DAVOS, Jan 24: President Pervez Musharraf complained on Saturday that possible breaches by European countries in respect of nuclear proliferation were passing in silence.
But he bemoaned that while Pakistan had been put in the world spotlight, “there are European countries involved” since the technology involved advanced metallurgy found largely in Europe.
“Nobody’s talking, that’s my concern,” he said. “Maybe we are the only country that is really going forward with an investigation. I don’t know if it’s happening in the other countries.”
This question is most likely to fall on the deaf ears. The political world is mean. We still live in the days where rules are applied selectively and the sovereign countries are dealt with discrimination.
Can US and UK answer how did the proliferation start in the first place?
[QUOTE] Originally posted by Capricorn: *
**Can US and UK answer how did the proliferation start in the first place?*
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Let's see, was it not the United States (which had just used atomic weapons against Japan), that was the first great proliferator of them all, by giving the technology to the UK?
Let's see, was it not the United States (which had just used atomic weapons against Japan), that was the first great proliferator of them all, by giving the technology to the UK?
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Not only UK but Israel and India too and God knows who else.
When the British in 1946 threatened to end the Combined Development Trust (CDT), the agency, established in 1944, responsible for joint acquisition and allocation of raw materials, the United States capitulated to British demands and agreed to a fifty-fifty allocation of uranium with Britain. This equitable allocation allowed Britain to amass a huge stockpile, without which it could never have detonated an atomic bomb in October 1952.
*The McMahon Act prohibited transferring to any other nation the scientific and technological information necessary to manufacture an atomic bomb. The successful detonation of a British hydrogen bomb in May 1957 led President Dwight D. Eisenhower to overrule such advisers as the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, Admiral Lewis Strauss, and to secure an amendment to the Atomic Energy Act of 1958. This amendment provided for a renewed bilateral exchange of nuclear weapons technologies with Great Britain. *
An uninvited guest has joined the nuclear club, and fingers are pointing at Canada. On May 18th 1974, India detonates a 12-kiloton nuclear explosive in the Rajasthan desert. It was built using plutonium from a research reactor donated by Canada in 1956. The explosion prompts fierce criticism of Canada’s nuclear exports, and a wall of excuses from officials in both Canada and India. Canadian officials say they couldn’t stop it. India denies it was even a bomb.
The first Canadian reactor export took place in 1956. It was a “research” and plutonium production reactor modelled on the 40 MW NRX (National Research X-metal or X-perimental) reactor that began operation at Chalk River in 1947. The NRX was a heavy water moderated reactor that was built to produce plutonium for the American nuclear weapons program. It was well known that heavy water moderation results in very efficient plutonium production.
The Indian reactor was part of an aid program organized under the Colombo Plan Administration. The total cost of the reactor was about $17 million, of which the Canadian government provided $9.5 million as foreign aid under the Colombo Plan. [274] The reactor was known as CIRUS (Canada-India-Reactor-United States). The “US” was added because the United States supplied the heavy water for the reactor. The reactor went critical in July 1960, and became infamous as the source of plutonium used by India to manufacture the nuclear bomb it exploded in May 1974. It was still in operation in 1996.
Add onto that the fact how the government of France quite blantaly helped Israel acquire nuclear weapons, and how the United States helps sustain and enhance that nuclear capability.
***US Under Secretary of State for Arms Control, John Bolton, who told British journalists last week that America was not interested in taking Israel to task for its continuing development of nuclear weapons because it was not a ‘threat’ to the United States. ***
When it comes to nuclear technology, it seems many a country quite willingly gave such technology away, to their closest allies and continue to help build these programmes up further.