US PRESIDENT George Bush’s plea on 11 February to stop the spread of nuclear weapons has not been greeted with universal acclaim. It is flawed, critics say, because it ignores the bombs and technologies that can give birth to such weapons in the US, the UK, France and Japan.
Even Mohamed ElBaradei, the director-general of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency, was diplomatically blunt. “We must abandon the unworkable notion that it is morally reprehensible for some countries to pursue weapons of mass destruction yet morally acceptable for others to rely on them for security,” he said.
Others point out that although Bush wants to curb uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing in North Korea and Iran, he doesn’t mind other countries using the same technologies. the UK and France run major nuclear reprocessing plants, while Japan is due to open one soon.
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“By putting forward a plan that denies nuclear fuel technology to the developing world while turning a blind eye to its continued misuse in advanced nuclear states, the president’s plan will have little chance of success,” argued Paul Leventhal, the founding president of the Nuclear Control Institute, a lobby group based in Washington DC.
Bush’s credibility has also been dented by the US’s poor record in recovering the 17.5 tonnes of highly enriched uranium it has sold around the world for use in research reactors. According to an audit released on 9 February by Gregory Friedman, the inspector-general of the US Department of Energy, only about 2.6 tonnes is likely to be returned to the US.
