The global uranium fuel bank was back in the news last week when developing nations on the IAEA Board angrily stalled discussions. IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei faced widespread discontent when he requested that a detailed plan for a fuel bank be submitted by September 2009.

Delegations from developing nations said that they would not support any measures that could “endanger their inalienable and sovereign right under the Non-Proliferation Treaty to develop their own nuclear fuel cycle.” They also objected to “attempts meant to discourage the pursuit of any peaceful nuclear technology on grounds of its alleged ‘sensitivity’.” India, a non-party to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, reportedly led the charge against the proposal…

IAEA officials claim that talks have not stopped completely, but it will take much more time and political will to get the fuel bank project off the ground. The outcome of Iran’s presidential elections and the appointment of a new IAEA Director General are also complicating factors.

The idea for an independently monitored international fuel bank has been around since President Eisenhower’s 1953 “Atoms for Peace” speech. It has sparked interest in recent years due to fears that Iran’s enrichment program will lead to an arms-race in the Middle East. The two most promising proposals today come from the DC-based Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) and Russia.  NTI, backed by billionaire Warren Buffet, pledged $50 million for the effort, and Russia has offered to host the IAEA-administered bank at its Angarsk enrichment facility.

In 2006, former Senator Sam Nunn and Senator Dick Lugar wrote an op-ed in the Chicago Tribune calling for a “new international non-proliferation standard that prevents countries from using the guise of nuclear energy to develop nuclear weapons.” In 2007, then Senator Barack Obama introduced the International Nuclear Fuel for Peace and Non-Proliferation Act of 2007, which supported the fuel bank effort and would have authorized $50 million for the project. The most important fuel bank endorsement came in Obama’s April 5 speech in Prague.

Considering this enthusiasm at the highest levels of the U.S. government, why have so many U.S. legislators been silent about the non-proliferation regime since April? The answer to this question, quite simply, is Iran.

America’s Iran agenda bears heavily on the survival of the fuel bank initiative. Iran’s progress on its enrichment program has stirred fears among other states in the Middle East, who have since voiced desire for help in developing their own civilian nuclear technology regimes. Despite this pressure, President Obama has been careful not to sacrifice the fuel bank initiative. He acknowledged Iran’s “right to access peaceful nuclear power” and said that while it has “legitimate energy concerns, legitimate aspirations…the international community has a very real interest in preventing a nuclear arms race in the region.”  

The fuel bank initiative might not be dead, but it is certainly in critical condition. Now we must wait until the dust settles in the streets of Tehran before taking the next step forward.

On Tuesday, the House Armed Services Committee marked up the fiscal year 2010 Defense Authorization bill. Among the provisions included were some especially promising nonproliferation boosts. Here’s how a couple of programs that Kingston and Cuyler were concerned about fared:

–The Department of Energy’s Global Threat Reduction Initiative, which tracks down and secures loose nuclear material internationally, received an additional $224 million.

–$179 million was added for the International Nuclear Materials Protection and Cooperation program, another DoE effort, which would go towards installing radiation sensors at risky border crossings and tracking down potential WMD components.

Also included in HASC’s markup was an additional $30 million for the Department of Defense’s Cooperative Threat Reduction program, aka “Nunn-Lugar.” As Travis wrote last month, funding for the program steadily decreased during the Bush years, dropping 19 percent. HASC’s increase will bring Nunn-Lugar funding to $434 million – a good sign – but it is still short of the Bush administration average of $474 million per year.

Between these three programs, funding for international nonproliferation efforts was upped by HASC by $433 million, bringing the total for 2010 to $3.2 billion, $223 million more than last year’s budget.

Yesterday UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon released a statement on the urgency of the entry into force of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty: The conclusion of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) more than a decade ago was an import…

Last Sunday the New York Times’ Room For Debate blog hosted a discussion on nuclear abolition.  There were four participants: Nina Tannenwald, associate research professor of international relations at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, Ken Adelman, former Director of the Arms Control Agency, Joe Cirincione, President of the Ploughshares Fund, and John Mueller, Professor of Political Science at The Ohio State University.

Overall I thought the discussion did a good job of laying out some of the key fault lines in the debate over abolition.  It also exposed the weakness of many of the arguments against the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons.  Some comments below the fold.

1. Nina Tannenwald makes an excellent point in noting that “[t]oday, no U.S. agency is devoted primarily to promoting nuclear self-restraint, and the unsurprising consequence is that American policy has, until President Obama, focused mainly on the restraint of others.”  The gutting of the arms control and nonproliferation bureaucracy under the Bush administration is an issue I’ve followed for a while, and it’s good to see that the FY 2010 Foreign Relations Authorization Bill, on the House floor today, contains a number of provisions aimed at strengthening arms control and nonproliferation activities at the Department of State.    

2. After asserting that we’ll never “be able to verify nuclear matters everywhere around the world,” Ken Adelman suggests that we would be better off pursing “real steps” to reduce nuclear dangers.  Such steps include stabilizing nuclear-armed Pakistan as a cohesive state; stopping the Iranian effort; assuring the security of Russian nuclear weapons; precluding trade in enriched uranium and plutonium; and making sure existing nuclear states have PALs (permissive action links) and other devices to render the weapons useless for non-authorized personnel (like terrorists).

First, as George Perkovich and James Action, co-authors of the Adelphi Paper, Abolishing Nuclear Weapons, note, “verification is important but ultimately not as vital as political-security dynamics and enforcement, because verification cannot be perfect, and even if it were, the challenges of deterring and defeating an actor that chose to break a prohibition would remain.”  

Second, it’s telling that the “real steps” proposed by Adelman do not include deep reductions in U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals, ratification of the CTBT, achieving a Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty, U.S. adoption of a declaratory policy of “no first use” (or even of “defensive last resort), etc.  Based on the priorities highlighted by Adelman, it seems pretty clear that he believes that nuclear weapons remain as important to the security of the United States as ever, and that we should not be concerned about reducing their salience.

3. The always provocative John Mueller argues that the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons is misguided.  Instead, we should “just let it happen.”  According to Mueller, nuclear weapons “have proved to be useless and a very substantial waste of money and of scientific and technical talent,” and “the proliferation of nuclear weapons has been far slower than routinely predicted because.”  “To the degree that these observations come to be accepted,” he writes, “nuclear weapons will naturally fade — though probably never disappear — from the scene.”

While I’m sympathetic to much of Mueller’s argument, the problem with letting nuclear weapons “naturally fade…from the scene” is that we cannot simply assume that the logic of deterrence or the slow pace of proliferation that has characterized the past 60 years will characterize the next 60.  Moreover, the nuclear weapons establishment in the United States and other nuclear weapons states is notorious for being incredibly resistant to change.  Without guidance from high-level civilian leaders to significantly reduce the role and number of nuclear weapons, significant change is unlikely to take place.  Finally, failure on the part of the U.S. to explicitly endorse abolition as a goal could make it impossible to secure the support we need to constrain the Iranian and North Korea nuclear programs, limit the spread of dangerous enrichment and reprocessing technologies, and reduce other nuclear dangers.

During last week’s speech at Cairo University, President Obama reaffirmed his commitment to promoting steps toward a world free of nuclear weapons:

“I understand those who protest that some countries have weapons that others do not.  No single nation should pick and choose which nation holds nuclear weapons.  And that’s why I strongly reaffirmed America’s commitment to seek a world in which no nations hold nuclear weapons.”

This statement strongly reiterated policies Obama has supported over the last few months. For instance, in a recent NPR interview, Obama said:

“…I think one of the things that we need to do is to describe to the Iranians a pathway for them achieving security, respect and prosperity that doesn’t involve them possessing a nuclear weapon. But we have to be able to make that same argument to other countries that might aspire to nuclear weapons and we have to apply some of those same principles to ourselves so that, for example, I’ll be traveling next month to Moscow to initiate start talks, trying to reduce our nuclear stockpiles as part of a broader effort in the international community to contain our nuclear weapons.”

These statements follow the remarkable Prague speech, where Obama declared “America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.”

Obama’s remarks over the past months represent some of the most significant commitments ever made by a U.S. president to nuclear non-proliferation. This trend of high profile statements – not only by Obama but also by Vice President Biden, Secretary of State Clinton, and others – is just what we need.

The repetition drives home how serious the issue is to the United States and signals our willingness to undertake the cooperation necessary to achieve security from nuclear weapons. The strong public statements clear the field for vigorous diplomatic action on START, Iran, and missile defense in the months ahead.