Physicist M.V. Ramana is a professor and Simons Chair in Disarmament, Global and Human Security at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs (SPPGA), University of British Columbia. The CEDAR project at St. Thomas University invited him to give a talk about the links between nuclear energy and nuclear weapons.
This evening is hosted by the environment Society program and the cedar research project at St Thomas University the co-hosts are the international Physicians for the prevention of nuclear war Canada the NB media Co-op and the Coalition for responsible energy development in New Brunswick I was trying to think of how
Long we’ve known each other and so I went back through my emails last night and I found the first email I sent to you Roman uh it was September 2020 3 years ago it was a request to republish one of your articles in the NB media
Co-ops so that it could be shared freely in New Brunswick and of course you agreed and since then we’ve exchanged many hundreds of emails um but we first met in person today which was great Rana is professor and Simon’s chair in disarmament Global and human security at
The school of of public policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver the Simon chair is funded by the Simon Foundation Canada which actively promotes positive change through education in peace disarmament international law and human security many or most of those hundreds of emails uh that I’ve exchanged with
You are questions I have about technical or policy issues related to nuclear power and you answered them all many questions sometimes the same question two or three times very patiently and not just me of course if you look at the long long list of ramous Publications many of his co-authors are students or
Researchers that you’ve also been mentoring talking about nuclear weapons weapons of mass destruction is not easy the consequences of nuclear weapons were terribly evident in Japan before the end of the second World War and the thought that it could happen again is is very difficult to think about but we must
Think about it and talk about it openly so everyone is aware of all the potential consequences of the choices we make for our Energy Future we must be aware of the possible consequences of our choices before we make them so I thank you Ramina for making it easier
For me and for so many others to engage with these difficult topics and I look forward to your talk this even Professor r thank You thank you Susan for that very generous uh introduction um made me blush at times but um I’m not sure you know this is entirely accurate uh what you need to know about nuclear weapons is something you probably know already and it doesn’t require a PhD physics which I haven’t
Forgotten uh to actually say that nuclear weapons are hugely destructive that everybody knows and that’s pretty much all you really need to know in a way to develop a position on this uh but unfortunately we live in a society where uh we have to sort of engage in all
Kinds of technical Arcane discussions and um I sometimes tell people in parties that I’m very lucky that I get paid to write and research very obvious things that most people know that you know nuclear reactors can go bang sometimes and they produce waste that’s difficult to deal with and stuff of that
Sort you just have to say the same thing over and over again uh in different ways and it’s I’m lucky that I get paid for that so uh anyway so thank you again for um bringing me here it’s a real pleasure to be here in newbron it’s the first
Time I’m coming here and it’s a beautiful place I wish I had more time to sort of look around uh sometime okay um so today I was going to talk a little bit about uh the connections between the uh Technologies and the processes that are used to
Generate uh nuclear energy and what it takes to make nuclear weapons and this is a topic that comes up periodically uh in the newspapers and media if you were to paying attention to this and it usually comes up uh in the context of some Far Away country trying
To develop some uh or acquire certain kinds of Technology either developing themselves or um importing it from somewhere and the issue coming up of you know what happens if they have nuclear weapons the country that’s been dominating the newspaper headlines for some years now maybe or 15 20 years is
Iran uh which uh claims to be wanting to uh develop a large nuclear energy program uh but is also developing the has developed the capacity to enrich uranium and I’ll talk about what that means in in a few minutes uh and there’s been sort of long-standing diplomatic
Discussions over can Iran have this or not what are the conditions what should the international atomic energy agency do etc etc and all of that is basically in a way a nition of what I’m going to be emphasizing today which is that nuclear energy and the capacity to make nuclear weapons are
Unated the same thing happens in the context of Saudi Arabia more recently and so on and so forth um so I’ll start with a little bit of historical background to this just to sort of set the stage the story can go back how far
You want to go back this is a uh you know the uh in in the some of you may have seen the film Oppenheimer uh in this uh the big Blockbuster the summer along with Barbie uh and uh the uh there’s a discussion in that film uh between Oppenheimer the main character
And uh Isaac ior Rabbi who’s like his very good friend another Nobel prize winning physicist and at one point Rabbi says I don’t want the culmination of 300 years of physics to end up in a weapon of mass destruction right so in in a sense the history of nuclear weapons can
Be traced back all the way to sort of early theoretical physics but I’m not going to go all the way back so I’ll just start with sort of when we found out about the essential process that underlie both the generation of energy from um from nuclear reactors and uh the
Capacity to make nuclear weapons which is a process called nuclear fishion it was discovered in the late 1930s by a group of people in Germany and uh what they essentially found was that uh they would uranium nuclei could spontaneously Decay into uh two or more uh lighter
Nuclei and in the process generate more uh neutrons as well as um energy and the the neutrons are subatomic particles inside the nuclei of atoms uh and these uh NE these neutrons can then go on to triggering other fishing reactions so if one uranium uh nucleus were to fish in
It produces a bunch of neutrons if one one or more of those neutrons were to hit other uranium nuclei those could also fish in and the the significance of this uh fishing process uh the most profound significance of This was um was realized by another character who comes in the
Movie of Heimer uh who in the movie looks like that on the bottom left the person who’s facing us and in real life looked like the guy on the other side of Einstein chck called Leo Zill Zill was the first one to sort of realize that the fishing process could in principle
Make uh an atomic bomb a bomb that will uh generate a large amount of energy uh and once he realized it he was just sort of uh very very concerned about the fact that um Hitler in Germany might develop a bomb of the sort and use it and so he
Realized that he needed to get the United States to get concerned about it and he did the uh he went to the most influential person that he knew which was Albert Einstein he was a best known scientist at that point and he figured if he could persuade Einstein uh and
Then Einstein could do something about it and Einstein did write a letter to the US president at that time president roselt and President Roosevelt went on to uh setting up uh I mean to ordering uh the creation of uh what was to become the Manhattan Project uh again that what
The real life Manhattan Project looked like that’s how it looks in the like in the film Oppenheimer for all the children for all the people whove watched it so the Los was this place in New Mexico that um Oppenheimer the the head of the program had some historical
Association with from his childhood and it was very remote it was a place where they started developing the nuclear weapons nuclear uh and uh what they did there was to develop two kinds of ways in which uh you could exploit this fishing process to produce a lot of energy uh one uh
Ended up being a weapon that was dropped on the city of Hiroshima in Japan on 6th August 1945 uh and that was probably the first time that much of the world learned about the power of the atom uh except for a handful of scientists who were involved in the Manhattan Project and a
Few others outside the United States who must have realized that this was possible most people around the world were clueless about this and so the first news many of them got it was in their newsp paper headlines saying uh Japanese City was destroyed by a new kind of
Weapon uh the second um uh bomb that they uh dropped was 3 Days Later over the city of Nagasaki and uh this used a different uh principle and a different material and I’ll talk about both of those in one second uh but this uh particular process the so-called
Implosion uh device was something that the scientists were unsure sure about uh whether it could actually work H and so uh while the bomb that was dropped on top of Hiroshima was never tested before it was actually dropped on the city the bomb that was dropped in Nagasaki a
Similar kind of uh bomb was actually uh tested uh in uh the so-called Trinity test uh not very far from uh Los Alamos on uh July 16th 1945 uh so I said a minute ago that um you know if uh most people around the world would have learned about uh the
Power of the atom uh from their newspapers on August 7th 1945 but had there been somebody who was actually uh looking for traces of this uh they might have seen that in a few days after July 16th because that first uh nuclear test did spread around a lot
Of radioactive materials and some of you may have heard there’s this Lake in Ontario which is been uh declared as the place where we can date uh the start of the anthropocene uh stratag graphers sort of looked at it and said there are sort of levels where you can see the influence
Of human beings in that Lake you will see traces of plutonia uh which will probably AR around July 20th uh uh taken by the winds from that so in somebody who was actually testing these things could have known that this was happening even before it came out in the
Newspapers after the dropping of Hiroshima that’s just a side uh you know technical detail that people have discovered fairly recently by doing the kind of computer modeling and sort of trying to figure out what would have happened to the protonium that was released there all right so that basically sets
The sort of historical stage and immediately following the bombing of Hiroshima and nasaki uh people around the world were justly uh and rightly concerned about this new technology and the very first resolution of the United Nations uh talked about the necessity of dealing with the problems raised by the discovery of
Atomic energy and they pass resolution saying we need to uh control this technology and uh around the same time uh the United States uh two very uh influential people uh Dean aeson and David linthal uh they were tasked with writing a report on what to do about
This new technology this new uh form of energy atomic energy and they also started with the fact that the development of atomic energy for peaceful purposes and the development of atomic energy for bombs are as in their own words much of their are much of their course interchangeable and
Interdependent uh why do I say this uh because this is a a sort of a truth as it were that has been systematically masked and I’ll come to that in second but just to give a sort of reinforcing this point I’ll turn to what happened uh
About uh 2 years later uh in India uh where I was born and in uh April of 1948 so this was uh India had just achieved uh freedom from British colonialism in August of 1947 so this was just a few months after India had become free uh the person who was to
Become the first Prime Minister of India chap javahar Neu uh he introduced uh a bill called the atomic energy bill in what was called the constituent assembly uh the constituent assembly was the body that was supposed to set up the rules that you know that govern the legislatures in India there was no
Parliament at that stage there was no Constitution at that stage and so this was a body that was tasked with doing that so clearly they had very big things on their minds uh there was a big partition going on millions of people uh being displaced going from India to
Pakistan and back you know all kinds of uh challenges these people had to deal with and yet in the middle of that they had to vote a session about this bill that was introducing the concept of atomic energy and uh so it’s a bit surprising but it also gives you an
Indication of how important uh people like NATO thought it was to develop atomic energy um I can give you a whole lecture about that but I’m not going to do that but all I’m going to say was that the idea that uh nuu was pushing this technology there was because
Everybody after after Hiroshima and nasaki talked about not just the destructive power of the atom but also the possibility that it could be used to generate electricity for development energy for development and so when uh this bill was introduced in uh in the uh in the constituent assembly uh Nero said
This is to develop atomic energy for peaceful purposes but there was a brief debate over this and during that debate uh he was n was challenged about why are you imposing all kinds of rules about secrecy uh in this and n’s answer for somebody who has long sort of talked
About the peaceful uses of atomic energy very very eloquently was to say that I do not know how to distinguish if I have to develop atomic energy for peaceful purposes I’m automatically going to create the capacity to make nuclear weapons so that’s is yet another illustration of the fact that this
Connection was widely understood across the world at that point right but things changed um a little bit later through uh something called the uh most importantly something called the atom whoopies uh speech that uh President Eisenhower the US president gave in 1953 and uh Eisen overs it was part of
Uh Cold War and a sort of jocking for um uh sort of the world’s shall we say trying to get different countries to join different sites and one of the things the United States was trying to do was you know we are the beacon for development for uh for making all your
Countries uh come out of poverty and one of the ways we can try to do this is to uh harness the power of the atom and uh Heen set up a whole bunch of uh uh programs that went to different countries try to explain to them how to
Uh set up atomic energy programs or do research into this train people and so on and so forth and that did a lot to try and to convert many many countries into believing in the possibility of atomic energy the the Soviet Union was not far behind they had their own uh
Programs uh especially in all of the uh Eastern European countries that were under the in in part of the Soviet uh block and their slogan was uh May the atom be a worker not a soldier uh and so they had their own version of Atoms for Peace as it were and
So that was the beginning of trying to distinguish the development of uh atomic energy for uh peaceful purpose versus uh that for military purposes and to the point that over a long period of time people have been reinforcing this uh different people saying you know one can develop nuclear energy without making
Nuclear weapons in fact you should not even confuse these two things right uh so there are propaganda campaigns publicity campaigns run by uh you know different organizations that are involved in nuclear technology to try and maintain this or try to create this illusion that these things are
Separated but what I’m going to sort of tell you now I’m going to tell you what I’m going to tell you today which is that uh the uh these two are really related and I’ll try to explain to you uh in what ways they are related um broadly speaking there are
Three kinds of connections between uh the technology to make nuclear energy and to uh make nuclear weapons uh those have to do with the sort of technical details which you’ve sort of got a glimpse of already uh the fact that uh people who are trained uh to do one can
Easily go on to doing the other and last but not least there are in strong institutional connections uh between the institutions that are involved in the generation of atomic energy or promotion of that technology and those that are involved in nuclear weapons um so the uh the technical
Background has to do with uh what the the physical process that I mentioned uh the process of uh fishing so there are um only a few two materials two um two real materials if you like uh that can be used to make uh nuclear weapons these are called file
Materials uh they can undergo that fishing process that I mentioned earlier even when they are struck by low energy neutrons uh the most two most common things are what are called highly enish uranium which I will explain in a second and plutonium uh there is also one other
Material which can be used uh called uranium 233 which is derived from thorium uh occasionally you will see you know these bursts of uh discussions about why thorium is such a great material and can be used to make nuclear energy without making nuclear weapons technically there’s no basis for that
What if you can use something to make nuclear energy you can also use the same process to make nuclear weapons including torum the importance of thinking about these materials is that now um you know 7 what over 78 years after uh the explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki uh
The physical processes or the the way by which a bomb can be uh designed is relatively well known um but uh the hardest uh challenge that any country that wants to develop nuclear weapons uh is actually making the material uh that can be used and again I’m sort of put a
Picture there of uh a scene in the film of Heimer and what Oppenheimer does through the filmus he has these two jars one supposedly representing highly indium being produced uh in oakrid Tennessee and the other plutonium being uh uh produced in Hanford uh in Washington State uh and uh so these the
The amounts of materials that you require of these things is of the order of you know uh 5 to 2 kog of these material so they are relatively small amounts as I’m going to sort of explain to you um and there are uh broadly speaking two ways by which I can make
Nuclear weapons I already sort of alluded to those where I talked about the bomb that was dropped in Hiroshima and the one that was dropped over Nagasaki um the one that was dropped over Hiroshima uh used what’s called a gun type weapon that basically one piece
Of uh highly uranium was shot into the other one so that they produce enough material to be sustaining one of these chain reactions uh so that a more energy can be produced than was used to put those two things together and the one that was uh exploded over Nagasaki
Involv this process called implosion that actually you create this sphere of protonium and you explode a bunch of um uh explosives around it so that the thing gets compressed uh into a much smaller size you don’t need to know all the details of this but these are the
Two broad process that are going on uh the modern weapons often use also something called nuclear fusion but even those nuclear fusion the So-Cal hydrogen bombs but even those require first efficient weapon to be able to create the pressure to be able to create the nuclear fusion process so the bottom
Line is that you do require uh highly IND uranium or plutonium uh what are these two things uh so the uh uranium that’s found in nature uh uh consists primarily of two kinds of uranium uh what we call Isotopes uh these are um materials that have the
Same number of uh protons and electrons but different numbers of neutrons so they are different not in their chemical properties but in their masses uh so uh uranium 235 is lighter than 238 and it’s present only to a very small extent about 7% of the uranium that you find in
Nature if you went out of this building and you dug in the earth you will find a small amount of uranium anywhere you go and that uranium will have 99.3% uranium 2 38.7% will beat Ur 235 but u235 is the uh isotope that can actually sustain the
Fishing reaction so you need a much larger amount of that to make a nuclear weapon and this is the process that is uh this is the material that this uranium enrichment process seeks to concentrate and you saw this picture which some of you may have seen this is
Of the former president of uh Iran Ahmed NAD uh sort of walking around in a centrifuge plant centrifuges are uh I’m not going to sort of talk about the historic thing centes are the Modern Way by which we enrich uranium uh they basically are like washing machines if
You like they go round and round and because the two kinds of uranium have different masses one of them will concentrate on the outside and one of them will concentrate on the inside and you can scoop out with one of them and therefore make uh a more concentrated
Process right um and this is the way by which you also uh produce fuel for many many different kinds of reactors uh the reactors that are operating in Canada right now are all what are called candole reactors candole reactors are designed to use natural uranium they don’t require this kind of enrichment so
We don’t have any uranium enrichment uh uh facilities in Canada right now uh but they are there in Russia in the United States much of the world uses something called light water reactors which do require uh uranium to be uh enriched if the reactor has to operate and produce
Energy uh so this is why there are several countries which have enrichment programs um there are sort of from the per for the purpose of thinking about the relationship between uh nuclear energy and nuclear weapons uh the two of the key uh issues about uranium engagment is that it’s difficult to detect
Uh unlike some of the older processes that used to be used to make uh to inter uranium which required a lot of energy and the for would give off a lot of heat it’s something that could be seen from space uh a centu is actually very
Difficult to detect uh and so it creates the possibility that a country could have a clandestine uh uranium centrifuge facility where it is enriching uranium without anybody else knowing about it uh in fact a way that uh people knew about Iran doing one of these was not so much
Initially because somebody saw it but because there are people inside Iran who didn’t like what was happening and they leak the information out so only after somebody told you that that that was happening that satellites could go and look for a possible place where this is happening okay the the second thing to
Know about uh the uranium enrichment process is that you could be uh the difference between a nuclear reactor and a nuclear weapon is that the level of concentration that is required of the uranium 235 is much higher for a nuclear weapon uh for a uranium for a nuclear reactor typically you talk about
Enriching the u235 from 7% to about 3 to 5% uh some of the reactors that are being planned for the provin of new brunck might require are much higher levels in particular the r 100 is talking about a higher level of enrichment uh the ones that are being
Planned for uh the Darlington site in Ontario will require about again 3 to 5% uh things of that sort uh for whereas for a UR for a nuclear weapon you have to enrich the uranium to about 80% 90% uh things of that sort but you could take the same centrifuge facility that
Is used to make uh fuel for a nuclear reactor and reconfigure it to produce a much more concentrated Ur 235 and this is not very easy again to detect and can be done pretty fast uh and this was the sort of basis for people who are saying
Oh you know we can uh Iran can develop one of these in X number of months and things of that sort the last thing that we’ve learned in the last uh couple of decades is that this process is Not So Sophisticated that other countries cannot do and a Gentleman called AQ Khan
Was in the news uh about um 18 years ago uh or 20 years ago when he was uh found that he had spread this technology to a whole bunch of places and found suppliers in different countries like Malaysia and so on and so forth the
Bottom line of that is it is not very difficult to develop uranium inment by yourself if you like the plutonium route is sort of a different way uh the plutonium is produced in all nuclear reactors uh when the fishing process uh produce neutrons some of those neutrons are absorbed by
The uranium 238 component that I talked about and that under goes a series of nuclear reactions to become plutonium uh and uh what happened in the Manhattan Project was the this plutonium because it’s not uranium so it has different chemical property so you can do chemistry to try and separate out the
Plutonium and that was what is done in this place called Hanford that I mentioned uh which is in Eastern Washington State uh and uh this uh process called reprocessing was sort of widely talked about during the Atoms for Peace program and many countries started developing uh this uh process uh and uh
In in particular uh this is sort of the process that is used in countries like North Korea in China in uh India in Israel uh to uh separate out protonium from the spin fuel in different kinds of reactors that they have built uh in the case of India that uh reactor that was
Used to produce the spin fuel that had the protonium came from Canada uh it was called cus the Canada India reactor and the US was added to it when the United States supplied uh the heavy water Canada was facing a shortage at that particular point and so that’s the
Source of the uh plutonium that uh uh was then reprocessed uh at a place called the trom reprocessing plant uh which is near the city of Bombay it’s actually now part of the city of Bombay because the city has grown quite a lot and then uh subsequently in
1974 uh there was a a test uh India’s first nuclear weapons test uh in a place called poan near the border with Pakistan and that basically set off the first alarm Bells as it were uh and many many countries realized that actually you know there are ways by which uh
Nuclear energy programs can be used to make nuclear weapons after sort of two decades of being told that’s not really a big connection right uh since the Atoms for Peace program and so um we had you know Canada for example was not doing reprocessing at that point and
They have a had an informal ban uh we can talk more about what’s happening right now uh later on uh but same with the United States they basically said we are not going to do reprocessing and recycling because we don’t want other countries to have this technology and if other countries should
Not have it then we should also not be developing this uh and it is possible to make nuclear energy without doing any processing so let’s do it that way that’s sort of the idea uh so let me just give a couple of counter arguments that you will hear so just to recap what
I said all nuclear reactors produced plutonium the plutonium can be separated from whatever else is being produced inside the reactor through this process called reprocessing many countries don’t do reprocessing but reprocessing is something that can be done just like I talked about uranium enrichment any country can in principle develop one of
These uh reprocessing plants in a clandestine fashion and you can try to produce the plutonium and use it in nuclear weapons there are a few counterarguments that you will hear from the nuclear industri so I’m going to sort of for those people who KCK out on
This uh I’ll just mention uh one or two of those uh the most important thing is uh the argument that not all kinds of plutonium can be used to make nuclear weapons so you will hear for example people saying there is something called reactor grade plutonium that’s produced
In reactors that are uh meant for generating energy these are commercial reactors they are not meant to make nuclear weapons and that protonium is different the protonium is indeed different but it can be used to make nuclear weapons and uh the uh people who sort of uh in a way the most authoritative
People are the uh people who were at the department of energy in the United States who have tested over a th000 nuclear weapons uh and in the 1990s they basically explained that just about any combination of plutonium Isotopes can be used to make nuclear weapons uh there
Are some very few exceptions but those are not really applicable to the to the real world as it were and we’ve had also you know former heads of the Los Al National Laboratory talking about the use of this so that’s a counter argument that I think I would sort of dismiss the
Second thing to note is that the uh even a what is considered a small nuclear reactor small not in physical size but in terms of how much energy it produces uh can produce fairly significant amounts of material material to make nuclear weapons so we calculated for example that even a a 200 megawatt
Reactor uh of certain you know the light Water Reactor kind that is being uh proposed for uh Darlington by Ontario power generation uh if it’s about 200 megawatts it can uh it can you need enough uranium enrichment capacity to make about uh enough for about eight uh uh nuclear weapons and it’ll produce
Enough plutonium inside its code for about 10 nuclear so over a period of time that amounts to quite a lot uh and uh just about there are two other things to sort of uh I’d like to emphasize one is that uh though there are so-called safeguards there’s a entire organization called the
International formic energy organization uh one of whose mandates is to try and prevent the use of uh facilities that are meant for produc proding atomic energy for peaceful purposes into producing materials that can be used to make nuclear weapons uh they employ something called safeguards safeguards are just accountancy mechanisms
Essentially trying to make sure that all the material that’s coming in is accounted for uh but even those cannot really uh ensure that small amounts of material cannot be uh removed uh and when you’re talking about large nuclear energy programs those small percentages add up to quite a lot uh plus you also
Have the problem that there are some reactor designs um including this one called molx that’s being developed here in New Brunswick uh but also one called the Prototype fast breeder reactor which is sort of um being built uh in near the city where I grew up in in Southern
India uh where the entire core of the initial reactor before it starts operating has such a lot of plutonium that once you a country has it there they can immediately say okay we just going to now make nuclear weapons you do what you want uh and that’s called breakout and it’s a serious
Concern uh and lastly you know many uh countries sort of think that um there are countries which don’t have officially nuclear bombs but know just about everything they need to know so that if they do choose to do it they can do so very fast uh Japan is usually the
Held out as the uh archetypal country for that okay so I think I sort of tried to explain that having the capacity to generate nuclear power will automatically imply that a country will have some uh capability to make nuclear weapons uh capability does not translate to intention so a country might well say
We’re not going to make nuclear weapons and they could sort of stay that way for a long time but what is true today may not be true several years later so so again I’ll go back to the example of Iran where Iran first started uh exploring nuclear uh energy technology
In the 1970s under the Sha and because Iran was a uh considered to be an ally of the United States United States was very happy to supply them with nuclear technology train people and so on and so forth and then everything changed after 1979 and the Islamic revolution there uh
And so that’s something which one has to always think about that you know a country that might be seen as today a country that’s not interested in nuclear weapons could 20 years down the line change its mind okay I’ll just say briefly a little bit about two other aspects two other
Connections one that I talked about uh the idea of people so the uh country that I’ll give as an example is the country of Pakistan uh so when uh Pakistan uh became became uh uh it was also became independent the same time as India in August of
1947 uh but through the historical Act of how exactly that partition happened Pakistan found itself with very little uh scientific and Technical Talent uh they you know the initial uh efforts under the ATMs for peace program that looked to see whether we could uh Pakistan could develop nuclear energy
Found that they really didn’t have the kind of people that were required the physicist the metallurgist the chemists and so on and so forth and essentially um the the uh uh the first report that sort of looked at this said there probably not more than 10 people in all
Of uh Pakistan that can uh have any training in nuclear technology and not even enough so this was a problem they had and thanks to the Atoms for Peace program a number of uh Pakistani scientists came to the United States to Canada to get trained uh and these were
The people who went back later uh uh and helped uh this gentleman munir Ahmed Khan uh develop the technology to make nuclear weapons uh and then of course there also this whole side thing about um the um aqan coming from Netherlands with uh technology for enrichment uh that also
Contributed uh so anyway the idea is that people who are trained in trying to uh to make nuclear reactors operate them and so on can then also go on to use that training to make nuclear weapons uh and that relationship is something which again is is a strong connection uh and I
Also mentioned the case of uh Iran where in the 1970s uh Iran was considered an ally and so the United States was supporting uh the Sha’s uh program plans to uh import uh nuclear reactors and trained a number of people at uh MI it uh including the
Person who was to become the deputy director of Iran’s atomic energy organization the director of a nuclear research reactor in Teran and the person who was as the representative of the international atomic energy agency and uh uh when you know people were talking about it and and pointing
Out to us uh decision makers that you know you were the guys who really caus this Henry Kissinger who was the Secretary of State at that point said oh this was a purely commercial transaction and we didn’t think about the possibility that one day these people might make nuclear
Weapons the other connection is that of uh institutions uh in many countries you will find that the institutions that are involved in promoting nuclear energy are also the ones who are involved in making nuclear weapons so uh our neighbor to the South uh the United States the department of energy is the organization
That both promotes nuclear energy and makes nuclear weapons uh uh but the better example that I know a lot more about is uh that of India I already mentioned that India when it set up its uh nuclear energy program in 1948 uh set it up ostensively to develop
Atomic energy for peaceful purposes and so that was the Mandate of the Department of atomic energy that was uh in charge of this but eventually over a period of time uh the decision was made to develop nuclear weapons uh one can debate over how much of it came from the
Institution itself and how much of it came from other uh forces such as the military and so on so forth but most of the scholarship will give the department of atomic energy a very Central role in driving India towards making nuclear weapons and one reason they did that was
Because they found it was uh a politically very advantageous for them to be able to be involved in in making nuclear weapons uh once they were involved in making nuclear weapons they there was much greater willingness on the parts of on the part of the government to give them the financial
Resources they want to give them the administrative resources they want to allow them the kinds of uh secrecy that they love to have because they can say you know you can’t come inside our nuclear reactor to say how how it’s operating because you know we are also involved in making nuclear weapons and
It’s a it’s a great uh unique uh institutional status that they have use for their political power because they make these two promises that I talked about in in my book on this subject uh the promise of sort of perfect security by having nuclear weapons and the promise that they generate cheap
Electricity now they don’t do either of those things uh nuclear weapons have not made India any safer and the electricity is far from cheap or abundant but it allows them to always use this kind of janus-faced you know two uh purpose things for those people who might say oh
You know India is a poor country we should be developing nuclear weapons they say oh we not about nuclear weapons at all we are really interested in making atomic energy for electricity don’t you want to give people uh you know people who are poor in villages
Don’t you want to give them power this is what we are about and then somebody points out to them that look you’re really not supplying that much electricity India uh all of India’s nuclear reactors to together Supply about 3% of the nation electricity right and much less percentage of the actual
Energy that they use and for them they’ll say oh but you know that’s okay because we are protecting you from China from from Pakistan by having nuclear weapons so it’s a great way by which they can sort of maintain the status uh and what else you sort of see is
That uh in those uh circumstances where uh nuclear energy is uh not doing so well so for example in the United States uh in the last decade I mean that’s a another story on in and of itself but what I just say very quickly is that a
Lot of utility companies that had uh nuclear power plants that had been built decades ago so they had been paid off they were supposed to be money Spinners and and profit sources they suddenly found that these were no longer economical and so they had to go and get
Subsidies from uh States and from the federal government if they had to keep operating and and uh what they did was um the and this was happening uh at the time when the Trump Administration came to power in 2016 2017 and the Trump Administration was not very likely to um
Take the argument or by the argument that nuclear energy was needed to deal with climate change Trump after all had come to power talking about climate change being like HX from China and so the what the nuclear industry basically red was to say this is great for
National Security so the person who was the uh energy secretary under uh President Obama uh Ernie mun uh he went and joined this NGO after he left office and the first report they produced was to say US nuclear nuclear energy Enterprise is a key National Security enabler so that’s the argument they’re
Trying to make so in a way the we sort of come back a full uh Circle uh when they started by saying nuclear energy and nuclear weapons are not connected but when they want money for nuclear energy to maintain their reactors they go back and say well you know actually
These are connected right uh and you see the same thing in the UK when they were trying to develop the Trident submarine uh and so um let me sort of uh there are other places where you see the same kind of dynamic uh in the Middle East for
Example a lot of countries are thinking about acquiring nuclear reactors and there is you know talk about how it is related nuclear weapons in all of those countries and so there’s kind of a winking and a nodding that says well you know we’re not interested in nuclear
Weapons but maybe in the future sometime if we want it then this gives us the capacity to do that and uh the last thing I will say is that uh for those of us who do think that nuclear weapons are abhorent they are a moral Abomination uh we would like
To see them all be uh abolished at some point what does nuclear energy do to the possibility of uh disarm and the answer is as long as you have nuclear reactors you know that you have the capacity I’ve talked about the you know countries like Japan being considered a virtual nuclear weapon
State uh and this again was recognized by people in the beginning like Oppenheimer who talked about the fact that even if countries were to enter into some kind of agreement to disarm their weapons they will build these reactors and they will be waiting to break out from uh that situation and so
Any kind of nuclear power will make disarmament necessarily unstable uh so even if they were to sort of temporarily say we’re going to get R of our nuclear weapons you’re always worried that they will rebuild that thing and so that’s I think something to remember uh I’ll conclude here by just rein uh
Reinforcing what I mentioned that there are close connections between the production of nuclear energy and weapons and there are many ways in which the pursuit of one goal can advance the pursuit of the other and uh that expanding nuclear energy will make eliminating nuclear weapons and avoiding nuclear war much harder thank [Applause]
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