Will Canada go the non-proliferation distance? By Douglas Roche Published April 14, 2010

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US President Barack Obama dramatized world attention on nuclear dangers during his extraordinary 47-nation Washington summit this week by warning that just an apple-sized container of plutonium could set off a nuclear bomb that "could kill and injure hundreds of thousands of innocent people." A "catastrophe for the world" is waiting to happen, he said.

It's a safe bet that the leaders of so many states where civilian nuclear sites lack even standard military protections, like barbed wire and checkpoints, will now invest in fuel vaults, motion detectors and central alarms. They left the summit with a new resolve to tighten security measures for all nuclear materials.

But since there is enough nuclear fuel in dozens of nations to make another 120,000 nuclear bombs, the question can rightly be asked: Did the Obama summit do enough to protect people from an impending catastrophe?

The answer is that Obama may have bought the world some time. But with nuclear power plants coming online in many countries, the risk of nuclear terrorism is going up, not down.

Obama himself recognized that the summit was only "one part of a broader, comprehensive agenda that the United States is pursuing—including reducing our nuclear arsenal and stopping the spread of nuclear weapons—an agenda that will bring us closer to our ultimate goal of a world without nuclear weapons."

Obama is prodding his fellow leaders to recognize that the nuclear risk is not confined to terrorism. The full risk consists of a growing number of nations refining nuclear fuels and, in the case of the suspicions about Iran, enriching uranium to bomb-grade level.

Can the world find a way to guarantee that nuclear energy will never be used for bombs? That is the question Obama is getting at.

He knows very well that global co-operation to secure all nuclear materials is impeded by the powerful nuclear weapons states, which think they can set the rules controlling access to nuclear energy while maintaining their arsenals of 23,000 nuclear weapons.

The president might get limited co-operation to control the most egregious cases of nuclear vulnerability, as in Pakistan. But a growing number of countries are chaffing at the idea of new international restrictions that would apply to them while the big boys exercise their nuclear hegemony.

Like it or not, the continued possession of huge stocks of nuclear weapons by the US, Russia, the UK, France and China—the five permanent members of the UN Security Council—is inextricably linked to new efforts to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons and even efforts to strengthen control systems of nuclear fuels.

The Canadian government contributed to the Washington summit by stating that it would ship highly enriched uranium spent fuel from the Chalk River nuclear site back to the US. That set a good example, along with Canada's efforts to help Mexico convert its weapons-grade fuel to a lower level and strengthen the G8 Global partnership to safely dismantle nuclear materials in Russia and other places.

But Prime Minister Harper should not think these moves are sufficient in addressing the real problem. He must couple this work to strengthen in a substantive way the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Non-Proliferation Treaty, two instruments that do the heavy lifting in reducing nuclear dangers. The NPT calls for nuclear disarmament negotiations and non-proliferation measures—as well as providing for the peaceful use of the atom.

The project of the 505 members of the Order of Canada—a prestigious lot to be sure—in endorsing preparatory work for a Nuclear Weapons Convention has hit the nail on the head. This would be a global treaty that would ban all nuclear weapons and put effective international control systems on nuclear energy.

Premature? The UN secretary-general and a growing number of world leaders don't think so. And President Obama, in bringing India, Pakistan and Israel—three nuclear weapons nations that shun the Non-Proliferation Treaty—to the Washington summit is indicating a "comprehensive" approach may be down the line that could be a new global regime.

The US military-political establishment is certainly not ready for global negotiations. There is powerful opposition within the US to Obama's vision of a nuclear weapons free world.

Shrewdly, Obama is building a base of support by first pointing so vividly to the nuclear terrorist threat. His new Nuclear Posture Review, demanding that proliferation of nuclear weapons be halted and that North Korea and Iran reverse their "nuclear ambitions," recognizes that the US must meet its own NPT Article VI obligations to nuclear disarmament in order to be in a stronger position in advancing non-proliferation measures.

In addition to US pursuit of "rigorous measures to reinvigorate" the NPT, the review includes this passage concerning steps to be taken: "Initiate a comprehensive national research and development program to support continued progress toward a world free of nuclear weapons, including expanded work on verification technologies."

This is exactly the approach Canada should take.

At the end of the Washington summit, the 47 leaders issued a communiqué calling on all states to work co-operatively "as an international community to advance nuclear security, requesting and providing assistance as necessary." How much lasting co-operation will there be when the camera lights are turned off? The next such summit, two years from now in South Korea, will be a test.

Meanwhile, the US and Russia have committed themselves to converting 68 tons of plutonium—enough for 17,000 nuclear weapons—to electricity and other peaceful uses. Obama has started down the road to a nuclear weapons free world. How many states will go the distance?

Former senator and disarmament ambassador Douglas Roche is author of Creative Dissent: A Politician's Struggle for Peace.

editor@embassymag.ca