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Nuclear Weapons & Proliferation
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June 8, 1998
Unanswered Questions On Pakistan Uranium May Point To More U.S. Intelligence Failures Statements by Pakistani officials in the wake of their nuclear tests are raising questions about the ability of the U.S. to monitor and then influence Pakistan's nuclear weapons program during the past ten years. In the early 1990s, U.S. officials said that Pakistan had agreed to freeze production of weapon-grade high-enriched uranium (HEU); that production was halted after 1991; and that the freeze monitored by U.S. intelligence. After India tested three nuclear bombs last month, U.S. officials then retracted that earlier assertion. They said then that there was "no formal agreement" between the U.S. and Pakistan to halt HEU production, and added that the U.S. had no confidence that Pakistan had not resumed output of weapons-grade uranium. This week, A.Q. Khan, head of Pakistan's uranium enrichment program, stated in interviews that "the production of HEU never stopped" in Pakistan, and that "none of the governments (in Pakistan) ever stopped HEU production." Most experts, on the assumption that HEU production was halted in 1991, have estimated that Pakistan now may have an inventory of about 200 kilograms of HEU. If Khan's statement is correct, however, Pakistan may have a far larger stock, as much as 500 kg. That would be enough for 25 to 30 bombs--more than enough to target all of India's major population centers in a nuclear war. U.S. Not Inclined To Offer Incentives To Get India, Pakistan To Climb Down U.S. officials said June 2 that, because the State Department had been lied to by India's Foreign Ministry about India's plans for a nuclear test last month, the U.S. would not be willing to offer carrots to either India or Pakistan to coax them to de-escalate their nuclear weapons programs. China, France, Russia, and Britain are said to be willing to negotiate with India and Pakistan to get both countries to sign the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) and support a nuclear weapons fissile material production cutoff, now on the agenda at the Conference of Disarmament in Geneva. But the U.S. government, alone of the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council (P-5), is gearing up to apply sanctions under U.S. law passed in 1994. U.S. officials said that, since that is the policy, the U.S. would not have any credibility were it to enter into a negotiation with India and Pakistan offering incentives. U.S. officials also said that they were suspicious of plans by French President Jacques Chirac to lead the P-5 toward a reconciliation with India and Pakistan, noting that, earlier this year, France had formally proposed widening nuclear commerce with India, regardless of its refusal to join the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). German Nuclear Waste Affair Threatens Reprocessing Deals German transports of spent nuclear fuel to France for plutonium separation have been suspended indefinitely after revelations of years of minor surface contamination about 3,000 times the legal limit. The violations were never reported to the German government for more than ten years. The suspension will likely remain in force for months, since Germany is gearing up for a national election where the opposition seeks to make an issue of the nuclear rules violations. Should the embargo remain in force into 1999--a likely scenario if the elections result in a coalition government between formally antinuclear Social Democrats (SPD) and environmentalist Greens--intervenors would sue to shut German reactors. Since German law requires six years of forward spent fuel management, at least two nuclear power stations would face a threat of court-ordered shutdowns. In addition, A number of German nuclear stations are reassessing their original plans to reprocess their spent fuel in France and Britain. Under existing contracts with foreign reprocessors, German utilities have until 2000 to decide whether they will go through and separate the plutonium from the burned up fuel abroad or, instead, keep the fuel in Germany in dry storage facilities for the next half century. Nuclear Watch is written exclusively for Global Beat by Mark Hibbs, the European Editor of Nucleonics Week and Nuclear Fuel, leading specialist newsletters on international nuclear affairs, published by McGraw-Hill, Inc. Hibbs, based in Bonn, Germany, covers nuclear energy and proliferation problems in Europe, the former Soviet Union, and Asia. Mark Hibbs' coordinates: Return to Global Beat Home Page Nuclear Watch | East Asian Security | Economic & Monetary Union | NATO Expansion | Nuclear Weapons and Proliferation | U.S. Defense Policy | Publications | Events | |
