Atomic Buddha - fuelling New Delhi

Back on July 18, 2005, United States President George W. Bush and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh agreed in principle to closer US-India civil nuclear ties.

That agreement, recently much advanced, swings open the door to India purchasing uranium on the open market.

On Wednesday, The Australian reported that Federal Cabinet resolved to start shipping uranium to India, subject to Australian inspections of Indian nuclear plants where the yellowcake will be used.

Get set for an anti Delhi orgy, where so-called environmentalists, “internationalists”, politicians, academics and pro-Islamabad types will do their level best to remind the public that India lost access to the international uranium market in 1974 after it detonated a nuclear device. Further, they’ll badger, given that India is not a signatory to the United Nations’ Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT), selling New Delhi yellowcake, will only lead to the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

This bunkum was recently unmasked as errant nonsense by the Nuclear Security Science and Policy Institute at Texas A&M University. Addressing the issue of weapons grade material production, the Institute claimed that the proposed understanding between Washington and New Delhi would be helpful to the cause of nuclear non proliferation. The warming of ties between Washington and New Delhi would place some 30-odd additional Indian nuclear facilities, including eight reactors, under international auspices. It would also close one of India’s plutonium production reactors.

Presently, the world’s greatest democracy produces two, perhaps four on the outside, nuclear weapons a year. However it does have the capacity to produce closer to 30 weapons annually. But to do so means diverting large quantities of domestically sourced uranium into weapons grade material, which in turn would greatly reduce its capacity to generate electricity. And to date, India has chosen to focus its (nuclear) energy on generating electricity for civilian use rather than manufacturing atomic weapons.

Hostility to New Delhi’s nuclear ambitions is at best, couched in ignorance, and at worst, in bigotry.

First, antagonists claim that Australian uranium could be transformed into nuclear weapons by India. This ignores India’s limited domestic supply of uranium that could easily be earmarked for weapons grade production, in the absence of imported nuclear fuel. That said, assuming India still wanted to import more nuclear fuel, and that Australia refused to sell it, India could source it (and with some effort, the technology) from Russia or France.

Second, it is believed by many that as India has not signed the NPT, selling her uranium is asking for more proliferation.

This farcical statement assumes the NPT means something, when in fact it means nothing. NPT banner wavers believe that the treaty actually stops proliferation. Truth is, the NPT is manifestly unable to stop the type of proliferation currently underway by jihadists worldwide.

Let’s recap shall we?

Since the 1960s, the possession of nuclear weapons has been the exclusive prerogative of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council: the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, China and France.

In 1970, the NPT recognised the overlap between electric power generation and the construction of weapons, and attempted to place controls on the spread of nuclear fuel and technology. The NPT was created in the framework of the Cold War’s guarantees of Mutually Assured Destruction, where nuclear umbrellas offered by the United States and the Soviet Union, respectively to its allies and clients, was all the insurance nations needed to protect themselves from any potential aggression.

The NPT has four elements.

The first prohibits its signatories, all 184 of them, from attempting to build nuclear weapons. Note the 184 excludes the UN’s permanent five (who are “beyond the NPT”) and three states (India, Israel and Pakistan) that have never signed the treaty.

The second element promises those same (184) states a carrot for affixing their signature to the NPT: they’ll have the right to acquire peaceful nuclear technology, subject to an inspections regime.

The third part gives the UN’s permanent five a blanket exemption from such undignified and unwarranted inspections.

And the fourth element vaguely promises that the five nuclear states will somehow, someway, someday willingly disarm themselves and joyfully discard any vestige of military might they may have. Fat chance.

Given the NPT was never reinforced by sanctions (let alone by the threat of force) against those who signed but chose not to comply, the treaty was doomed from the start and was never much more than a mere inconvenience to those nations who opted to acquire nuclear material or technology on the sly.

The champions of the NPT have averted their gaze when it comes to the farce that the NPT has become. Most recently, a proud signatory, the Jihadist Republic of Iran, admitted that it has been and continues to seek nuclear capabilities. Laughingly, the mad mullahs would have the world believe that Teheran merely wants uranium to light up homes and fire up mosques when in fact the truth is a touch different. North Korea is another terrific example of a nation signing the NPT, but merrily going about arming itself to the teeth, at the expense of feeding the mouths of its people.

The issue of nuclear proliferation is scrutinised in William Langewiesche's The Atomic Bazaar. The book will appeal to Hindu haters, anti-Americans and pro-Pakistanis. And of course to those Australians who believe that India’s economic future lies in harnessing wind energy. These groups seem united in their determination to impede the modernisation of the Awakening Buddha.

Langewiesche attacks the United States policy on proliferation (it says it’s grossly ineffective) and refuses to chastise European appeasement of rogues getting their greasy paws on nuclear technology (it hints that we should deal with this as the new reality). And he’s mute on what should be done to Pakistan in the light of A.Q. Khan’s atomic achievements.

This book is not about nuclear weapons in the hands of nation states, rather it’s about the proliferation of such weapons in the hands of non state actors, namely terror groups. Even so, anti-proliferationists will no doubt dredge it for mud to hurl at India.

Reading Mr Langewiesche’s book reminds me of an average school boy landing a date with the smartest and prettiest girl in the neighbourhood, only to realise that while landing the date is great news, he has nothing in common with the girl. Yes, going out together does wonders for his social standing and it looks good, but it doesn’t feel right. It’s missing something. And so does this book.

William Langewiesche used to write, and write well, for one of America’s finest magazines, The Atlantic Monthly. He has since moved on to Vanity Fair. His style is easy to spot: beautiful lengthy essays, measured in their thousands of words, where each essay, even if it was part of a series (over several months), could stand alone. And usually did. This is exactly the feel one takes away from his four-chapter “book”. Chapters are united in plot but alas disconnected in characters, time and their capacity to fascinate the reader. Pity.

While William Langewiesche knows the science of physics and the craft of writing, he knows little of history. Like a mushroom cloud following a nuclear blast, his bias is visible for miles around when he fails to distinguish between the uses of nuclear weapons in the quest for good, and their uses in the pursuit of evil.

This sinful moral equivalence mindset is present from the get-go, where the author opens with a lucid outline of the basic physics of the atom bomb that pulverised Hiroshima. He explains just how the B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay, flew on a clear day in August 1945 over Hiroshima, and some 43 seconds after dropping Little Boy, the weapon exploded “lighting up the sky”.

Langewiesche reminds us that the total killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki numbered close to 220,000. In a fashion expected of Japanese historical revisionists, he throws in his two yen’s worth: “The intent was to terrorise a nation to the maximum extent, and there is nothing like nuking civilians to achieve that effect." Mr Langewiesche doesn’t offer a syllable in defence of the bomb, where he should have confessed that the bombings actually brought forward the closing of the war and spared perhaps upwards of two million lives, both American and Japanese, by dispensing with an otherwise mandatory massive allied landing on the Japanese shore.

Getting his leftist bias off his chest, Langeweische then outlines the two different fuels needed to fire nuclear weapons: highly enriched uranium (HEU) and plutonium, and goes about illustrating how a cunning and determined jihadist would seek the much hyped “black market” for nukes in Russia.

Finding himself in the closed town of Ozersk, reached by first flying to the Siberian city of Yekateringberg, he is enthralled by a nuclear facility packed with uranium and other treasures for would-be terrorists. While guards are indeed posted around the facility, he is dispirited that not only are they mostly under-paid and over-drugged, but all the mod cons provided by the United States government to minimise theft are mostly underused or useless. For instance, the radiation detectors designed to intercept theft of nuclear fuel, are mostly switched off as they are far too sensitive. They often sound the alarm when locals walk past with nothing more harmful than a few fish recently caught in the nearby toxic lake.

Scanning the nuclear assets available at Ozersk, the question remaining for any terrorist is how to move the goods out of Central Asia and to a place where they can be secretly assembled. The closest border to Ozersk is Kazakhstan, but it is out of contention for “political reasons”.

That leaves two options: Georgia, which the writer claims is extremely corrupt, and Turkey’s border with Iran. One frontier is monitored by very pliable border guards, manning a resplendent customs station and six lane highway (generously paid for by the US Government), and the other national frontier is manned by Kurdish tribal chiefs rather than the Turkish military. You couldn’t get a more porous border if you spent your lifetime looking, the writer alludes.

And once the uranium is over the border, it is very straightforward to make it useful, we’re told.

The balance of the book is devoted to the career of Dr Abdul Qadeer (A.Q) Khan, the so-called “father” of Pakistan’s Islamic bomb. The writer acknowledges (almost salutes) Dr Kahn’s successful manufacture of the HEU (as opposed to a plutonium) based Islamic Bomb.

Dr Khan worked at a Dutch facility where uranium was enriched for peaceful purposes. He had no problems stealing plans for centrifuges and buying what he needed in Europe (mostly, but not always on the open market). Langweische is very reserved and not at all stirred to passion when explaining that Khan obtained all he needed, even though the sale of such products was officially barred via NPT-conferred export controls.

Dr Khan’s genius is that he seems to have perfected a simplified delivery system of distributing bombs. For a fee of roughly one hundred million American dollars, Dr Kahn offered to home deliver his products (IKEA-like) to the despots of the world community: the Kims of Pyongyang, the "honour" killing mullahs of Teheran, the Al-Asaads of Damascus and those so-called western “allies”, the limb amputating Al-Sa’ud family of Riyadh.

In October 2003, a ship carrying centrifuge parts (from Dubai) bound for Libya, proudly sporting motifs of Khan's operation, was intercepted by the United States soon after it entered the Mediterranean after passing through Suez. Subsequent to that, the good doctor was placed under house arrest in Islamabad.

Incarcerating Dr Khan in his sumptuous castle, according to Langewiesche, did nothing to diminish the nasty network he established. It had the same behaviour modification effects one would expect if Paris Hilton was confined to her Beverly Hills palace. Zippo. Dr Khan’s organisation remains as it has always been: free flowing, amorphous, technically savvy, mutable and fundamentally amoral.

Honestly, such features are not the trademarks of democratic giants like India. Rather, they are the hallmarks of successful Islamoterror groups like Hezbollah, Jemaah Islamiya, Hamas and al-Qaida. And their Koran thumping sponsors, such as Iran.

Every once in a while, when deciding on foreign policy, and weighing up all significant issues, Federal Cabinet gets it so very right. This has been one such instance.

Let the shipments begin.