THE NON-PROLIFERATION TREATY

There was a time when the US, Britain and the USSR thought they could simply forbid everybody else to build nuclear bombs, so they signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1967. They thought they could lure the have-nots by Article IV of the treaty, promising them all possible technical help with technology and fuel for the peaceful uses of nuclear energy. To make a treaty with somebody obliging him never to do what you are doing yourself is in itself a dubious foundation, and many countries, including France, India, Israel, and China refused to participate.

But in 1976, Carter rudely violated Article IV, the one and only reason for the have-nots to sign, by refusing the promised help and (later) drawing up unilateral rules on who was allowed to get what under what conditions. For example, where Nixon had obliged the Japanese to reprocess their own fuel (or not get US uranium), Carter forbade them to do it. In 1978 Congress passed its own non-proliferation act which contradicted the NPT and put another stake through the corpse.

Now when one party violates a treaty, not once by subsequently regretted accident or malice, but by abrogating its main condition once and for all, that treaty is dead. There are no doubt State Department lawyers who will prove to you that technically the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact is still in force just like the NPT. But lawyers' baloney aside, a corpse cannot be resurrected: the NPT is dead no matter how Washington waves its carcass in the wind to prove that it still breathes.

But the point is largely moot, for the NPT was pretty useless even when it was still adhered to. All fission bombs, U 235 or plutonium, are ultimately derived from uranium (I omit the highly theoretical case of a thorium bomb); but the NPT provides for no check of any kind on this source material. In the US, you cannot walk into a shop and buy processed uranium (yellowcake), but you could probably get it as easily as marijuana or cocaine. And you can legally buy unprocessed uranium ore in the form of minerals, or dig it up from the ground yourself. I have some myself and wear it round my waist hoping for hormesis to keep my cancer in check.

Moreover the Intnl. Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which is charged with enforcing the NPT, inspects only the fuel of reactors and compares it with the books to see if any of it has been diverted for other uses. That in itself is no safeguard, because all reasonable roads to a bomb, whether uranium or plutonium, never lead through a power reactor. It is the equivalent of inspecting the raw material inventory of a chocolate factory to see whether any of it has been diverted to make TNT (which is, in theoretical chemistry, possible). If no such diversions are found, they give the country a clean bill of health.

Not enough of that, the government of the inspected country is always given advance notice of an impending inspection, and by custom, one of the inspectors is a citizen of the inspected country, or if none is available, at least of a country of the same block (Western, Soviet while it lasted, Arab, Third World, etc.). In this ridiculous game a Soviet national would inspect US power reac-tors, knowing very well that the US was making bombs anywhere but the electric power industry, and the State Department obse-quiously hailed it as "a step in the right direction" when the USSR graciously allowed the same idiotic game in several of its own reac-tors, though not until 1988. It makes you wonder how diabolically clever Saddam must have been to get away with building the bomb under such rigorous scrutiny.

The international agreement on nuclear safeguards (London 1980/81), which also contradicts the NPT, is somewhat stricter; but as the IAEA or anyone else will confirm, it can do nothing to dis-cover, let alone prevent, a signatory country cheating and building a bomb in secret if it wants to do so.