The International Panel on Fissile Materials, a MacArthur-supported international group of scientists that has been promoting a treaty to terminate production of explosive material for nuclear weapons, has learned from the Indian government that it will not be allowed to hold a meeting it planned for December in Delhi.
According to a news report that appeared yesterday on Nature’s website, the Indian government takes the position that some members of the fissile materials panel are hostile to India.
That opens tempting opportunities for speculation about personalities, but in the interest of keeping our eyes on the ball, let’s disregard them.
What’s important here is India’s self-evident determination to pursue nuclear arms races with China and Pakistan unencumbered, and its willingness to endure some bad press for the sake of guaranteeing that its bomb production program will be in no way threatened.
The Nature report seems to get the facts right but misses that main point, as well as some smaller but telling ones.
Author Geoff Bumfield reports, for example, that panel members “openly” oppose reprocessing, as if this position were so heretical it takes the courage of a saint to confess it. In fact, the dominant consensus in the United States since the 1970s has been that reprocessing complicates nuclear waste disposal about as much as it helps and does not pay except in the context of a breeder program–itself a highly dubious proposition.
Brumfiel notes that India is building a 500-MW breeder, which “will pave the way for future breeder reactors capable of converting the nation’s vast thorium reserves into uranium-233 fuel.” Actually, it will do that only if it works satisfactorily, which would be a first. Every other breeder program ever undertaken has so far been a failure.
The International Panel on Fissile Materials is co-chaired by R. Rajaraman, an emeritus professor of theoretical physics at Jawaharlal Nehru University New Delhi, and physicist Frank von Hippel, a professor of science and public policy at Princeton University. The research group led by von Hippel at Princeton does much of the analytic work and inventorying of fissile material stocks needed to advance the panel’s efforts.