McKay: Canada Courts Calamity with India Nuclear Deal

[Oscar]

Canada Courts Calamity with India Nuclear Deal

(Not yet posted to straightgoods.ca. Ed.)

Paul McKay Straightgoods.ca July 2, 2010

(Paul McKay is an award-winning journalist, and the author of "Atomic Accomplice: How Canada Deals in Deadly Deceit".)

Ten days before Canada inked a nuclear sales pact with India at the G20 summit, the Indian government invited global investors to help finance its $70 billion plan to develop 20,000 megawatts of solar power plants in that sun-rich country by 2022.
That followed an official Indian government estimate that its long windy coastlines and interior deserts can host nearly 50,000 MW of wind generation.
When built, this 70,000 MW of new green power would roughly triple the total electricity produced in all of Ontario by all power plants of all kinds, and generate as much peak power as 140 Pickering-sized nuclear plants. This would help offset India's rocketing greenhouse gas emissions, and dove-tail with its pressing need to quickly build de-centralized power plants on a fragile, far-flung grid system.
All this could be ramped up before a single new Candu reactor could be designed and built there. India's new green mission has been hailed by investors, developers, environmentalists, and Indian citizens.
Obviously, Prime Minister Stephen Harper missed this memo. And the one reminding him that in 1974 India extracted plutonium from an earlier "peaceful" Canadian reactor to make its first atomic bomb. And the memo confirming that India has refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. And the one reminding him that India's bitter arch-rival, Pakistan, also used "peaceful" Candu technolgy to produce plutonium for its own growing nuclear arsenal.
This 'see-no-evil' attitude has plagued Canada-India nuclear affairs since the 1950s, when the hallowed founder of India's nuclear bomb effort, Homi Bhabba, spent months learning the secrets of plutonium extraction at the Chalk River complex north of Ottawa, and cajoled Lester Pearson into donating a replica of the plutonium production reactor there. Later, under the guise of research exchanges, Pakistani physicists gleaned the same fatal secrets at Chalk River while their colleague, the infamous Abdul Qadeer Khan, plied his atomic black market trade between Karachi and Europe, North Korea, Iran, Libya and China.
The chilling result is that since 1974 Pakistan has used the ever increasing, ever more powerful and accurate Indian nuclear warhead arsenal to justify building its own ever increasing, ever more powerful and accurate arsenal of nuclear weapons.
Are we to believe Stephen Harper's claim that shipping more reactors and uranium to India will be as benign as building indigenous solar and wind power plants?
Hardly. Both India and Pakistan now use reactors, based on the unique Candu design, to make plutonium and tritium for their hydrogen bombs. All Candu reactor models produce plutonium. Both countries know how to extract plutonium from waste fuel, and distill tritium gas. Both have refused to sign the NPT or global bomb test protocols. Both adamantly assert a sovereign right to perfect, test and stockpile an unrestricted number of missile-capable nuclear weapons.
Worse yet, India has also committed to building a fleet of even more dangerous reactors, called fast breeders, which will operate as dual civilian-military facilities. These will not only vastly increase the volume of plutonium created and extracted, but convert an abundant yet atomically benign mineral, thorium, into yet another fissile outlaw element, Uranium-233.
This will further blur any distinction between peaceful and military atomic uses within India, and undoubtedly incite Pakistan to match its rival by either building its own breeder reactors, or escalating plutonium production at its civilian power plants to keep weapons parity with India.
In a contortion worthy of Houdini, Mr. Harper claims Canada can prevent a repeat of the 1974 nuclear betrayal because India has solemnly promised to specify which facilities are military or civilian, and to keep them strictly segregated. But this is akin to keeping a bucket of water divided in half - fissile materials, knowledge, and budgets are notoriously porous, hidden in secrecy, and immune to meaningful inspection or policing.
But there is an even deeper danger embedded in the proposed resumption of Canadian nuclear sales with India.
It tells the rest of the world - and all potential proliferating regimes - that there is no serious penalty for abetting a regional
arms race, building ever more deadly weapons of mass destruction, refusing to join the NPT, or betraying a solemn 'peaceful use' promise.
Of all countries, Canada should be the last to concede this ethical ground. It was India which blackened our international honour in 1974, and has remained unrepentant ever since. Unlike Australia, which refuses to sell uranium to non-NPT countries, international arms control protocols that have taken decades to construct are being sabotaged by Ottawa for the sake of some quick sales.
This is commerce without any conscience. Let us pray India soon spurns such craven nuclear offers in favour of globally-financed, domestically built green power projects which can better solve its security, climate and poverty problems.

Paul McKay is an award-winning journalist, and the author of "Atomic Accomplice: How Canada Deals in Deadly Deceit".
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