This piece dithers on a bit before getting to the heart of the matter and offers few solutions. But, that may be because there are not any. Russia has sold uranium to India before and probably will again. I do not know whether China has sold uranium to India or not. I know they would in a heart beat.
Can we talk? Reversal on uranium sales to India opens up a whole new world
- by: Mike Steketee
- From: The Australian
- December 03, 2011 12:00AM
WE should be thankful for small mercies. Before delivering a triumph to Julia Gillard on selling uranium to India, Labor’s national conference this weekend is having a debate on the issue.
That will be a change because so far we’ve heard little more than applause for the Prime Minister’s announcement three weeks ago that she would seek to change party policy to allow sales to a country that has not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
She says it is time to modernise the party platform. Those who agree present the change as little more than tidying up a diplomatic anomaly.
There is a case for a change in policy, including the contribution nuclear power can make to reducing India’s carbon emissions, the practical reality that other countries are willing to sell uranium to India and that we already sell to countries like China and Russia.
But there is more to it than that.
“I am horrified that the media have not explained the enormity of this proposal,” says Ron Walker, a former diplomat.
As a head of the nuclear division in the Department of Foreign Affairs in the 1990s and chairman of the board of governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency in 1993, his views are worth considering.
No anti-nuke activist, he subscribes to the policy first adopted by the Fraser government: that we should use our position as a major uranium supplier to demand strict safeguards against nuclear non-proliferation.
Leaving aside its surreptitious development of the nuclear bomb, India has been presented as the model nuclear citizen. Unlike China, Russia and Pakistan, it has not exported its nuclear weapons technology and expertise, at least on any significant scale.
Therefore, so the argument goes, India deserves to be made the exception to the rule that we do not sell uranium to countries that do not sign the NPT.
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He writes plenty more. Go read it. More next week.
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