Over the past few years a number of proposals have been made regarding the establishment of multinational fuel cycle centers. The idea of a multilateral approach to the fuel cycle is not new and goes back as far as 1946.
The Bush Administration non-proliferation initiative
In February 2004, President Bush proposed several new measures "to combat the proliferation of Weapons of mass destruction", including the imposition of new restrictions on the spread of enrichment and reprocessing (ENR) technology to additional countries, on the grounds that such sensitive fuel cycle technology can be used to produce fissile material for nuclear weapons. Under President Bush's proposal, nuclear technology suppliers would refuse to provide such technologies to any country that did not already possess full-scale, operating enrichment or reprocessing facilities. He also proposed that suppliers ensure reliable access to nuclear fuel for countries that renounce enrichment or reprocessing, as an incentive for countries not to acquire such technologies.
The Global Nuclear Energy Partnership supposedly has similar aims, to offer reliable nuclear fuel services as a viable alternative to the acquisition of sensitive fuel cycle technologies. Iran has been offered "legally binding nuclear fuel supply guarantees" if it agrees to suspend enrichment related and reprocessing activities until "international confidence in the exclusively peaceful nature of Iran's nuclear programme is restored."
Some argue that President Bush's ENR proposal conflicts with the key bargain of the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) that promised states forswearing nuclear weapons “the fullest possible exchange of equipment, materials and scientific and technological information for the peaceful uses of nuclear energy.” Since then, Bush administration's has modified this proposal in order to accommodate the interests of Canada, which wants to build uranium enrichment plants to export enriched uranium fuel for nuclear-power plants, albeit possibly only under a "black box" arrangement that does not transfer technical knowhow.
Iranian reaction
Iran argues that such restrictions on the acquisition of enrichment technology would constitute a breach of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, the IAEA Statute and the Comprehensive Safeguards Agreement, which require non-discriminatory sharing of nuclear technology.
Manouchehr Mottaki, was the Iranian Minister of Foreign Affairs appointed by President of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. During the Iranian presidential election, 2005, he was the campaign manager of Ali Larijani, the Right-wing politics-Conservatism candidate, and said that the West's demands for Iran to "surrender its inalienable right to fully master nuclear technology" constituted "nuclear apartheid". In subsequent statements in February 2006 he insisted that "Iran rejects all forms of scientific and nuclear apartheid by any world power", and asserted that such "scientific and nuclear apartheid" amounted to "an immoral and discriminatory treatment of signatories to the Non-Proliferation Treaty", and that Iran has "the right to a peaceful use of nuclear energy and we cannot accept nuclear apartheid". His words were later echoed in a June 2006 speech by Iran's deputy chief nuclear negotiator Javad Vaeedi, in which he claimed that "developing countries are moving towards destroying technological apartheid".
Iran has offered to accept international participation in its nuclear program, and to operate its enrichment facilities as a consortium with foreign governments, as long as the program is conducted on Iranian soil. This idea has been endorsed by Western and American experts. This proposal was rejected by the Western countries, led by the US, who insist that there should be no enrichment at all in Iran.
International reactions
It has been suggested that the U.S. proposal has led some countries to develop enrichment capabilities, in part based on the perception that all countries will soon be divided into uranium enrichment "haves" (suppliers) and "have-nots" (customers) under various proposals to establish multinational nuclear fuel centers and fuel-supply arrangements. Some have suggested that fears that such proposals are "thinly veiled attempts to revoke their 'inalienable right' to peaceful nuclear technology . . . may even be spurring more countries to pursue nuclear enrichment technology, in hopes that they can achieve significant capability before any new international agreement solidifies and locks them out of the club." Others argue that "proposals to create national or international monopolies on the nuclear fuel cycle are very unlikely to be acceptable," especially if punitive sanctions or the threat of military intervention are used to enforce restrictions on access to fuel cycle technologies. According to one report, "Developing nations say they don’t want to give up their rights to uranium enrichment and don’t trust the United States or other nuclear countries to be consistent suppliers of the nuclear material they would need to run their power plants."
According to a 2004 analysis by the Center for Nonproliferation Studies,
"Many NPT state parties, particularly those from the Non-Aligned Movement
(NAM), have already stated their opposition to President Bush’s proposals to restrict enrichment. In their view, precluding states from developing enrichment and reprocessing capabilities contradicts an important tenet of the NPT-that is, the deal made by the nuclear weapon states (NWS) to the non-nuclear weapon states (NNWS). Article IV of the NPT states that NNWS have the inalienable right to develop research, production, and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, a right intended to provide an incentive for NNWS to give up the pursuit of nuclear weapons. The Bush proposals, however, introduce another element into the nonproliferation regime by segmenting countries into those that can engage in enrichment and reprocessing and those that cannot. Since most states with fuel cycle capabilities are from the developed world, it is clear that the target group of the proposal is the developing world."
Similar past proposals to restrict enrichment have caused deep divisions between NPT signatory states, as developing countries have consistently rejected efforts to place additional limits on the fuel cycle. The Final Document of the United Nations General Assembly resolution S-10/2 which was adopted at the 27th plenary meeting of the tenth special session on 30 June 1978 stated in paragraph 69: "Each country's choices and decisions in the field of peaceful uses of nuclear energy should be respected without jeopardizing its policies or international cooperation agreements and arrangements for peaceful uses of nuclear energy and its fuel-cycle policies".
This position was reiterated in the 1980 NPT Review and Extension Conference and has been consistently reiterated in every Review Conference since then, including the 1995 Review Conference and in the Final Document of the 2000 NPT Review Conference. The Final Document of the 10th Special Session of the United Nations General Assembly in 2002 also reiterated that non-proliferation measures should not be used to jeopardize the inalienable rights of all States to have access to and be free to acquire technology, equipment and materials for peaceful uses of nuclear energy, and that each country's choices regarding nuclear fuel cycle policies should be respected.
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