in China, thereby working out any glitches and lowering costs for at least 10 new plants in the US that would use the same design.

To some, however, it's unclear how much the US benefits or whether the technology will help China's military. Others question whether the deal will create enough US jobs to merit billions in public financing.

"You've got the Japanese making most of the big parts, [and] the Chinese doing at least half the construction and absorbing all the technology to do it themselves later on," Mr. Sokolski says. "I fail to see any boon to US industry."

"We don't think these economic impact and jobs estimates are done very well," says Thea Lee, policy chief for the AFL-CIO, who sits on the advisory board of Export-Import Bank. "It's been our sense that the bank's process of verifying such claims is very inadequate and that there's a lot of phony job-padding going on."

Westinghouse officials say the deal will "load Westinghouse design centers" in Pennsylvania and other states with work and create positions in 20 states – to the tune of about 5,000 jobs.

Though the deal doesn't sit all that well with Lawrence Wortzel, a commissioner with the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, he does not favor blocking it.

"While I have reservations about the financing and technology transfer to third parties, I still wouldn't recommend taking action to block the sale," he says, noting that China certainly has the money to finance the deal itself and has a huge trade surplus with the US.

Full HTML version of this story which may include photos, graphics, and related links

The Return of Reprocessing

Nuclear Wasteland

 

IEEE article on the return of reprocessing

 

 

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/print/4891

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nuclear Wasteland

By: Peter Fairley

PHOTO:Roger Ressmeyer/Corbis

BLUE GLOW OF SUCCESS: Fuel assemblies cool in a water pond at the French nuclear ­complex at La Hague. The blue light is ­generated by Cherenkov radiation, which arises from a ­particle's traveling through a medium faster than the speed of light in that medium

For roughly a quarter century there has been a hiatus in nuclear-plant construction in Europe and North America. Now new plants are being built in France, Finland, and Russia, and new reactor proposals are gathering steam in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. But to undergo a true resurgence—which many analysts argue is necessary to help reduce global greenhouse gas emissions—the nuclear power industry needs a coherent plan for dealing with its reactors' radioactive and toxic leftovers.

Burying the waste is a slow, politically painful process that leaves much to be desired. The long-planned U.S. repository under Yucca Mountain in Nevada has been immensely controversial. Yet if built as currently planned, it may be too small when it finally opens to accommodate all the high-level waste that has piled up in the country during half a century of commercial nuclear energy.

Lately, nuclear advocates, particularly in the United States, say they've found a better solution, or at least a path to one. It's based on the recycling and reuse of spent nuclear fuel, known as fuel reprocessing in the industry's jargon. Reprocessing breaks down fuel chemically, recovering fissionable material for use in new fuels. Thus, there is less highly radioactive material that needs to be sealed in caskets, buried deep underground, or otherwise permanently isolated from humankind.

"If we do reprocessing and recycle, we can increase the capacity of Yucca Mountain 100-fold," says Phillip Finck, a nuclear engineer at Argonne National Laboratory, in Illinois. Suddenly, instead of being crammed full on its opening day, Yucca Mountain would be able to handle everything the industry could throw at it until 2050 or beyond, staving off searches for additional Yucca Mountains.

As it happens, there's an ideal test case with which to evaluate that enticing proposition: France, which never backed away from nuclear energy and which has long relied on reprocessing as the linchpin of its power reactor fuel system.

The French experience clearly does show that reprocessing need not be the dangerous mess that other countries, including the United States, have made of it [see photo, "Blue Glow of Success"]. The U.S. military used reprocessing for several decades to separate plutonium from spent fuels, providing fissionable material for bombs. The result was widespread contamination—which has been in some cases irremediable—in the central Washington desert and the South Carolina coastal plain.

France, in contrast, now reprocesses well over 1000 metric tons of spent fuel every year without incident at the La Hague chemical complex, at the head of Normandy's wind-blasted Cotentin peninsula. La Hague receives all the spent fuel rods from France's 59 reactors. The sprawling facility, operated by the state-controlled nuclear giant Areva, has racked up a good, if not unblemished, environmental record.

The United States now claims to have a way of eliminating reprocessing's other major liability: the risk of spreading a supply of raw materials for bomb making. The United States officially banned reprocessing of spent fuel for power reactors in 1977, during the administration of President Jimmy Carter, who feared that proliferation of reprocessing technology would make it too easy for wayward nations or even terrorist groups to obtain the raw material for bombs. But in recent years, the U.S. Department of Energy engineers, including Finck, have developed an approach that they claim is more resistant to terrorist misuse, thereby mitigating concerns about nuclear security and proliferation. The result is that, three decades later, pressure is mounting for another look at reprocessing. The U.S. government is already supplying recycled fuels to one commercial reactor and planning tests of new proliferation-resistant reprocessing technologies.

Nevertheless, although it may be safe to proceed with reprocessing, France's experience suggests that reprocessing as done now is not ready to catalyze a full-blown nuclear renaissance. The problem in a nutshell is that without breeder reactors, which can break down the most long-lived elements in nuclear waste, reprocessing comes nowhere near achieving Finck's 100-fold reduction in that waste.

France's engineers tried harder than those in any other country to build and run breeder reactors reliably at a commercial scale, but ultimately they failed. The result is that even in France—the best real-world model of what reprocessing can accomplish—the technology remains a tantalizing but only partial solution to the problem of high-level nuclear waste.

Reprocessing got its start in the early 1940s, when Manhattan Project scientists sought a way to isolate pure plutonium. According to Richard Rhodes, author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb (Simon & Schuster, 1986), the chemist Glenn Seaborg, the discoverer of plutonium, came up with the basic concept. A carrier molecule grabs onto plutonium that's in a particular chemical state. That allows the carrier and the plutonium to be separated from the rest of the spent fuel. Further chemistry releases the carrier, leaving a solution of nearly pure plutonium.

It was a risky endeavor from the start because of the volatile, intensely radioactive materials involved. When it was scaled up at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state to obtain the quantities of plutonium needed for bombs, immense concrete bunkers were built to house the operations [see "The Atomic Fortress That Time Forgot," IEEE Spectrum, April 2006]. The workers called them Queen Marys, after the British ocean liner, the world's biggest at the time. Inside, all the processing steps were done entirely by remote control, with technicians peering through thick windows at the machinery that moved materials through the chemical tanks. It was all part of what Bertrand Goldschmidt, an eminent French chemist who worked with Seaborg, called "the astonishing American creation in three years"—a network of laboratories and factories equivalent in size to the whole U.S. auto industry.

France's Commissariat à l'Énergie Atomique (CEA), a ­government organization, commissioned its first reprocessing plant in 1958 at Marcoule, in the south, to supply weapons-grade plutonium for the country's nascent atomic bomb program. It added an initial reprocessing unit at La Hague for the same purpose in the early 1960s. The equipment running today, however, dates mostly to a massive upgrade and expansion begun in the 1970s and 1980s. France cut a deal with five countries—Belgium, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, and Switzerland—to finance the modernization of La Hague. In exchange, France agreed to reprocess those countries' spent fuel and return their separated plutonium, so as to reduce high-level waste volumes and provide additional fresh nuclear fuel. Today, the Areva Group, a spin-off of the CEA, runs La Hague as well as other French fuel-cycle installations and builds reactors via a subsidiary it co-owns with Siemens.

Even some of the nuclear industry's most tenacious opponents acknowledge that the result is a technical marvel. The leader of Greenpeace France's antinuclear program, Yannick Rousselet, says he no longer cites technical challenges in his criticism of Areva. "In the past," Rousselet says, "the antinuclear movement tried to say that they would not succeed with reprocessing. But they succeeded. To be honest, at least in terms of the technical aspects, it works."

Activists such as Rousselet had reason to doubt La Hague's chemistry, essentially the same as the separation process developed by the Manhattan Project. It has proved an ecological, occupational, and humanitarian disaster nearly everywhere else. Spills and explosions at reprocessing plants in the United States, Russia, and Britain have polluted rivers and contaminated hundreds of thousands of acres. Britain's Sellafield reprocessing complex, on England's Cumbrian coast, was shuttered in April 2005 after safety authorities discovered that 83 cubic meters of highly radioactive liquids had spilled during a period of nine months.

La Hague, in contrast, has never had a serious accident or spill. It does intentionally release relatively small amounts of radioactive substances into the air and water of the adjacent English Channel, whose strong currents were a key attraction of the La Hague site—behavior that Rousselet calls irresponsible and unwarranted. But the amounts released are below licensed levels and are dropping.

Eric Blanc, the marine engineer turned chemical plant operator who serves as La Hague's deputy director, tells the growing stream of visiting U.S. politicos and utility executives that La Hague's neighbors experience an annual radiation dose below 0.02 millisieverts—roughly equivalent to the dose of solar radiation the visitors receive on their transatlantic flights. La Hague's 5000 workers absorb less radiation than they would if they were employed at a nuclear power plant.

LA Hague takes exposure seriously, nevertheless. Inside the plant, there's a bit of the atmosphere of a James Bond movie. Protection suits and respirators hang on the walls. Scores of workers in white jumpsuits sit at computer screens in a central control room, while others control radiation-resistant robots or dexterous telemanipulators to guide, clean, or repair the equipment. The robots are in the thick of the action, and the danger lies safely isolated behind walls and leaded-glass windows 1 to 2 meters thick in workshops that have not seen a human in two decades of heavy-industrial operation.

Reprocessing at La Hague takes place in two independent but interconnected lines. At the front end of each line, robotic assemblies lift spent fuel-rod bundles weighing 500 kilograms from armored shipping casks and suspend them in 9-meter-deep pools of water. The fuel bundles are at 300 °C; after cooling for four to five years, the fuel elements are fed into the plant's processing workshops to be chewed up, dissolved in nitric acid, and run through a series of chemical separation baths. The chemistry is fundamentally the 63-year-old Purex process developed in the Manhattan Project—Purex stands for "plutonium-uranium extraction"—but Areva says the separation equipment employed is more compact than its predecessors and generates less waste.

The major products of the separation are uranium and plutonium. The former, consisting of the isotopes U-235 and U-238, constitutes 95 percent of the spent fuel. The plutonium yield is just a little more than 1 percent. Most of the uranium is shipped to an Areva plant in southern France and, at the moment, stockpiled. Some analysts predict that uranium prices will eventually justify more reuse of La Hague's uranium; but for now, utilities find it cheaper to use fuel freshly made from uranium ores and enriched to the precise isotopic composition they need. As for the plutonium, it is shipped across France to the Rhône Valley, where Areva's Marcoule fuel plant blends it with uranium and fabricates it into fuel for French reactors.

The final step in the process encapsulates the high-level waste, which consists mainly of acids and solvents from the Purex process plus dangerous, extremely radioactive leftovers from the spent fuel, including isotopes of curium, cesium, and iodine. This step is called vitrification. Technicians operating remote manipulators drop the toxic blend into a bath of borosilicate glass heated to 1150 °C, then dole out the molten mix into 180-liter stainless-steel canisters. Think of a huge glass paperweight with radioactive matter inside instead of colored swirls. But this particular glass is not fragile, Blanc explains. That's the point: the glass is supposed to immobilize the isotopes, isolating them from the environment, like bugs in amber, for thousands of years.

Once processed, two bundles totaling 528 fuel rods yield one vitrification canister 1.3 meters tall and a bit less than half a meter in diameter, plus another steel canister of similar size holding the compacted metal fuel rods. Even the largest of France's reactors, which can produce 1300 megawatts, generate just 20 canisters of high-level waste per year. According to Areva, it's about a factor of 10 reduction in the mass of highly radioactive waste needing to be stored under the most stringent conditions, and a four- or fivefold reduction in volume relative to leaving a plant's spent fuel unseparated [see flowchart, " The French Nuclear System"].

Despite its record of technical success, La Hague's business lost much of its shine during the past decade. By the mid-1990s, France's European partners were rethinking the wisdom of their investment in La Hague and, one by one, stopped shipping their spent fuel. From its 1997 to 1998 peak of 1700 metric tons per year, La Hague's throughput sharply decreased by 2003 to an average of 1100 metric tons per year. In part, France's partners were responding to grassroots concerns about the security of spent fuel and plutonium shipments [see sidebar, "The Terrorist Threat"]. But the ultimate cause for the slump traces back to the demise of the next-generation reactors designed to consume La Hague's plutonium, the so-called fast breeders.

All reactors get their heat from bundles of rods filled with a fissile fuel. The rods are inserted into a core in close proximity to each other, enabling neutrons radiating from the fuel in each rod to split heavy atoms of uranium or plutonium in neighboring rods, thereby generating more neutrons, which split more atoms, and so on. In most conventional power reactors, water or graphite is employed as a moderator to slow down the neutrons, thus rendering them more likely to be absorbed by U-235 atoms, knocking out more neutrons. That is necessary because the concentration of fissionable material in the fuel is low, just a few percent. In contrast, breeder reactor fuel contains a high fraction of fissionable material, so that a moderator is not required.

There is an additional potential advantage to the breeder reactor. By surrounding the fuel rods in its core with a jacket of U‑238, which is not fissionable by slow neutrons, the reactor can produce power and simultaneously "breed" new plutonium faster than the plutonium in the fuel rods is consumed. The U‑238 atoms capture neutrons to form fissile plutonium 239.

The reason for expanding La Hague in the 1980s was to produce a first load of plutonium fuel for what was to be a fleet of breeder reactors. Energy analysts, alarmed by the oil-supply manipulations of the 1970s, had predicted a rush into nuclear power that would exhaust uranium reserves in a matter of decades. "We were projecting that by 2010 nothing but fast [breeder] reactors would be built," recalls one such analyst, Evelyne Bertel, an expert in nuclear fuel cycles at the Organisation for Economic Co‑operation and Development's Nuclear Energy Agency, in Paris.

The United States and the Soviet Union both mounted major efforts to develop breeder reactors during the 1950s and 1960s. But it fell to France, after Carter took the United States out of the reprocessing and breeding game, to design and build the first commercial prototype.

In 1972, a consortium of companies led by the French utility Electricité de France (EDF) started work on the Superphénix. There were countless challenges. Above all was keeping the breeder's densely packed core from overheating, which could cause the fuel to melt and possibly even explode. Because the heat flux is so high in a breeder and absorption of neutrons by a moderator is undesirable, reactor designers faced a limited choice of coolants. In practice, almost all breeder designers have opted for liquid metals that are notoriously hard to handle. Liquid sodium, used in the Superphénix, is extremely corrosive and ignites explosively on contact with oxygen or water.

Starting in the mid-1980s, the Superphénix suffered a series of sodium leaks. Meanwhile the nuclear industry peaked and uranium prices crashed, eliminating the imperative to switch to plutonium fuel. The reactor went through several shutdowns and restarts before the French government finally pulled the plug for good in 1998. By then the reactor had run just 174 days at its full 1250-MW design capacity. A French government investigation in 2000 estimated that the project had cost about €9 billion (US $11.8 billion).

French industry players often blame politics for the Superphénix debacle. François Mitterrand, then president, held power through a coalition with France's staunchly antinuclear Green Party. However, the technical problems are undeniable. "The experience of Superphénix demonstrated that France built a nonmature technology," says Bertel.

With breeder reactors out of the picture for the foreseeable future, France tried to find a new role for La Hague's plutonium. The solution was to re-engineer Areva's fuel assembly plant at Marcoule, originally designed to make fuel bundles for the Superphénix, to instead produce plutonium-enriched fuel elements for conventional reactors. By blending plutonium and depleted uranium, in a ratio of 8 percent to 92 percent, the plant created so-called mixed-oxide, or MOX, fuel, which can be substituted for enriched uranium fuel after just minor modifications to a conventional reactor. Today MOX fuel provides close to 10 percent of France's nuclear power generation and is also used in Belgium, Germany, Japan, and Switzerland.

The downside is that spent MOX fuel is even tougher to transport, store, and reprocess than regular used fuel. Spent MOX fuel contains four to five times as much plutonium, increasing the risk of unexpected nuclear chain reactions, called accidental criticalities, within reprocessing plants. Spent MOX is also three times as hot as spent uranium fuel, thanks to an accumulation of transuranic isotopes such as americium and curium, making it less fit for underground storage.

Therefore, according to a 2000 consensus report on reprocessing prepared for France's prime minister, spent MOX must cool for 150 years before it can go into an underground waste repository such as Yucca Mountain [see sidebar: "The Prickly Economics of Reprocessing"]. Meanwhile, spent MOX fuel is ­piling up quickly in La Hague's cooling ponds: the 543‑­metric‑ton accumulation grows by 100 metric tons every year.

The bottom line is that burning MOX fuel makes economic sense only as the beginning of a larger process that ends with incineration in a breeder reactor, and no sense at all as an end in itself. Most of France's reprocessing customers, seeing little future for nuclear energy amid the antinuclear demonstrations of the 1980s and 1990s, accordingly saw no future for breeders either. In that context, Bertel says, pulling away from reprocessing and MOX fuel made perfect sense. As she puts it, "If you are stuck with the spent MOX fuel, why bother?"

The French government and EDF remain invested in the country's nuclear future and therefore classify La Hague's spent MOX as a strategic reserve of plutonium to jump-start future breeder reactors. This eternal hope is, in fact, an essential justification for France's fuel cycle. Japan shares France's vision and built its own reprocessing plant using Areva's designs, which started up last year; the plant is expected to eventually supply Japanese reactors with MOX fuel.

France and Japan suddenly look less isolated in their reprocessing strategy, thanks to U.S. President George W. Bush. Early last year, Bush singled out France's nuclear program for a rare bit of cross-Atlantic praise, telling the American people in a Saturday radio chat that reprocessing will "allow us to produce more energy, while dramatically reducing the amount of nuclear waste." Surprisingly, Bush has endorsed reprocessing as not only a means of handling domestic nuclear waste but as a bold response to proliferation as well.

Turning a conventional argument on its head, Bush is saying that the risk of additional countries' using reprocessing to arm nuclear weapons can be lower, not greater, if the United States reprocesses. Under his proposed Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP), nations with "secure, advanced nuclear capabilities" would guarantee a steady supply of nuclear fuel to non-nuclear-weapons countries that agree to return the resulting spent fuel and the plutonium within for reprocessing, forgoing reprocessing plants of their own.

But many proliferation experts worry that Bush's plan could backfire. It's not clear that many countries will agree to forgo reprocessing, letting others do the work for them, while they themselves agree to take back the noxious wastes. If participation in GNEP is disappointing, the program could end up encouraging rather than impeding the spread of reprocessing technology—Areva, for one, is plainly interested in licensing its technology.

Whether or not GNEP attracts any takers, a movement toward reprocessing is already well established in the United States. U.S. utilities are getting their first taste of MOX fuel today, thanks to former President Bill Clinton, whose Energy Department in 1997 authorized the fabrication of surplus weapons-grade plutonium into MOX fuel for use in U.S. power plants. Clinton's DOE also awarded a contract to an Areva-led consortium to build a MOX fabrication plant at the DOE's Savannah River, S.C., site. While awaiting construction of the MOX plant—beset by lawsuits that have delayed its projected start date from 2009 to as late as 2015—Bush's first energy secretary, Spencer Abraham, gave Areva permission to produce a first load of MOX at Marcoule. The resulting fuel assemblies began producing power at Duke Power's Catawba, S.C., plant last year. (Abraham, by the way, has since signed on as chairman of Areva's U.S. subsidiary, Areva Enterprises.)

Since Bush's high-profile endorsement of reprocessing last year, nuclear players within and around the Energy Department have been lobbying Congress to support the next step toward full integration of plutonium into the U.S. nuclear industry: a ­reprocessing demonstration plant. The demo is needed to prove, at large scale, a reprocessing scheme called Urex+, developed at Argonne National Laboratory to be more proliferation-resistant than La Hague's. Urex+ coextracts plutonium together with other transuranic elements present in spent fuel. Such isotopes can be "burned" in a breeder reactor but would complicate the job of any would-be bomb maker, because they contaminate the explosive material somewhat.

The DOE's Spent Nuclear Fuel Recycling Program Plan, sent to Congress this past May, also calls for a demonstration of a breeder reactor fueled by Urex+. In fact, as with France's fuel cycle, the DOE plan is hard to defend unless several such breeder reactors are built. Without them, high-level transuranic waste would become a growing annoyance in the United States, much like the MOX bundles building up in La Hague's cooling ponds. Burton Richter, a Nobel laureate who leads the DOE's science panel on nuclear waste separations (and also serves on the board of Areva Enterprises), acknowledges that breeder reactors are DOE's endgame. "Everybody is in agreement that the right system ultimately results in multiple recycles in fast [breeder] ­reactors, so that's where things are going," Richter says.

With visions of nuclear electricity "too cheap to meter" long gone, the case for breeder reactors has shifted from creation of new fuels to management of spent fuels. Without breeder reactors, the case for reprocessing is less than compelling. Considered in isolation, the economic arguments for and against reprocessing are a wash. Most of the arguments concerning security and terrorism, too, seem moot. But until or unless breeder reactors are commercialized that can truly burn up all the residual fissile material found in spent fuels, reprocessing will simply concentrate high-level waste in a form that's hotter and harder to handle, exchanging one nuclear waste headache for another.

About the Author

Contributing Editor Peter Fairley has reported for IEEE Spectrum from Bolivia, Beijing, and Paris.

To Probe Further

A recent report to address recycling of nuclear fuels, critically, is "Managing Spent Fuels in the United States: The Illogic of Reprocessing," by Frank von Hippel. It is also available online at http://www.fissilematerials.org. "Economic Forecast Study of the Nuclear Power Option," a report to France's Prime Minister on the economics of reprocessing, was published in July 2000: http://fire.pppl.gov/eu_fr_fission_plan.pdf.

MIT's 2003 study, "The Future of Nuclear Power," is at http://web.mit.edu/nuclearpower.

Greenpeace France's "Stop Plutonium" Web site is http://www.greenpeace.fr/stop-plutonium/en.

The U.S. Department of Energy sent a Recycling Program Plan to Congress in May 2006: http://www.gnep.energy.gov/pdfs/snfRecyclingProgramPlanMay2006.pdf .

Areva's La Hague Web site is http://www.cogemalahague.com.

Sidebar 1

The Terrorist Threat

IMAGE: Areva

A police-escorted truck carries pure plutonium from La Hague to Marcoule.

Heightened concerns about terrorism after 9/11 have complicated the global debate over French-style reprocessing. The de facto U.S. practice of leaving spent fuel in ponds adjacent to reactors—a tempting target for terrorists—suddenly seems more questionable than ever. But pure plutonium extracted at plants such as La Hague also could be material for dirty bombs, or even an actual atomic bomb. If a country with sophisticated facilities somehow got its hands on it, just 10 kilograms might suffice for a fission bomb.

The image of French reprocessing took a hit on 19 February 2003, when Greenpeace found a dramatic means of spotlighting the vulnerability of the supposedly top-secret plutonium ­shipments between La Hague and Areva's mixed-oxide (MOX) fuel plant at Marcoule: it intercepted a convoy carrying more than 138 kg of ­plutonium in the center of Chalon-sur-Saône, a small city in Burgundy, and invited the French media along for the show.

Sitting in Greenpeace's storefront bureau in Cherbourg, the regional capital 20 kilometers south of the La Hague plant, Greenpeace's Yannick Rousselet recounts the disquieting ease of the operation. "We just waited in front of La Hague, and within three or four weeks we knew everything," he says. By process of elimination, Rousselet's team identified the nondescript flatbed trailers carrying plutonium casks out of La Hague week after week. The trucks pulled out with their police escort at the same time and followed a consistent route and schedule. Stopping the convoy was hardly mission impossible: the convoy rolled into town right on time; a Greenpeace activist driving ahead slowed to a stop, and 25 more activists leaped from a van blocking the opposite lane to chain themselves to the flatbed truck. Rousselet says the stunned gendarmes chaperoning the shipment stepped out of their cars, popped their trunks, and quietly retrieved their weapons and armored jackets.

Greenpeace hired a London-based nuclear risk analysis consultancy, Large & Associates, to put a finer point on the demonstration by assessing a series of terrorism and accident scenarios. In the worst case the consultants studied, an armed group immobilizes a plutonium convoy in a highway tunnel just south of Paris with fuel tanker trucks, opens the plutonium canisters, and then ignites the tanker fuel. In the consultant's estimation, the resulting fire and a northerly breeze would send a plutonium plume over Paris, causing a death toll as high as 4700 and necessitating the permanent relocation of much of the French capital.

Greenpeace's maneuver made good television; however, Areva defends the safety of its shipments. It says the convoys are protected by sophisticated, secret defense systems, which remained silent for Greenpeace, because the French security forces can "differentiate between a pacifist operation and a terrorist attack." —P.F.

 

Sidebar 2

The Prickly Economics of Reprocessing

IMAGE: Frederic Pitchal/Sygma/Corbis

A nuclear fuel canister at La Hague: the blades facilitate air cooling of the material.

Critics of nuclear fuel reprocessing in the United States often cite its cost, hoping to offer a clean economic argument unsullied by complex issues about national security, arms control, and the ­environment. But comparing alternative nuclear-fuel-cycle costs is a slippery business, requiring firm long-term projections of uranium prices, estimated total costs of waste disposal procedures that have not actually been implemented yet, and a credible way of factoring in R&D expenditures covered by the military.


In the 1970s, uranium prices were expected to go through the roof within a few decades. But that argument fell into disfavor during the last two decades of the 20th century, when nuclear construction came to a standstill worldwide. Now, with expectations of a nuclear renaissance, uranium prices have increased by a factor of more than four since 2003. Today's economists tend to discount alarmist uranium supply scenarios. Known resources are dependent on the intensity of exploration, and uranium exploration has, until recently, been meager. What's more, because uranium fuel is but a small part of total nuclear generating costs, the industry could afford to pay higher extraction costs without pricing itself out of business.


Mainly for those reasons, an influential 2003 report on the future of nuclear power, done at MIT, concluded that possible ­depletion of fuel resources "is not a pressing reason for proceeding to reprocessing and breeding for many years to come."


But if economics does not vindicate reprocessing, neither does it damn it. Although credible studies have concluded that reprocessing and producing mixed-oxide (MOX) fuel is several times more costly than using fresh uranium fuel, the cost penalty is small when viewed in context. In addition, studies pricing MOX fuel often underplay the ­significant uncertainties inherent in their calculations. The biggest is the ultimate cost of waste disposal, because no country is ­actually operating a final repository. As the MIT study warns, "the uncertainty in any estimate of fuel cycle costs is extremely large."


Benjamin Dessus, director of the Ecotech program at France's prestigious National Center for Scientific Research, says that he has concluded economics will never settle the reprocessing debate. Eight years ago, Dessus coauthored a high-profile report on the economics of reprocessing for France's then prime minister, Lionel Jospin. It concluded that phasing out reprocessing would cut France's power costs by 1.3 ­percent—an answer that pleased neither side in the debate.


"[Jospin] requested a report on economics, and we returned a report that said economics couldn't decide it," Dessus says. "He didn't want to hear that." —P.F.

 

Military not ready for other wars

Troops in US lack resources, government says

By Ann Scott Tyson, Washington Post  |  March 20, 2007

WASHINGTON -- Four years after the invasion of Iraq, the high and growing demand for US troops there and in Afghanistan has left ground forces in the United States short of the training, personnel, and equipment that would be vital to fight a major ground conflict elsewhere, senior US military and government officials acknowledge.

Article Tools

• Printer friendly
• Single page
• E-mail to a friend
• Nation RSS feed
• Available RSS feeds
• Most e-mailed
• Reprints & Licensing
• Share on Digg
• Share on Facebook
•   Save this article
• powered by Del.icio.us

More:

• Globe Nation stories |
• Latest national news |
• Globe front page |
• Boston.com

Sign up for:
• Globe Headlines e-mail |
• Breaking News Alerts

More troubling, the officials say, is that it will take years for the Army and Marine Corps to recover from what some officials privately have called a "death spiral," in which the ever-more-rapid pace of war-zone rotations has consumed 40 percent of their total gear, wearied troops, and left no time to train to fight anything other than the insurgencies now at hand.

The risk to the nation is serious and deepening, senior officers warn, because the US military now lacks a large strategic reserve of ground troops ready to respond quickly and decisively to potential foreign crises, whether the internal collapse of Pakistan, a conflict with Iran, or an outbreak of war on the Korean Peninsula. Air and naval power can only go so far in compensating for infantry, artillery, and other land forces, they said. An immediate concern is that critical Army overseas equipment stocks for use in another conflict have been depleted by the recent troop increases in Iraq, they said.

"We have a strategy right now that is outstripping the means to execute it," General Peter Schoomaker, Army chief of staff, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday.

The Army's vice chief of staff, General Richard Cody, described as "stark" the level of readiness of Army units in the United States, which would be called on if another war breaks out. "The readiness continues to decline of our next-to-deploy forces," Cody told the House Armed Services Committee's readiness panel last week. "And those forces, by the way, are . . .also your strategic reserve."

General Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was asked last month by a House panel whether he was comfortable with the preparedness of Army units in the United States. He stated simply: "No . . . I am not comfortable."

"You take a lap around the globe -- you could start any place: Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, Venezuela, Colombia, Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, North Korea, back around to Pakistan, and I probably missed a few. There's no dearth of challenges out there for our armed forces," Pace warned in his testimony. He said the nation faces increased risk because of shortfalls in troops, equipment and training.

Pace said the unexpected demand for more troops in Iraq -- from the 10 brigades that commanders projected last year they would need by the end of 2006, to the 20 brigades scheduled to be there by June -- prompted him to recommend permanently adding 92,000 troops to the Army and Marine Corps, saying it would "make a large difference in our ability to be prepared for unforeseen contingencies."

Indeed, the recent increase of more than 32,000 US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan has pushed already severe readiness problems to what some officials and lawmakers consider a crisis point. Schoomaker said last week that sustaining the troop increase in Iraq beyond August would be "a challenge." The Marines' commandant, General James Conway, expressed concern to defense reporters last week that it would bring the Marine Corps "right on the margin" of breaking the minimum time at home for Marines between combat tours. US commanders in Iraq say they may need to keep troop levels elevated into early 2008.

The troop increase has also created an acute shortfall in the Army's equipment stored overseas -- known as "prepositioned stock" -- which would be critical to outfit US combat forces quickly should another conflict erupt, officials said.

The Army should have five full combat brigades' worth of such equipment: two stocks in Kuwait, one in South Korea, and two aboard ships in Guam and at the Diego Garcia base in the Indian Ocean. But the Army had to empty the afloat stocks to support the troop increase in Iraq, and the Kuwait stocks are being used as units rotate in and out of the country. Only the South Korea stock is close to complete, according to military and government officials.

"Without the prepositioned stocks, we would not have been able to meet the surge requirement," Schoomaker said. "It will take us two years to rebuild those stocks. That's part of my concern about our strategic depth."

"The status of our Army prepositioned stock . . . is bothersome," Cody said last week.

Democratic and Republican lawmakers who received classified briefings last week on the stocks and overall Army readiness voiced alarm.

"I'm deeply concerned," said Representative Ike Skelton, Democrat of Missouri and chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, who last week asked the Congressional Budget Office and the Government Accountability Office to investigate the stocks "as a matter of vital importance to national defense."

Representative Solomon Ortiz, Democrat of Texas and chairman of the committee's readiness panel, said: "I have seen the classified-only readiness reports. And based on those reports, I believe that we as a nation are at risk of major failure, should our Army be called to deploy to an emerging threat."

El Baradei interview on Iran

FT interview: Mohamed ElBaradei

By Daniel Dombey

Published: February 19 2007 21:12 | Last updated: February 19 2007 21:12

On Monday, the Financial Times talked to Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency ahead of a crucial week in the dispute over Iran's nuclear programme.

A UN Security Council resolution passed last December calls on Iran to suspend uranium enrichment – which can produce both nuclear fuel and weapons grade material – by Wednesday February 21, the date that Mr ElBaradei is due to produce a report on Terhan's compliance with the Security Council's demands.

On Tuesday he is scheduled to meet Ali Larijani, Iran's chief nuclear negotiator. Barring a last minute breakthrough, the dispute will then return to the UN, where the US will push for additional sanctions.

In his 40-minute interview with the FT, Mr ElBaradei made clear his doubts both about calls for more sanctions and the international community's emphasis on suspending enrichment. He says that it is far more important to dissuade Iran from pursuing enrichment on an industrial scale – a development that could be a mere six months away – since the country has already acquired considerable technical knowledge from enriching uranium in a "research and development" facility.

This is a transcript of his conversation with the FT.

The importance of negotiations:

FT: What hopes do you have that the Iran nuclear dispute will be resolved in a reasonable time period?

ElBaradei: I'm still quite hopeful because I don't see any other option, quite frankly. How long will it take to convince all the parties to go back to the negotiating table is a matter of speculation. I know however for sure that even if you go for a year or two for retaliation and counter-retaliation and more sanctions it will get worse for everybody, Iran of course, but also all other parts of the international community, specifically, in the Middle East which simply cannot afford an additional escalation which would lead to militancy and increase terrorism. So if we can avoid going through this painful process, knowing that it can never resolve the issue, and try to resolve the process going back to negotiation, that's obviously in the interest of everybody. Both sides understand that. Both sides understand that there's no other way except than to go to negotiation. It's just a question of how to get both sides to the negotiating table while saving face. It really is about saving face…

There's a lot of efforts by everybody trying to do that right now, a lot of it is really, more [of a] drafting process, more how to present a package in a balanced way and whereby the Iranians would feel that they have not lost face and the international community would feel that their requirements had been satisfied. I came up with this idea of double, simultaneous suspension, a time out.

FT: Which would be simultaneous rather than sequential?

ElBaradei: Correct, and that would require some sort of road map to agree on that, or a timeline if you like, that Iran will take a time out from its enrichment activities as a confidence building measure. That obviously does not impact on its right because nobody is questioning its right and this is a concern of Iran that this might compromise the right. I don't think anybody is questioning the right, it's about timing and modalities of implementing fully this right in light of the confidence deficit created. And the Security Council made clear that if Iran does suspend they are ready to suspend [sanctions].

FT: Although that was sequential, wasn't it?

ElBaradei: Yes, but really, you can say sequential a day after, it doesn't really matter if you agree in advance how this will happen, it can be simultaneous. It can even be the same day, somebody will look at it as sequential, others can look at it as simultaneous.

As I said, it is not a major hurdle to get over that, because the stakes are just too high right now in my view to go towards a confrontation route. Sanctions were all right because the international community wanted to send a message that we are concerned and they did that, but… everybody knows that sanctions are not going to resolve the issue in and of itself.

Iran's failure to comply with UN demands

FT: People expect on Wednesday you will report that Iran has not suspended because there's no sign that Iran has suspended. That's the clear expectation.

ElBaradei: Yes.

FT: So after your report there will obviously more pressure from the US to push for more sanctions. Do you think that it will be ill advised to push for more sanctions at the Security Council straight away?

ElBaradei: Obviously, short of a major change of heart, I would report that Iran has not complied with the demand of the international community to suspend. I'm going to see Mr Larijani tomorrow, who's coming to see me in Vienna. And I will continue to make a last ditch effort to try to convince them that it is in their interest to find a way to go into negotiations. If it doesn't happen and I don't see that it is going to happen overnight, I will have to report negatively.

The Security Council resolution, the previous one, 1737 [agreed in December], indicated that if Iran did not comply they will take additional measures. It's a policy judgment, I do not want to replace myself for the Security Council's judgment, but I know for sure that even with additional sanctions, if they were to go for additional sanctions, they would still, in parallel, look for ways to get Iran to the negotiating table and in compliance with the concern of the international community that the programme is not a peaceful programme. Really the whole thing is about confidence building.

Sanctions

FT: You have have real concerns about sanctions. If they begin to bite do you think they are counter productive?

ElBaradei: I have major concerns about relying on sanctions alone. Our experience without exception is that sanctions alone do not work and in most cases radicalise the regime and hurt the people who are not supposed to be hurt. So I have a major concern not about sanctions per se but sanctions alone. And sanctions have to be coupled at all time with incentives and a real search for a compromise based on face saving, based on respect.

I mean we always forget this word respect. A lot of the problems we face, fifty per cent at least if not more, is psychological. Substance is important, but fifty per cent of it is how you approach it, how you reach out to people, how you understand where they're coming from. So I will continue to say: 'Yes, it is your prerogative to apply sanctions but sanctions alone will not do it and you need to invest as much in trying to find a solution through negotiation.'"

The tensions between Iran and the US

FT: Do you think both sides have invested inadequately in negotiations?

ElBaradei: I think so. I've been on the record for saying for many years that the Iranian issue will only be resolved when the US takes a decision to engage Iran directly… The nuclear issue is the tip of the iceberg, it masks a lot of grievances, security grievances, competition for power in the Middle East, economic issues, sanctions, it has to do with human rights, support for extremist groups, there are a lot of other issues that need to be resolved. Iran could be very helpful as a stabilising force in the Middle East. The US could be very helpful in providing the security assurances that obviously lie at the heart of some of the Iranian activities.

Iran's mastering of nuclear technology and the next steps

ElBaradei: Even if the Iranian programme is for peaceful purposes there is no question that at the back of their minds this is a deterrent, that it has a deterrence value as it were. So we need to understand that. I look at things also from the global security perspective. My worry primarily is that if Iran were to be pushed out of the regime, then we have another repeat of North Korea. My worry primarily [is about] if Iran were to start chipping away at an inspection authority or ability to do any inspection. And I start to worry [about] if Iran were to develop industrial capability before we at least clarify all these outstanding issues about the history and the nature of the programme.

These are the three important issues for me from a non-proliferation point of view, much more important for me than Iran acquiring the knowledge [of how to enrich uranium]. Because even if that was relevant six months ago it is not relevant today because Iran has been running these centrifuges for at least six months.

Yes, they might acquire a little bit more, perfecting the knowledge, but to aim at denying a country knowledge is almost impossible, to say the least. And there's a big difference between acquiring the knowledge for enrichment and developing a bomb. It is almost impossible for a country to, particularly because this right is quoted under the NPT [nuclear non-proliferation treaty], and the difference between acquiring knowledge and having a bomb is at least five to ten years away. And that's why I said the intelligence, the British, intelligence, the American intelligence, is saying that Iran is still years, five to ten years away from developing a weapon.

We need, what is really important is to have, a proper diagnosis of the problem, assess the problem properly. My concern is that there has been a lot of hype about the Iranian issue because you need to assess it properly and then you need to address it properly, afterwards.

Military action

ElBaradei: What you see right now, all this talk about the use of force, it's not only counter productive but in fact does not in any way help resolve the issue. Imagine what a regime would feel if they hear that force will be used against them, in additional to being called names, in addition to talk about regime change in the past. Even if they were not going to develop a nuclear weapon today, this would be a sure recipe for them to go down that route.

FT: And how worried are you that the US or Israel might carry out military action, an air strike?

ElBaradei: I of course cannot give hundred per cent guarantees that this will not happen because you read about this all the time. I don't know whether it is hype or if there is some kernel of truth to it.

I know for sure that this would be catastrophic, counterproductive, whatever you called it because for a variety of reasons.

One, I know that what we see in Iran right now is not the industrial capacity you can [use to develop a] bomb. You have small R&D at the knowledge level… to enrich uranium. And I said a hundred times you cannot bomb knowledge.

So there is not really much to bomb. And if you [do] then [you] turn the Iranian drive or you put it in high gear for developing a nuclear weapon. We know that if you jolt a country's pride, all the factions, right, left and centre will get together and try to accelerate a programme to develop a nuclear weapon to defend themselves.

That's classic strategic thinking in any country, whether it's a democracy, a theocracy, whatever… There is a fundamental choice people need to make, which is either you understand that there is a limit to military power, that these issues mask a sense of insecurity or even competition for dominance or influence but force is not the appropriate means to address these issues. Or [you] go for the military option and then either you'll have a repeat of North Korea or you have a repeat of Iraq and these are not our greatest achievements as civilised human beings.

Iran's current nuclear capacity

FT: You talk about them having a small R&D programme. There's a certain amount of cloudiness about where they are. We know that they have two 164 centrifuge cascades above ground in the "R&D" facility at Natanz. They have also said but sometimes denied that they have two further 164 centrifuge cascades below ground in in Natanz. Is that where they are at the moment?

ElBaradei: I think that's where they are at the moment. I think they probably even have one, I'm not sure they've even installed the second one, so it is still just one, so it is still small scale,so whatever they have, what we have seen today, is not the kind of capacity that would enable them to make bombs.

FT: So have the two [cascades of centrifuges] above ground been functioning smoothly at all?

ElBaradei: They have been functioning, I think they have been functioning, they have been able to run them simultaneously, and that also shows as I said that they acquire the knowledge.

The UN demands for suspension of uranium enrichment

ElBaradei: The idea… to continue to focus only on the suspension in my view is not the right approach. You can focus on suspension because it is a confidence building measure but… if I look at it from a weapons perspective there are much more important issues to me than the suspension of this.

The ideal situation is to make sure that there is no industrial capacity, that there is full inspection, because you are asking me how much do they have underground, well I can tell you, but we are not implementing the Additional Protocol [of the NPT], so I don't have spot checks and I do not have the confidence I would have with the Additional Protocol.

FT: When did the inspectors last visit?

ElBaradei: It was last week [when] we were there. I mean the inspection is going smoothly insofar as that I think. It gives us additional authority, it's not just the spot checks. I mean spot checks are not that important, I mean frankly you go after a week, you see what's happened. But what happens is that it gives us [more insight into] R&D. For example [under the additional protocol, currently not applied by Iran, we have] authority to see manufacturing of equipment, which for now we are not able to see. Are they manufacturing more equipment to install later on, that we are not able to see at the moment.

Top priorities

ElBaradei: My three priorities as I said are [for] Iran not to go to industrial capacity until the issues are settled, confidence is built, we need full inspection, involving additional protocol, and at all costs I would like to see Iran not moving out of the [treaty based non-proliferation] system. That would set a terrible precedent and I do not want them to come back in a couple of years and say: 'Good morning gentlemen, we have nuclear weapons.'

The prospects of Iran achieving industrial scale enrichment.

FT: If you define industrial capacity as a cascade of 3,000 centrifuges or more, since if that was fully functioning it would take a year to get enough fissile material for a bomb, how far away do you think they are at the current stage of progress?

ElBaradei: I think they are still far away

FT: A year, two years?

ElBaradei: It's difficult, I really like not to take numbers, to speculate, but away from what, from developing the three thousand [centrifuges]?

FT: From getting three thousand functioning smoothly.

ElBaradei: I don't know, it could be a year, it could be six months. It could be a year, but we need to remember but as long as even they have 3,000 [centrifuges], as long as these 3,000 are under [NPT] safeguards, they cannot go beyond five per cent, people forget that… it's really a risk assessment more of tomorrow more than it is of today…

The choices ahead

ElBaradei: I don't judge intention. It's very difficult to judge. And you know it very much on which kind of environment you create in the region. If you create an environment in which Iran feels isolated, in which Iran is subject to further sanctions, then some of these worst case scenarios could take place, because then you would put the hard liners in the driver's seat, you would make the country feel more and more insecure and then some of these scenarios could happen.

If there is another narrative, based on engagement, based on dialogue, based on reconciling differences, based on stabilising Iraq, stabilising Lebanon, opening up a trade agreement with the Iranians based on providing [them] with nuclear technology, western technology, as the six party offer [tabled last year by EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana on behalf of the UK, France, Germany, the US, China and Russia] promises, then this progression could be quite different, because first of all Iran would not necessarily fear that they would be attacked.

FT So the US needs to give security guarantees?

ElBaradei: Oh yes, absolutely, then we should also stop calling names and threaten regime change. And of course if we give them all the technology they need then of course it's costly anyway [to pursue their own uranium enrichment], even if they wanted to. However, we need to explore all these options…

Iran sees enrichment.. sooner or later as a strategic goal because they feel that this will bring them power, prestige and influence. They feel that this will bring them into the company of some of the large and influential [states], the 12, 13 countries with enrichment processing, even if they don't have a weapon, and to change that perception you need to then to look into the whole regional and global security position, because unfortunately a lot of that is true. A nuclear capability is a nuclear deterrent in many ways…

When you see here in the UK the programme for modernising Trident, which basically gets the UK far into the 21st century with a nuclear deterrent, it is difficult then for us to turn around and tell everybody else that nuclear deterrents are really no good for you, it does not increase your security, because all the weapon states, without exception, are either modernising, or thinking about developing new weapons not only for deterrence purpose, but actually usable [ones]. Statements have been made during the last couple of years about possible actual use, such as mini-nukes, bunker buster. So the environment is do as I say not do as I say and that is not sustainable.

What Iran needs to begin negotiations

FT: Your 'time out' idea is deliberately vague. Would it be enough for the Iranians to suspend enrichment activities since the resolution calls on them to do more?

ElBaradei: I think the resolution talks about if they suspend enrichment-related activities, [then] they will suspend sanctions. They ask them to do a host of other things, but suspension of sanctions is linked to the enrichment. And yes, there is a part of constructive ambiguity because I would like to leave people room for manoeuvre to negotiate the details.

I cannot replace myself for governments, it is governments to negotiate the details, but it is encouraging that I have not seen anyone so far reject the idea. Everyone so far is saying we like this but we want to add this or that or the other. I still think it's very much an idea that's alive and kicking. President Putin recently came in support of it, the Germans, the French said that this mutual suspension is a good idea. The Americans also did not reject it so far although they said that the Security Council resolution is clear. That's fine, but somebody needs to take it and translate it into a working solution.

FT: Have you seen any solid or substantial response from the Iranians? I know that they didn't make a big noise on Revolution Day [which Iran celebrates on11 February].

ElBaradei: That was frankly quite positive, because all the expectations were that they were going to announce that they were going to go for the 3,000 centrifuges and maybe some other stuff.

They did not do that and I think the president [Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad] said he would make that announcement in April. That to me is an effort to reach out. It's a moderate reaction, frankly. So we still have this window of opportunity, but the window of opportunity is frankly until our board meets.

Even if my report is coming out this week, I can still add and reverse judgements there until the 6th of March. So we have a window that is not very long, but still I would still like to see something happening before the board because once I go to the board then you go into this sort of autopilot process, the board would react, the Security Council would react, it then makes things much more difficult.

The US

FT: How constructive has the US been?

ElBaradei: The US has been helpful in joining the six party offer. That took a lot of time and was a step in the right direction. I still hope that eventually the IS will be able to get into direct contact with Iran about the regional issues and not only the nuclear issue because they are very much linked, the connection between the regional issue and the nuclear issue are very much linked because they are all about security, we should not delude ourselves about that.

The US building up of military force in the Gulf, I think it's not only [because of] the nuclear issue, it's.. Iraq, it's… Afghanistan, Gulf protection, we have seen that over time, people flexing muscles, and the Iranians have been making parades.

But flexing muscles and showing how much force you have, it's part of the game, but… the issues at hand are not going to be resolved by shows of force and frankly a lot of issues we are facing in the Middle East today are absolutely immune to any resolution through the use of force…

I am all for dialogue, as I am all from negotiation, not because this is a soft approach, but I know if you engage people you moderate their behaviour. If you isolate them you radicalise them. That's why I always say if you have a problem sit and talk it over but if you continue to think that dialogue is the icing on the cake and I will only do it if people are behaving well you might have to wait for very long.

North Korea

FT: Some people see the agreement on North Korea as a re-enactment of the Agreed Framework [the 1994 nuclear deal between the US and Pyongyang] but this time North Korea had nuclear weapons. So was it a mistake for the US to walk away?

ElBaradei: I leave it to the US government and the public to judge that. People refer to this agreement as the son of the Agreed Framework. Hopeful, it's a legitimate son, hopefully it will allow us to go forward. I have a lot on my plate for me now, while I'm still doing this job, to reminisce and say what we have done wrong.

We have done a lot of things wrong on this and many issues but the important thing is to focus on the future. I think this is a step in the right direction. It is not the ideal solution. Korea should not have had nuclear weapons. We have mismanaged nuclear North Korea to the point where they have a nuclear weapon so that's why I say we do not want a repeat of it in Iran…

And it is not ideal because we are going to deal [with] inspection in an incremental way, but the world is not black and white, as long as we are talking and not bombing each other, I think that is positive.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007

--
Siddharth Varadarajan
Associate Editor
The Hindu
I.N.S. Building, Rafi Marg
New Delhi - 1

Telephone: +91-11-2371-5426
Fax: +91-11-2371-8158
Mobile: +91-98111-60260

The Hindu: http://www.thehindu.com
My personal website: http://svaradarajan.blogspot.com