03-02 Fuel or Weapons

It was a professor at “Teachers College” that said our job was to help students “know what they don’t know”. And this is the importance of this chapter. Do we ever fully know the extent to which uranium ends up as fuel for nuclear reactors or as material for nuclear weapons.
I remember when it was discovered that South Africa had produced nuclear weapons and later agreed to destroy them. Most of the world does not want to see nuclear weapon proliferation, and South Africa bowed to world opinion.
Nevertheless, a few other nations were able to get a hold of the technology and the equipment to produce nuclear weapons. Here we are talking about Israel, India and Pakistan.
Of course, we have the obvious nuclear states that are huge both in the production of nuclear energy for power generation and in the production of nuclear weapons. And we are talking about the US, Russia, France, China and the UK. The photo shows a nuclear bomb test exploded by France.
During my years as a political activist, I was keenly aware that Canada was a major supplier of basic uranium. And today they are number two in the world next to Kazakhstan.
And I remember how the government of Canada insisted that they would sell uranium only to nations that were signatories to all the necessary United Nations agreements and inspections.
Well these UN watchdog agencies did not detect the secret nuclear programs of countries like South Africa, Iraq or North Korea.
We should take it for granted that as we improve the technology for generating electricity from nuclear power that we are also improving the technology for building smaller and more focused nuclear weapons. Probably the greatest so-called proliferation is taking place within the major nuclear states.
The world is currently focused on the nuclear program underway in North Korea. But what the world does not appreciate is that the civil nuclear programs of nations like Japan, South Korea and Taiwan are such that they have much more capacity to produce enriched uranium than what they will ever need for their domestic reactors. They all could become nuclear weapons nations in less than a year.
Here is what we all need to know. All the various steps, materials, technology and equipment to produce civil nuclear energy are the same for producing military nuclear energy.
And all civil nuclear installations produce spent nuclear fuel that contains an element called plutonium. Very scarce and very scary. Of the two bombs dropped on Japan at the end of the second world war, one was a uranium-based bomb and the other was a plutonium-based bomb.