From the perspective of a relatively plentiful, relatively cost effective, relatively clean, relatively well technically developed energy source, nuclear doesnt have too many serious competitors right now.
But, there are a number of problems that still have to be considered... least of all the threat from terrorists and rogue stages of various types.
Posted on Tue, Aug. 31, 2004
The new nuclear nightmare
Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service
(KRT) - The following editorial appeared in the Chicago Tribune on Sunday, Aug. 29, 2004:
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About half a century ago, President Dwight Eisenhower and his aides had what seemed to be a brilliant idea to avert a nuclear arms race. It came to be called "Atoms for Peace." Those who had nuclear weapons, mainly the Soviet Union and the United States, would help those who didn't have such weapons develop peaceful nuclear energy projects, like power reactors. In return, those nations were expected not to divert uranium to build a bomb.
The idea backfired disastrously. It hastened the spread of nuclear technology - and weapons - around the world. Moreover, it stoked a lucrative private competition to supply such technology to more and more countries and demolished any attempts even to partially stuff the nuclear genie back in the bottle.
Now the world faces a looming threat. Osama bin Laden has spoken of acquiring nuclear weapons as a "religious duty." North Korea may have as many as eight bombs, and has reportedly begun selling key ingredients for making bombs to other countries. Iran is playing a cat-and-mouse game with the United Nations' nuclear inspectors while it continues work that will enable it to build its own bomb.
Earlier this year, a vast nuclear black market was exposed, its tendrils leading no one knows exactly where. But this is certain: All the nuclear technology and know-how needed to make a bomb was for sale, short of the actual fissile material, to the highest bidders. The market, led by Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, was thriving, dramatically accelerating the capability of North Korea, Iran and Libya to build bombs.
That black market - dubbed the "nuclear Wal-Mart" - has exploded a decade of assumptions and presumptions about how effective efforts to prevent nuclear proliferation have been.
Even the normally cautious director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, has been speaking bluntly about the need for urgent reform in the treaties and agreements that are supposed to limit the spread of nuclear weapons.
"If the world does not change course," he wrote, "we risk self-destruction."
That is not hyperbole. A bomb far more powerful than those exploded at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II can now fit into a car trunk.
On July 1, 1968, the United States and dozens of other countries signed the nuclear nonproliferation treaty. It sought to freeze the number of nuclear nations at five - the United States, France, Britain, the Soviet Union and China - while helping nations that forswore nuclear weapons to build peaceful nuclear reactors.
The nonproliferation treaty and the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, which was empowered to monitor treaty compliance, have failed to halt the spread of the bomb. Determined cheaters could, and did, develop weapons in secret, capitalizing on the expertise gained legitimately from nuclear nations.
The current web of international treaties and controls on nuclear weapons and power reactors was set up for a far different world. For one thing, these agreements were targeted at nations. They were not designed to deal with the likelihood that a terrorist group would, at some point, attempt to buy, steal or build a bomb, or detonate radioactive material in a so-called dirty bomb. All those frightful possibilities are more likely now.
In June 2003, Eliza Manningham-Buller, director of Britain's domestic intelligence service, MI5, told a London think tank that renegade scientists have helped Al Qaeda in its effort to develop chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapons, or CBRN.
"Sadly, given the widespread proliferation of the technical knowledge to construct these weapons, it will only be a matter of time before a crude version of a CBRN attack is launched at a major Western city and only a matter of time before that crude version becomes something more sophisticated," she said.
The United States seems to agree. The federal government reportedly is resurrecting a scientific art that had faded since the cold war: fallout analysis. That's the ability to quickly trace the roots of a nuclear explosion to who detonated it and where the nuclear material originated.
There is no way to rid the world of this threat. It can be reduced, but not eliminated. It would be simpler if it were only a matter of dismantling nuclear weapons, but it's not. There are hundreds of tons of the materials needed to build bombs - highly enriched uranium or plutonium - all over the world. Some of it is well guarded, some not. Some is used in hundreds of civilian reactors, often located on university campuses, used for research, training and medicine.
By one estimate, there's enough highly enriched uranium and plutonium already in the world to fuel at least 100,000 nuclear weapons. There are plants in several countries churning out even more enriched material.
Ever since Atoms for Peace, there has been talk of banning the manufacture of more bomb-grade materials for weapons and even for peaceful uses. Unfortunately, that has come to nothing. And even if a ban were enacted tomorrow, the threat would still be immense. Because the threat is so diverse, there is no magic bullet, no single approach, to thwart it.
Diplomacy alone won't do it. Some nuclear nations - notably India, Pakistan and Israel - haven't even signed the nonproliferation treaty. There's no way to stop the nuclear trade without international law enforcement and an enhanced global intelligence effort. A U.S.-led effort, known as the Proliferation Security Initiative, scored a huge coup in recent months, forcing the shutdown of Libya's nuclear weapons program and exposing the underground nuclear bazaar.
Earlier this year, Russia joined the effort, another positive development. The United States and Russia must secure and dismantle weapons and weapons-grade materials in the former Soviet Union and elsewhere. Behind that must be a credible allied military threat against any nation that seeks to secretly develop nuclear weapons.
Diplomatic efforts have not been entirely feckless. Over the years, those efforts have helped to restrain many nations from developing weapons and spreading nuclear technology. More nations have abandoned nascent efforts to acquire or develop nuclear weapons than now possess them. Egypt, Sweden, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Yugoslavia, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Australia, Libya, Argentina and Brazil have considered and abandoned the goal of going nuclear.
Sweden and Switzerland, however, are not Iran and Iraq. The difficulty that Saddam Hussein's Iraq had in trying to build the bomb was not a testament to the international atomic agency, which was completely bamboozled.
Iraq came perilously close to succeeding. David Albright, who worked as an agency weapons inspector there, says the Iraqis were hampered by inexperience, poor management and technical mistakes. One example: A technical error in the melting of uranium metal caused so much to be wasted that there wasn't enough left for a bomb. The world can't rely on such luck to stop the spread of nuclear weapons.
The first step to controlling nuclear proliferation has to be the creation of a potent IAEA, empowered to focus on blowing the whistle early on countries such as Iran and North Korea. The idea should be to alert the world to nuclear outlaws more quickly than is accomplished now - and to act on that information. As it is, the IAEA is so bound by its narrow rules, it still hasn't declared Iran is seeking to build nuclear weapons.
Gary Milhollin of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control rightly has called the IAEA's response "the blunder of the century."
For many years the world assumed that the horrific consequences of a nuclear explosion, and the threat of nuclear retaliation, were deterrent enough. That's no longer the case. Terrorists, living in their shadowy worlds, cannot be deterred in the way that nations can. There are no economic or political capitals of terrorism to target for retaliation.
The task, then, is evident: to make it as difficult as possible for terrorists or rogue states to buy, steal or develop nuclear weapons. As the world's only superpower, the United States can set a nuclear agenda for the world. With its economic and diplomatic clout, it can make things happen.
It won't be easy. Many countries with nuclear capabilities shun more international controls, often because they're costly to enforce and threaten to cut into lucrative nuclear markets.
Treaties alone won't do it. A treaty is still just a piece of paper. Terrorists don't sign treaties. Those nations that would help them often don't abide by treaties.
The world is a far different place than was envisioned by Atoms for Peace. In the 1950s, some officials, including some top Soviets, apparently protested to Ike that his Atoms for Peace idea could easily spread weapons-grade materials - and the potential to build bombs - worldwide, writes Paul Leventhal, founding president of the Nuclear Control Institute. The U.S. response? "Ways will be found" to prevent that.
Fifty-one years later, it's obvious that those ways never were found. That doesn't mean a nuclear holocaust is inevitable. But it does mean that the world cannot afford to believe in serendipity to protect itself from the most devastating weapons ever devised.
At the dawn of the nuclear age, Eisenhower's aides comforted themselves with one myth. As the 21st-century nuclear threat grows and evolves, world leaders have been clinging to another: that the world's most dangerous weapons could be kept out of the hands of terrorists through diplomacy and good intentions.
