Dear friends and others:
The following item from the NY Times Op-Ed should be considered in
connection with last weeks stories on US nuclear industries planning a
multi-billion dollar push to build "peaceful" reactors in China. We have a
major, major world problem building here.
I've been told that China is dumping nuclear waste in Tibet. Anybody have
anything on that?
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October 28, 1997
ON MY MIND / By A.M. ROSENTHAL
Clinton's Nuclear Deception
Craftily, ever so craftily, President Clinton is deceiving the
American public about a critical danger to world security: China's
international sales of the matériel and technology of nuclear warfare.
The motive is to allow China to buy American nuclear matériel and
information, including advanced U.S. nuclear reactor technology -- as U.S.
nuclear manufacturers are urging.
No previous President, and not even Mr. Clinton himself until now, would
take the step required to permit Chinese nuclear shopping in America --
certifying that China was not illicitly peddling its own nuclear goods
abroad.
The U.S. knew that was not true.
The U.S. knew that despite Beijing's denials and pledges, for more than a
decade China has made important nuclear sales to countries intent on
achieving capability to make nuclear bombs.
Under a 1985 U.S. law, nations illegally proliferating nuclear matériel
and technology are subject to American sanctions. They are also forbidden
to buy U.S. nuclear products and technology.
Now Mr. Clinton is ready to permit American nuclear sales to China. So
last Friday, in his speech setting the stage for the state visit of
President Jiang Zemin, he made this statement:
"China has lived up to its pledge not to assist unsafeguarded nuclear
facilities in third countries, and it is developing a system of export
controls to prevent the transfer or sale of technology for weapons of mass
destruction."
Neither part of that sentence is honest.
In 1992, after selling nuclear-war matériel to Iran, Iraq and Algeria
among other countries, China signed the worldwide Nonproliferation Treaty
against spreading knowledge about nuclear weapons to states that did not
possess them.
Three years later, U.S. intelligence discovered that the China National
Nuclear Energy Industry Corporation, a Beijing-controlled operation,
had sold 5,000 ring magnets to Pakistan, which is trying to match India's
nuclear-weapon potential. Experts say that sale could increase Pakistan's
weapon capability by jumping its enriched-uranium capacity 100 percent.
The magnets are a product China sold to Saddam Hussein before the gulf
war.
The U.S. also found that the magnets went to "unsafeguarded" Pakistani
facilities -- no international inspection permitted. Teams of U.N.
inspectors have spent almost six years trying to find all of Saddam's
"unsafeguarded" hidden nuclear capability.
Violating the treaty should have brought sanctions. Washington complained
but imposed no penalty.
China denied the sale. Then on May 11, 1996, it promised not to do it
again. Mr. Clinton's speech said nothing about China's nuclear deals and
treaty-breaking -- or what the C.I.A. told Congress in June 1997.
The C.I.A. reported that during the second half of 1996, after the pledge
to the U.S., China was still the "primary source of nuclear related
equipment and technology" to Pakistan. Also, said the report, China is the
world's "most significant supplier of weapons of mass destruction-related
goods and technology" -- which means nuclear, chemical or bacteriological.
The President did not mention China's breaking its pledge to America
after breaking its treaty pledge to the world. Nor did he say that he was
planning to reward China by giving it clearance to shop nuclear in
America. But he will, unless Congress can block him.
After China's broken pledges, will Americans be fools enough to believe
Beijing will keep new promises to become a reformed proliferator or use
U.S. nuclear technology for "peaceful purposes"? Just this year, after the
usual denials, Beijing admitted that U.S. machinery sold for civilian
manufacture was transferred to a military aviation plant.
That Clinton remark about China's developing export controls is cynical
acceptance of Beijing's cynical pretense that any illicit nuclear exporting
was the fault of sleepy customs officials.
The stuff of nuclear, bacteriological or chemical warfare is not exported
from China unless top officials approve. Mr. Jiang is the toppest.
President Clinton is crafty, but not crafty enough. He has turned China's
broken pledges into a guilt of his own -- deception about a matter of life
and death, many lives and perhaps, some hideous day, many deaths.
Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company
JOHN KLOTZ
http://www.walrus.com/~jklotz/
885 Third Avenue, Suite 2900
New York, NY 10022
(212) 230-2162
(718) 601-2044