Nuclear Nonproliferation

Australian voters last week ousted their government in favor of the Labor Party, which traditionally opposes both nuclear energy and nuclear weapons. This means the new prime minister, Anthony Albanese, likely will reassess the 2021 AUKUS deal under which the United States and United Kingdom pledged to sell Australia nuclear-powered submarines.

Albanese supports the general idea of AUKUS to counter-balance China, but not necessarily its most controversial aspect, which is that the eight submarines would be fueled with tons of nuclear weapons-grade, highly enriched uranium (HEU)—enough to produce up to 1,000 nuclear warheads if diverted—setting a precedent that would foster proliferation.

Ironically, the United States has tried for decades to halt commerce in weapons-grade uranium, precisely to stop the spread of bombs. Nuclear power reactors use low-enriched uranium (LEU) fuel, which is unsuitable for weapons, and since the 1970s, the US government also has gradually insisted that research reactors, pharmaceutical plants, army reactors, and space reactors use LEU fuel.

The proliferation of weapons-grade nuclear materials has long been nightmare fuel for U.S. security professionals, and the effort to stem the flow has been ongoing for decades. In the op-ed below, Prof. Alan Kuperman argues it's up to lawmakers, and the U.S. Navy, to address a vulnerability of America's own making.

"As the annual defense authorization and spending bills head to congressional floor votes this month, lawmakers have a chance to take the next step in the critical fight against nuclear proliferation — by pushing the U.S. Navy to change the way it powers some of its ships.

"A terrorist or rogue state with a nuclear weapon would be a national security nightmare. The most likely path to such a bomb would be for an adversary to divert or steal one of the two required nuclear explosives, plutonium or highly enriched uranium (HEU), from a non-weapons purpose like reactor fuel. That is why the U.S., for nearly 50 years, has worked to phase out global commerce in these two dangerous materials.

"But today the world's biggest remaining customer for HEU outside of weapons is the Navy, which uses it in reactors to power submarines and aircraft carriers. By contrast, civilian nuclear powerplants use low-enriched uranium (LEU) fuel, which is unsuitable for weapons. The Navy reactors currently use about 100 nuclear bombs' worth of HEU each year, more than all of the world's other reactors combined."

This article presents key findings of the first comprehensive global study of the commercial use of plutonium as fuel for nuclear energy. Research was conducted in all seven countries that have engaged in the commercial production or use of plutonium Mixed-Oxide (MOX) fuel to replace traditional uranium fuel in thermal nuclear power plants: Belgium, France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the UK. Five of the seven countries already have decided to phase out commercial MOX activities. The price of thermal MOX fuel has proved to be three to nine times higher than traditional uranium fuel. Plutonium fuel also has sparked political controversy, due to safety and proliferation concerns, in four of the six countries where it has been used commercially. The article concludes with lessons for countries that are engaged in, or contemplating, the recycling of plutonium for nuclear energy, including in fast reactors.

In the early 1990s, the relationship between genocidal violence and international humanitarian intervention was understood simplistically. Such intervention was viewed as always a response to, and never a cause of, inter-group violence. Well-intentioned intervention was expected reliably to reduce harm to civilians. Thus, the only obstacle to saving lives was believed to be inadequate political will for intervention. This quaint notion was popularized in mass-market books, and it later gave rise to the "Responsibility to Protect" norm.

By the mid-1990s, however, scholars had discovered that the causal relationship between intervention and genocidal violence was more complicated. The prospect of intervention sometimes incentivized violence by parties expecting to attract intervention to help their side in a domestic struggle. For example, a relatively weak faction might launch a rebellion or armed secession to provoke a government crackdown, in hopes of triggering intervention to help them achieve independence or control of the state.

Quiet as it's kept, close to San Francisco sits a commercial facility with enough highly enriched uranium to make a nuclear weapon — on the scale of the bombs dropped on Japan at the end of World War II.

General Electric Hitachi owns the Nuclear Test Reactor in Sunol, between Fremont and Pleasanton.

Like facilities at some universities, the reactor's main activity is neutron radiography, which enables clients to look inside objects without destroying them. But this reactor contains at least 7 pounds of highly enriched uranium, the same material used in the Hiroshima bomb.

For a civilian facility in the age of violent extremism, this is extraordinary.

The root of the moral hazard problem is that genocide — and related human rights violations — often result from state retaliation against a domestic group for rebellion by some of its members. Humanitarian intervention, such as that envisioned under the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), protects some civilians but also commonly facilitates rebellion by suppressing government forces and protecting rebels. The first reform of the R2P is the most important: do not intervene on humanitarian grounds in ways that benefit rebels unless the state has targeted civilians. Second, purely humanitarian relief aid should be delivered in ways that avoid prolonging violence. Third, the international community should preventively deploy resources to persuade states to appease non-violent domestic protest groups. Fourth, potential interveners should not coerce any foreign government to surrender power until they take three precautions against a violent backlash threatening civilians. Finally, interveners should avoid falsely claiming humanitarian motives when they are driven by other aims.

Facing U.S. diplomatic pressure and the expiration of the initial 30-year term of the 1988 U.S.-Japanese nuclear agreement, the Japan Atomic Energy Commission (JAEC) in late July revealed a plan ostensibly intended to reduce Japan's massive 47-metric-ton stockpile of unirradiated plutonium by boosting the use of mixed-oxide (MOX) fuel in the country's nuclear power reactors.

The rebellion in Libya was led by Islamist veterans of wars in the Middle East. Thus, the United States and its allies, not realizing it at the time, intervened to support a group of terrorists.

Since the creation of the atomic bomb nearly 75 years ago, scholars have offered only one major insight into how such weapons should change our thinking about national security. Sadly, the Trump administration is now ignoring that signal lesson of the nuclear era, by commencing production of a “low-yield" atomic warhead for submarine missiles, which could backfire by increasing the risk of a nuclear attack on the United States. The only hope is that Congress will prohibit deployment of this dangerously destabilizing weapon.

The root of the moral hazard problem is that genocide — and related human rights violations — often result from state retaliation against a domestic group for rebellion by some of its members. Humanitarian intervention, such as that envisioned under the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), protects some civilians but also commonly facilitates rebellion by suppressing government forces and protecting rebels. The first reform of the R2P is the most important: do not intervene on humanitarian grounds in ways that benefit rebels unless the state has targeted civilians. Second, purely humanitarian relief aid should be delivered in ways that avoid prolonging violence. Third, the international community should preventively deploy resources to persuade states to appease non-violent domestic protest groups. Fourth, potential interveners should not coerce any foreign government to surrender power until they take three precautions against a violent backlash threatening civilians. Finally, interveners should avoid falsely claiming humanitarian motives when they are driven by other aims.