About time Canberra dusted off its uranium policy
By Hamish McDonald March 11, 2006
Sydney Morning Herald
SUN XIAODI is a man with an interesting story to tell the Australian officials rushing to fix up a safeguards agreement covering future uranium exports to China before next month’s visit by the Premier, Wen Jiaba Sun, aged 50, spent much of his working life at the No. 92 uranium mine in a remote Tibetan-populated region of Gansu province. A year ago he surfaced in Beijing with some startling allegations about malpractice at the mine.
As well as accusing mine administrators of allowing radioactive contamination of local land and water, resulting in above-normal cancer rates, Mr Sun said they had been operating the mine illegally after it was officially closed in 2002.
The reluctance of local officials to obey Beijing’s orders to shut down thousands of small, unsafe coalmines is well known. Many are investors in the mines. But the idea of an illegal uranium mine is shocking. To whom would they sell the uranium ore? Are drums of yellowcake being smuggled across north-west China into the markets of Central Asia?
Unfortunately, Mr Sun is not available to elaborate. Nearly 11 months ago he was picked off the streets of Beijing by men in an unmarked car. His lodgings were searched and friends told he was detained for "a very serious crime related to state security".
Whether his allegations are true or not, or whether similar cases are awaiting a brave whistleblower, we don’t know. But the case points up a bizarre contradiction in Australia’s uranium export policy as it still stands after John Howard’s visit to India this week.
On one hand, uranium exports to China are OK, because China was one of five countries that exploded a nuclear device before 1967 and could therefore get into the nuclear non-proliferation treaty as a weapons state.
India’s nuclear program lagged, so it was unable to carry out its first test until 1974. It pretended this was a "peaceful nuclear explosion" for a long time, but did not pretend it was eschewing the weapons option and stayed out of the treaty.
China did not join the treaty until 1992, and only in 1996 did it specifically stop nuclear assistance to non-treaty states. Before then it was the mother of all proliferators, helping Pakistan attain an untested nuclear capability by the late 1980s. Pakistan’s "rogue" nuclear scientist, Abdul Qadeer Khan, later sub-proliferated bomb designs and enrichment centrifuges to Libya, Iran and North Korea.
Norinco and some other Chinese state arms corporations remain under US embargo for proliferating technology relating to weapons of mass destruction and their delivery missiles. Western intelligence sources say fake "end-user" certificates are easily forthcoming from Chinese arms salesmen.
By contrast, India has never given any hint of nuclear proliferation, and tightened controls at America’s request before the first Gulf War on precursor materials for chemical weapons. It has agreed to put 14 of its 22 power reactors under International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards and inspections to verify that any foreign-sourced fuel is not diverted to making weapons. These will be comparable to the agency and bilateral verification routines China will have to accept to get our uranium.
Which is the more trustworthy? Because India is not an treaty member, Mr Howard says Australia is bound not to export uranium to it. The critics of the US nuclear deal, which Australia is now under Indian pressure to follow, say an exception would encourage renegades like Iran to break out of the non-proliferation treaty.
Actually, barriers to exporting uranium to India are erected by Canberra’s policies, not the treaty’s rules. The treaty allows export of "source or special fissionable material" to non-member states for peaceful purposes, as long as safeguards are applied. India’s case - like those of Israel and Pakistan - is quite different from those of Iran, Libya and North Korea, which all pursued nuclear weapons development covertly while members of the treaty.
Uranium imports for civilian reactors will certainly free limited domestic supplies for weapons-making in India, but the same applies to China, which is expanding its current minimal battery of about 30 land-based nuclear missiles in order to retain deterrence in the face of the US’s new missile defences.
We don’t have to show enthusiasm for India going nuclear - India has its own critics like the writer Arundhati Roy, who see it as betrayal of independence ideals - and a bilateral deal would not get India into the treaty as a weapons state.
But neither should we act as though we trust communist China more than democratic India. Canberra’s policy needs to be updated.
This is the first of a weekly column by the Herald’s new Asia-Pacific editor.
Copyright © 2006. The Sydney Morning Herald.
