Not Iran, Not North Korea, Not Libya, but Pakistan

Norman Dombey on the nuclear threat to international security

In March 2002 I attended one of the regular Foreign and Commonwealth Office meetings on nuclear non-proliferation. We were told by a senior official that Iraq had reassembled its nuclear scientists and was reconstituting its nuclear weapons programme, which had been completely disbanded by UN inspectors after the 1991 Gulf War. In September 2002, Downing Street published its dossier claiming that Iraq had ‘sought . . . uranium from Africa’ and had imported hundreds of aluminium tubes alleged to be for use in uranium enrichment. Both claims, if true, would be signs of renewed Iraqi nuclear activity. Yet Dr Imad Khadduri, who worked in the Iraqi nuclear programme from 1968 until he left for Canada in 1998 and was involved in most major Iraqi nuclear activities in those thirty years, wrote in November 2002 in a Canadian journal that he found the ‘allegations about Iraq’s nuclear capability, as continuously advanced by the Americans and the British, to be ridiculous’.

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[1] North Korea’s Weapons Programmes: A Net Assessment, edited by Gary Samore (Palgrave, 120 pp., £65, January, 1 4039 3324 3).

[2] See www.fas.org/nuke/guide/pakistan/nuke/.

[3] See his talk to the Harvard-Sussex Programme, ‘War, Words and WMD’, available at www.sussex.ac.uk/spru/hsp/sussexdays.html.

Vol. 26 No. 17 · 2 September 2004 » Norman Dombey » Not Iran, Not North Korea, Not Libya, but Pakistan (print version)
Pages 32-35 | 4759 words

Letters

From Jim Harper

It's doubtless true that, as Norman Dombey suggests, the Bush administration would prefer states such as Iran, Libya and North Korea to be denied the ability to build nuclear weapons (LRB, 2 September). But Dombey also convincingly shows how very far most of those states are from having that ability: even if they have made some progress, none would be able to build enough weapons to constitute a significant military threat. Perhaps we should credit Bush and his negotiators – who bullied the International Atomic Energy Authority into putting a halt to Iran's indisputably legitimate non-weapons uranium enrichment programmes – with the same knowledge. They do, after all, employ advisers with a fair smattering of nuclear physics. The American diplomatic histrionics over the nuclear threat from 'axis of evil' states must therefore have other motives. First among these are financial. Dombey rightly says that uranium enrichment programmes worldwide have generally been initiated in order to avoid having 'to rely on the United States for fuel, since the US Congress could (and would) impose new conditions on delivery'. The flip-side of this is that US companies which produce and sell enriched uranium are determined to ensure that there are places where they can still sell it. I say US 'companies', but in fact there is only one: based in Bethesda, Maryland, it's called the US Enrichment Corporation, and was born six years ago as a privatised spin-off from the Department of Energy. USEC has a history of influencing government policy: it nearly scuppered the agreement brokered by Clinton whereby Russian nuclear warheads are reprocessed in return for cash (it didn't want to pay the going rate), and successfully lobbied the Department of Commerce to impose tariffs on imports from its European competitor Urenco. It's a nice irony that the enrichment facilities Iran was developing were based on advanced centrifuge technology rather than the old-fashioned gaseous diffusion process USEC employs. An American company mustn't be outdone.

Jim Harper
Waverly, Ohio